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Balaji Profile picture
@balajis
Jan 2, 2022 • 10 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
This article by Mearsheimer and @stephenWalt from 2016 holds up well.

I think they'll eventually win the argument as the US, by necessity, moves away from what they term liberal hegemony and towards offshore balancing.

I do have two thoughts, though… 🧵
mearsheimer.com/wp-content/upl… ImageImage
First, there is actually a structural similarity between liberal hegemony and offshore balancing.

The entire NGO industrial complex doesn't want poor countries to become wealthy. In fact, it hates those who become truly independent via capitalism.

They want pets, not partners. Image
NGOs do have a self-interest, but it's undeclared. Their self interest is in being seen as saviors.

The alternative approach? Invest in the ascending world. Shared *risk* and reward. Capitalism is for equals, equal partners in the deal. @mwiyas @iaboyeji
priceonomics.com/what-happened-…
What's the key difference between investment & NGO-style charity?

With investment, the recipient can become *richer than* the investor. This is actually the best outcome. And from this, true self-sufficiency & independence.

By contrast, NGOs mean perpetual dependence.
So, in this respect, the current NGO model actually *does* have an aspect of offshore balancing to it.

It keeps the ascending world from rising, and then attacks those that manage to rise anyway.

It's humanitarian in optics, but (arguably) realpolitik in substance.
We can understand this via the fictional Diana Moon Glampers.

The power to make everyone "equal" is in fact highly unequally distributed, and this is the whole point.

The Handicapper General makes sure no one rises above the Handicapper General.
litcharts.com/lit/harrison-b… Image
Now to the second point, shorter this time.

While many of the liberal hegemons abuse the *language* of human rights, democracy, and rule of law to justify what is in reality a half-NGO half-neocon form of neocolonialism...that does not mean these ideas have no merit.
The alternative approach is to stop entrusting the protection of human rights to NGOs, neocons, and their proselytizing surveillance state…and to move instead towards internationally transparent networks, with both algorithmic & human checks and balances.
bariweiss.substack.com/p/is-bitcoin-a…
Why bracket NGOs and neocons, btw? Aren't they implacably opposed to each other?

In theory. In practice, the hard power allows soft power to get boots on the ground, and vice versa. The warriors & priests support each other, even if they don't realize it.
OK, wrapping up.

To summarize, the US likely will move towards a more realistic foreign policy. Something like offshore balancing, not liberal hegemony.

But the ideals the US arguably once protected & now does not aren't abandoned. They live on on-chain. foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bit…

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More from @balajis

Balaji Profile picture
Sep 8
Both America and China were invested in the illusion that China wasn't already the world's strongest economy.

Psychologically, it suited the incumbent to appear strong. So America downplayed China's numbers.

Strategically, it suited the disruptor to appear weak. So China also sandbagged its own numbers.

But the illusion is becoming harder to maintain.Image
In retrospect, all the China cope over the last decade or so was really just the stealth on the Chinese stealth bomber.

Hide your strength and bide your time was Deng's strategy. Amazingly, denying China's strength somehow also became America's strategy.

For example, all the cope on China's demographics somehow being uniquely bad...when they have 1.4B+ people that crush every international science competition with minimal drug addiction, crime, or fatherlessness...and when their demographic problems have obvious robotic solutions.

Or, for another example, how MAGA sought to mimic China's manufacturing buildout and industrial policy without deeply understanding China's strengths in this area, which is like competing with Google by setting up a website. Vague references to 1945 substituted for understanding the year 2025.

One consequence of the cope is that China knows far more about America's strengths than vice versa. Surprisingly few Americans interested in re-industrialization have ever set foot in Shenzhen. Those who have, like @Molson_Hart, understand what modern China actually is.

Anyway, what @DoggyDog1208 calls the "skull chart" is the same phenomenon @yishan and I commented on months ago. Once China truly enters a vertical, like electric cars or solar, their pace of ascent[1] is so rapid that incumbents often don't even have time to react.

Now apply this at country level. China has flipped America so quickly on so many axes[2], particularly military ones like hypersonics or military-adjacent ones like power, that it can no longer be contained.

