The dollar became the world currency by accident after the OPEC started pricing petroleum in dollars. We're starting to see a slow departure from that.
If we did not spend those extra tens of billions per year in projecting power, we could better serve our students, workers, retirees, infrastructure, etc. Instead, they go to ensuring Japan, Korea, Philippines, etc. don't have to spend so much on defense.
As China ascends to No. 1, will they take over the spending? (I'd be happy of they were the ones keeping shipping lanes for their own exports open and not us)
> The dollar became the world currency by accident after the OPEC started pricing petroleum in dollars.
OPEC was formed on September 14, 1960. The definition of "world currency" is somewhat nebulous, but for the purposes of determining when the "dollar became the world currency", perhaps the best date to use is the Bretton Woods conference, which set up the main international financial system, establishing that everyone would peg their currencies to the US dollar, as well as the existence of the IMF and the World Bank. This was done--on purpose, not "by accident"--in June, 1944, 16 years before OPEC ever existed. The Bretton Woods system itself collapses in the 1970s.
> If we did not spend those extra tens of billions per year in projecting power, we could better serve our students, workers, retirees, infrastructure, etc.
This is laughable. If we didn’t spend billions projecting power, we’d be much poorer because world trade would become much more costly for us, as China reshapes it to its own advantage.
China isn’t looking in great shape to do any ‘ascending’ anyway.
> I'd be happy [if China] were the ones keeping shipping lanes for their own exports open and not us
History's not on your side for that one. You're talking about the country that, plagued by pirates disturbing its coastal shipping, went to massive expense to construct an enormous system of inland canals running parallel to the coast that the pirates couldn't reach.
If Chinese merchants wanted the sea kept clear, say because they wanted to trade with nearby islands, they had do that in their own private capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga
Except that's history. Reality today is not on your side. PRC has more ship building capacity than rest of world combined. Annual production of dead weight tons per year is about 6x-8x more than output US emergency ship building program during WW2. Not to mention most new PRC surface combatants do anti piracy tours out to Africa. If PRC/PLAN wanted to take over piracy protection for her SLOCs, they can basically do so already, plenty of small hulls being retired to coast guard that even they have enough capacity to do it.
