Why would they want to toss the US aside? They are the US allies.Where will they get substitute exports markets of that magnitude? Which other economy can have current account deficit of $500 bn. a year?
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Yes, this is exactly right.
The US's attractiveness as a market is unmatched. Where else can you find such a large population of consumers with comparatively high incomes or, more often, access to easy credit regardless of income? And, as Ulhas points out, what other nation could run such astronomical deficits for so long?
But this is equalled by the US' unattractiveness as a leader of the world's political and economic order. This is the challenge the wealthier and so-called 'developing' countries face: the US' market is needed for much of their domestic prosperity but deferring to the US on geopolitical matters is growing more and more distasteful and dangerous as Washington becomes increasingly reckless and demands greater obedience from its allies while offering diminshing rewards.
It will take some time for an alternative market -- no doubt a distributed system of developed smaller markets, ideally including not only the EU and North Asia, but Latin America and Africa as well -- to provide a parallel system to the American-centered one engineered at the end of the Second World War.
Optimistically, the end-result would be a robust global network of trade and production in which the US would be an important and vibrant but no-longer-central node.
Realizing such an outcome would depend, in no small way, upon American elites' acceptance of the need for managed relative decline into more or less 'normal' nation status instead of the wrenching unilateralism and deadly vainglory we're now seeing being played out.
.d.