alt Hacker News> Washington could bankrupt Europe overnight right now with targeted tourism, technical and financial sanctions.
Yet again the American exceptionalism bleeds through and shows why the hegemony is currently dying. Maybe with a slight bit of humbleness it could have survived but no, the exceptionalism is so well encoded that it seems short of impossible to stop the decline at this point.
Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too, which based on the current goings, isn't going so well. How do you expect that to be true for the second/third largest economy in the world, when the US can't even do so with Iran, one of the already most sanctioned countries in the world?
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The Iranian economy is in a state of total collapse! That's not something to aspire to.
It's not good to be in denial about this. Even small amounts of US pressure would create chaos in Europe at this point. Multiple European countries are heading towards a major financial crisis entirely on their own, even without any US involvement at all. See e.g. the UK, whose debt is now much too large for even an IMF bailout to work. Only massive austerity of the type that makes 2008 look like splashing around in warm water will be enough to turn that around.
Europe is not independent. Even ignoring basics like oil and gas, the choices of the EU ruling elites in Brussels have, over a period of many years, broken any ability to create a competitive domestic tech industry (something very difficult even with China-style global cutoffs). Even if it was all fixed tomorrow it's far too late. Building a competitive domestic office suite is far beyond what the EU can achieve, let alone everything else required.
> American exceptionalism bleeds through
None of this requires America be better at anything. It just requires the current finance and trade flows to be what they are.
> Seemingly this was the idea with Iran too
The analogy doesn’t work. American sanctions and adversarialism with Iran have famously granted us few grabholds on their system. Tehran is sovereign.
To the extent there is an analogy here, it’s in European reliance on America being its Hormuz. The obvious vulnerability that gives America asymmetric capability over Europe is the financial, security, energy and trade reliance. Unlike the Hormuz, those aren’t geographic features. But if Brussels is content with mincing around with their own special pile of AMD chips (or tourism bans or whatnot), it might as well be carved into rock.