They decided to stop being a world police, and correctly so. Now we're just waiting for US to understand the same thing, which is slowly happening, finally.
Great, so every country can just smoothly descend further into tyranny with no pushback from any other country. Thankfully we won't have any world police though!
The world police was never really there to stop tyrants, the evidence is that they'd conveniently look the other way whenever they benefitted from it, and they would even put tyrants in place when it suited them. They did stop some tyrants, for sure, but only when it was convenient.
The world saw it's greatest peace under US hegemony. It wasn't perfect and there were bloody avoidable wars on the behest of the US, but by and large things ran smoothly and US sponsored globalism brought prosperity and peace to many.
Too early to make what call? Pax Americana could end tomorrow and it wouldn't make the statement false (well, it would if whatever followed was even more peaceful).
The US provided lip service to the idea, but quickly became paranoid about the threat of world wide communism and changed its tune relatively quickly. In the places where this wasn't a factor, it wasn't altruism by any stretch, but economic interests. The US saw that a post-colonial world would be fantastic for business...
> If you think the US is the sole reason the entire world isn't all tyrants right now
It's a big part of it. Traveling changed some of my skepticism on how "good" the USA was for the world into it might be one of the best things that ever happened to it.
Pax Americana, to the extent that it was ever a real phenomenon, relates to a relative lack of hot wars. It says nothing about the prevalence of tyranny.
And the USA is at best neutral in terms of how many dictators it has taken down VS installed and propped up (especially if we count attempts and consequences as well). For every Saddam, you have an MBS.
I think it's more accurate to say there weren't many expansionist tyrants whilst the US was looking interested in world policing. The Soviet Union had to be very careful about what they did in Europe despite having their own nuclear umbrella, Saddam could tyrant all he wanted until he annexed a neighbouring state the US felt vaguely positively disposed towards, and whilst you could fight petty border wars or maybe fund a coup against a neighbour somewhere less strategic you didn't have the option of doing what 1939 German and Japan and Russia did or even what 2020s Russia is trying to do and China is probably thinking of.
The US didn't install MBS, he's the prince of a monarchy that predates American involvement by centuries. The same goes for any ruler in Saudi Arabia; we inherited that alliance, we didn't create the House of Saud. Maintaining our relationships with an existing government is not the same as overthrowing a democracy and installing a dictator like what happened in Iran or Chile.
What dictators has the US installed after the Cold War that balance against Saddam, Noriega or the Taliban regime change?
I said installed or propped up. They are certainly propping up the Saudi royal family, increasing their prominence on the world stage, even as they have killed American citizens and are conducting wars in the region. Also, the current Saudi royal family has been ruling at best since 1902, so nowhere close to "centuries" (though they do have ancestry going back to the 1700s to a royal family that briefly controlled a part of modern day Saudi Arabia).
In regards to other dictators, I'm not sure why you're only looking at post-Cold War history. What's most interesting about this period is the amount of failure by the USA to effect regime change, despite very clear evidence of such attempts, both against dictators and for them. We even have the interesting case of Haiti, where the USA supported a coup to get rid of president Aristide in 1994, then they led a UN-approved military action to re-instate him in 1998, then supported another coup to get rid of him in 2004. After the first coup, a military junta was installed, and the USA was one of few countries which traded with them. You also have US support against several islamic populist leaders in various Middle Eastern and North African countries, typically preferring secular military leaders instead - often leading to either protracted civil wars or to brief regimes that couldn't hold power. You also have a series of attempts at regime change in quasi-democratic countries, ostensibly for more democratic leaders, that failed - leaving uncertainty on whether those that they attempted to prop up would have been better or worse; the clearest example of this is the attempt to install Juan Guaido as the President of Venezuela after a deeply controversial vote.
You do realize that there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country? Or even created before the US was a little British colony looking for purpose in the world?
It seems like Americans forget how young their country is, it's barely a blimp in history so far, although recent written history makes it seem a lot older than it is.
> there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country?
Out of curiosity, who are you thinking of?
There aren’t that many countries that made it through colonization, industrialization, WWII and then decolonization and the Cold War intact. Very, very few virtually continuously. Fewer still as democracies.
I know you are using the definition of tyrant here to be "unjust ruler" as opposed to "absolute ruler". You can certainly have benevolent tyrants but I would argue that, without a constitution, you are by definition ruled by a tyrant. The USA has the oldest ratified constitution so that is a prime candidate for being considered the oldest stable non-tyrannical government. Of course, we are using different definitions of tyrant so you will not agree with my conclusion.
While I agree to some extent with your point, I think your definition is far too strict. For example, by your definition, the UK is currently and has always been a tyranny, since they don't have a formal constitution in the sense of any US-style state.
However, I do think you're generally right - even under a more relaxed definition of what does or doesn't constitute a tyranny, the USA is clearly one of the first non-tyrannical states, at least among those that still exist today. The UK had a mostly-democratic ruling system for even longer than that.
On the other hand, if we define tyranny to refer to any state in which elections are restricted to a relatively small subset of the population, then the USA or UK are not that early. Voting in the USA was largely restricted to male property owners until 1840. Many other countries had adopted at least universal male voting by this time. The UK was even later to pass this standard.
You do realize that there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country?
Shouldn't be hard to name just one, then, rather a bunch of handwaving.
The US managed the assemble an alliance of the... let's count them:
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
> Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
Beyond that, if you do get into the specifics of force projection (and basically anything logistical to do with NATO), you see that the entire alliance was built on the assumption that the US would contribute the capabilities that kept the whole system viable.
So,
$(US) + $(ALLIES) > $(US)
However,
$(ALLIES) - $(US) < $(ALLIES)
This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.
The problem is, this looks so much like a rerun of post WW1 America.
Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
Now? No. But West Germany alone had 5000 main battle tanks in 1989. Demographics have changed, the economy has changed, but Europe could definitely project force all over the area about 1000-1500km in its vicinity if it really wanted to.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
Shockingly, I don't believe the results will be anarchy and constant regional conflicts. But it's interesting that some people still seem to believe the US idyllic propaganda about how safe they're keeping the world.
Russia's population is falling and the current war is not helping it. Also the last resources of population import for Russia, Russians in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (+ Central Asians in Central Asia) are drying up. Nobody outside of the former Soviet sphere wants to move to Russia.
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
This is something that people don’t realize. America is no longer world police. If Europeans want to resolve intra-European disputes like Russia-Ukraine we should stay out of it.
Instead, by refusing to sell weapons to Ukraine -- and lying about Europe's support -- when it didn't suit Trump, you've firmly placed your flag. Not allies in any meaningful sense.
Lets see what happens when the invasion of Venezuela kicks off, either the world tries to prevent yet another authoritarian government from bullying those who are already on the ground, or we'll join in on the fun I suppose, if the US feels like it wanna share the future loot.
Maybe 'World mafia' is a better description? They're not enforcing law and/or morality (nor ever have been?), they're just pressing countries for bribes for Trump, or to shift World markets for insider trades, or probably still for oil, AFAICT.
