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America is a continent sized country bordered by two oceans, a sparsely populated tundra and a third- (although rapidly approaching second-) world country. It has the world's largest patch of arable land, mountains of natural resources, the best river network in the world, and is populated mostly by high-IQ Europeans. You (assuming you are American) are playing with cheats on.
If we're going to assign moral failings to individuals based on the countries they live in, then you are a failson being constantly bailed out by daddy's trust fund.
There's a great quote from a Tom Wolfe book along these lines...
As an American, I'm a little defensive but... there is some truth in that. I admit that we were very, very lucky with our geographically- some might say supernaturally blessed. And our foreign policy has often been naive to the point of stupidity (sending factory equipment to the USSR, or granting China trade advantages come to mind). Our intelligence operations often result in embarassing failures, and Hollywood routinely portrays ourselves as evil.
Nonetheless, we do have some strengths that aren't just luck. I won't bother to list them here, I think anyone can think of a few. The 21st century will be interesting though...
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American wealth explosion hasn’t come from those advantages. Poland, Israel, Australia, Taiwan, S Korea, Japan do not have those advantages.
UK is falling behind a lot of places that lack those resources. You can’t blame the fall of say Jaguar on natural resources. Or the very high electricity prices in Uk on natural resources. The last business plan I knew of for UK was basically to run ME and some Russian wealth but then that got moved to Dubai.
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Mexico is not a third world country approaching second world. It's a solid second world country with pockets of both third world conditions and modern, albeit relatively poor, first world societies. The latter are mostly the ones actually bordering the United States; the former are very far away. This isn't way back when; Mexico is a normal middle income country which has its fair share of problems but is not, like, an actual third world shithole.
Interesting take; I know you're in Texas. The last time I was in Mexico was in the 70s.
I still have unpleasant stereotypes of early 2000s drug cartel victims hung from overpasses in my mind just based on readings and media exposure.
Edit: Second sentence is worded sloppily.
Very high crime rates and an ongoing insurgency driven by organized crime using terror tactics are one of its many problems, yes. It's still far preferred to other parts of Latin America, going by revealed preferences.
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Mexico is not in any way a "second world" country. Those descriptors are pretty much obsolete, but the Second World was the Communist Bloc. Mexico is an upper-middle-income country by modern classifications, same as China.
In conventional use, second world country refers to an industrialized middle income country.
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Reality doesn't grade on a curve. It doesn't matter why the US is great and powerful, or whether it is fair. What matters is that it is, and the UK is not. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.
It's a shame that series of books ends its coverage in 411BC. Dramatic irony like that deserves its payoff.
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I think you misunderstand my (and I think Corvos') point. I wasn't arguing that the US wasn't playing fair. No country has ever played fair, but right now the US is playing stupidly by alienating its allies and neighbours.
Trump will never get Greenland, but he has managed to piss off an entire continent by acting like a petulant toddler because it hasn't simply been handed to him. And as far as I can tell, he only wants Greenland because he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize and because it looks big on the Mercator projection.
Whatever the US' strategic aims are in the future once the Mad King dies, the country's ability to achieve those aims has been, potentially, permanently damaged.
The Nobel prize thing is probably the most farcical part of this whole circus. If Trump thought that the Nobel Peace prize committee of all groups was going to elevate him with that sort of honour, he's a lot less bright than I thought.
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