I knew there was a defining moment, an actual second, in which it all collapsed for the west, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Thank you. I feel fully informed now.
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The Washington Bullets defeated the Seattle Supersonics in game 7 of the NBA finals to win their first and only championship.
It was the beginning of the end. 20 years later the Bullets would no longer exist. They're now the Wizards. 10 years later the Sonics went extinct too after relocating to Oklahoma City.

Go on…
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June 7th 1978

I thought I'd misspelled subtefuge, because it looks like this on my screen:
subteIgnatiuse
But I haven't, obviously. I'm seeing that because using the filter words function I swapped all forms of Fugazi's name to Ignatius, in reference to the character from A Confederacy of Dunces.
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We should be prepared for war. The geopolitical strategy of making people too rich to want to start wars has failed.
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So we should go back to war and disharmony to stand up for ourselves?
Thats it, I’m going to clown college

It is. We moved away from war and disharmony, Russia and China could not. Communism requires that freedom and democracy do not exist as options in the political marketplace, otherwise their own people will see the utopian lie for what it is. Dystopia.
Don't blame us. We tried. They couldn't play nice. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Why so serious? Pwned. Whatever that means. Who cuts the grass on this show? Please discuss.
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And here I was under the assumption that gearing towards international trade and cooperation and away from war was a good thing…
Thats it, I’m going to clown college

From less free trade to more.
We have been steadily reducing our capacity to produce war materiel since the end of the 40s. At no point have we ramped that up. We've been increasingly offshoring all the means of producing tanks, aircraft, boats, boots, and bullets ever since then, as if it'll just magically be there when the first shots are fired.
Being rich is great. Being powerful, and able to sustain that power under fire, is greater.
Japan, Korea, Singapore, Qatar, Kuwait, Switzerland, and in fact all of Europe, are only rich because America is preventing the likes of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and of course China, from mugging them.
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You almost said it yourself - In the 1990s we ‘ramped up’ globalisation. Ramped up from what?
Alba gu bràth

Please, enlighten me.
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I like how you skip the 80s entirely
Alba gu bràth