[ExI] putin and the three pirates problem

Aleksei Riikonen aleksei at iki.fi
Wed Mar 5 00:53:36 UTC 2014


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> It is of course always possible to leave allies out to hang,
> but it does tend to come back and bite you.

Yes. It however probably wouldn't bite as severely as a serious risk
of a major nuclear war.

The US is a big country in a geographically extremely defensible
position. They don't really need allies if they're willing to give up
their global empire. And I do think giving up the empire and getting
more isolationist would be better than risking a major nuclear war.

(Also, I personally *want* NATO to break-up, since we could then have
a German-led military alliance in Europe, and I much prefer allying
with the Germans when compared to the US, since I see the US as being
on the somewhat inevitable road of becoming a very nasty plutocratic
police state -- they don't really care about human rights or anything,
what with the spying on everyone and senior figures saying they'd like
to assassinate Snowden and so on.)

I'm not *extremely* confident that the US would give up the empire,
though. It would be wiser than risking nuclear war, but of course the
economic losses would be... substantial, to say the least. (But still
much more survivable than a nuclear war.)

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei



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