this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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The British Empire wracked up a ton of war debts and tried to levy taxes on its colonies and that kicked off the Revolutionary War. France spent so much money assisting the colonists to own the Brits that they wound up with their own debt crisis which is what kicked off the French Revolution.
Debt is a big problem but generally the way countries acquire debt is getting involved in a bunch of military entanglements. The US dumped a truly absurd amount of money into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nobody really acknowledges that aspect of them. We are well and truly spent, massively overextended, and we desperately need to stay out of military entanglements. We simply don't have the capacity for them. There's tons of domestic crises which have just been festering while to government goes galavanting around the world looking for glory and plunder.
There are two paths forward for the US: one where we make massive military cuts, refocus on addressing domestic problems and addressing the material conditions that have given rise to the far-right, and we start trying to play nice and win countries over through diplomacy and investment the way China does, gracefully managing the decline of the empire and leaving the door open to revitalization and possibly even becoming a positive influence on the world. The second is that we keep pouring more and more money into ensuring we have the most lethal military in the world, we continue trying to dominate the Middle East and elsewhere through military force, we ignore rising costs of living and other domestic problems, we keep becoming more and more of a global pariah, and as extremism gets worse and worse we won't have anything going for us but the military and as our only tool we'll apply it to more and more situations, losing more and more ground until we probably wind up nuking the world rather than accepting that we're no longer "number one."
It is virtually certain that we will follow the second path and avoiding that is really the only worthwhile political goal there is.
The US will never cut back on the military
That spending isn't for the people, it's for the "donors"
It's a house of cards, but the American public are utterly beaten into submission, so even if they know it, they do nothing
Until they do
I doubt I'll see those days, but it's be amazing to watch from a safe distance
I don't trust them not to take exactly the same path afterwards though
It seems engrained in what passes for a culture over there
Whichever is the dumbest choice we will proudly choose that one, no matter which party holds the presidency.
The second option would likely lead to domestic collapse and revolution before “nuking the world.”
Domestic collapse and nuking the world are not mutually exclusive.