A major contributing factor was the dollar illusion. All that money printing made America think it was richer than China. And China was happy to let America persist in the illusion. But an illusion it was. Yet another way in which Keynesianism becomes the epitaph of empire.

[1]: asiatimes.com/2025/07/thucyd…
[2]: x.com/balajis/status…Image
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Well, it's not the idea, it's the execution.

China can just sit back and let the world be its Xerox PARC. And then become a speedy second mover on anything that's working.

So you need innovations China genuinely can't copy.
One of them is Bitcoin.
Read 7 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Sep 1
The dollar is losing reserve currency status. It’s down to 42% of global reserves, and gold is rapidly rising. Image
Digital gold is becoming the reserve currency of the individual.

Gold is returning as the reserve currency of the state.

Original post below.
Recall the Fed admitted that a “small number” of countries were switching to gold.

But that small number actually included Russia, India, and China: the RIC of BRICS.
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Aug 18
On many graphs of the physical world, China is in first place by a wide margin.

But if you look more closely, India is a distant but real runner up. Image
Image
The same pattern holds in nuclear.
China is #1 in reactors under construction.
But India is in second place. Image
Electricity generation is similar.

China’s recent increase is unparalleled in history. But India is increasing quickly, and will flip the EU soon. Image
Read 7 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Aug 6
There are now two kinds of AI retards.

The first kind of retard uses AI everywhere, even where it shouldn’t be used.

The second kind of retard sees AI everywhere, even where it isn’t used.
Usually, it’s obvious what threads are and aren’t AI-written.

But some people can’t tell the difference between normal writing and AI writing. And because they can’t tell the difference, they’ll either overuse AI…or accuse others of using AI!

What we actually may need are built-in statistical AI detectors for every public text field. Paste in a URL into an archive.is-like interface and get back the probability that any div on the page is AI-generated.

In general my view is that AI text shouldn’t be used raw. It’s like a search engine result, it’s lorem ipsum. Useful for research but not final results. AI code is different, but even that requires review. AI visuals are different still, and you can sometimes use them directly.

We’re still developing these conventions, as the tech itself is of course a moving target. But it is interesting that even technologists (who see the huge time-savings that AI gives for, say, data analysis or vibe coding) are annoyed by AI slop. Imagine how much the people who don’t see the positive parts of AI may hate AI.

TLDR: slop is the new spam, and we’ll need new tools and conventions to defeat it.
I agree email spammers will keep adapting.

But I don’t know if a typical poster will keep morphing their content in such a way.
Read 5 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Jul 25
JP Morgan is updating their p(doom), but for the dollar. Image
Just the fact that JPMC is now admitting this is a big step.

"De-dollarization has increasingly become a substantive topic of discussion among investors, corporates and market participants more broadly."

As the US deglobalizes, the globe dedollarizes.
jpmorgan.com/insights/globa…Image
Yes, but no manufacturing economy can be realistically stood up in time to replace the sheer consumption that money-printing enables.

Example: to make $1T, you can (a) print or (b) sell $1000 phones to 1B people. Obviously, the former is far easier.
Image
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Profile picture
Jun 4
AI PROMPTING → AI VERIFYING

AI prompting scales, because prompting is just typing.

But AI verifying doesn’t scale, because verifying AI output involves much more than just typing.

Sometimes you can verify by eye, which is why AI is great for frontend, images, and video. But for anything subtle, you need to read the code or text deeply — and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI.

Researchers are well aware of this, which is why there’s so much work on evals and hallucination.

However, the concept of verification as the bottleneck for AI users is under-discussed. Yes, you can try formal verification, or critic models where one AI checks another, or other techniques. But to even be aware of the issue as a first class problem is half the battle.

For users: AI verifying is as important as AI prompting.
I love everything @karpathy has done to popularize vibe coding.

But then after you prototype with vibe coding, you need to get to production with right coding.

And that means AI verifying, not just AI prompting. That’s easy when output is visual, much harder when it’s textual.
@karpathy The question when using AI is: how can I inexpensively verify the output of this AI model is correct?

We take for granted the human eye, which is amazing at finding errors in images, videos, and user interfaces.

But we need other kinds of verifiers for other domains.
Read 4 tweets

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