\"A War like no other\"; by Victor Davis Hanson

[PMBardunias]

Nationalizing debt just ends up getting your credit cut off faster and more completely, thus it's counter-productive, since a lack of credit is much worse than massive debt in the first place.

The thing about credit ratings is that they are relative. This is why the US dollar is still being bought even in its present state- its still a better bet than the Euro and other currencies. If the US picked a convenient fight with one of our big creditors and nationalize their holdings, it would probably improve our credit rating. In a world where the US uses military power to undercut rival economies, would you bet against the US?

As for use of military power in an attempt to hold onto fading prestige, that has apparently been a common historical pattern and the primary one that Paul Kennedy addressed in Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, such foolishness being a basic ingredient of what he termed "strategic overreach."

The presumption in a comparison to Rome is that we are assuming that this is the 5th AD. It may very well be the mid-1st century BC. I don't believe that strategic overreach is anything we are in danger of. We have not even scratched the surface of "reach", never mind overreach. The only thing limiting US imperialism right now is the wholly appropriate objection of most of our people. Imagine the world with a truly imperialistic US- where they own all of the satellites and anything you google anywhere in the world is filtered by some US government agency. With global tariffs to defray the cost to the US for combating piracy and terrorism (as the US gets to define it), like Athens with the Delian league. Europe and Japan today ultimately rely on the US for their military needs (giving them all that extra cash for social concerns), imagine that done completely and a tax to pay for it. America is isolationist by default, and even in this "depression" we have it too good to make the type of nationalistic demagogery needed to make us the next Reich attractive. But it could go that way under the wrong conditions.