Your reply here mostly describes my thoughts on the Sachs/Mearscheimer debate vis a vis "spheres of security". Neither party seemed to me to be engaged in systemic analysis. Sachs' thesis is normative and idealist and fails to take into account why the u.s.' belligerence is increasingly unrestrained (decohering economic base). Mearscheimer kind of trots out his standard realist analysis which imo is mechanistic and can't accommodate factors which don't fit into the behavior of imperialist powers, i.e. also idealist.

That whole thing was kind of hard to listen to for me. Both of those two are useful in different ways but I thought that discussion simultaneously highlighted their limitations.

For ref https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9465503?scrollToComments=true

I find this is a typical thing with libs where they just think everything is just a matter of will. They don’t look at systems in terms of contradictions as a Marxist would.

There was another article in Krugman's substack, "No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again". (Behind a subscription wall)

Subtitle was"We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK".

A service economy doesn't need the electricity generation capacity of China - something that, in the original article, he was using to point to China being economically ahead of US. China uses the power for manufacturing and has a greater population. Why does he want to point to that statistic?

There's no direction to the strategy just dumb and dumber.