America had the strongest industrial base in the world. We made deliberate decisions to dismantle than industrial base, and to trade on generous terms with China in a way intended to help them build up their own industry and trade. We did this on the belief that Chinese economic prosperity would converge them toward a liberal, democratic "end of history". This was all public policy, debated in the open, and the effect on China's economic and industrial growth is obvious. Maybe (even likely!) they would have made good some other way, but absent specific actions we took, their ascent would have been considerably harder.
How are Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and all those other third world countries doing after your carpet bombing?
To my knowledge, none of those countries actually experienced "carpet bombing" in anything even approximating the way Japan and Germany did in WWII. We dropped a lot more bombs on Vietnam, but almost all those bombs were dropped on the countryside rather than being used to obliterate major urban centers. Subsequent wars, we haven't even dropped that many on the countryside.
The history of US military operations post-WWII is a long succession of attempts to achieve political ends without engaging in total war. Notably, the last total war we fought is popularly understood to be an overwhelming victory, and all subsequent, "limited" wars are popularly understood as stalemates or defeats, often humiliating defeats.
"Proportionality should be a guideline of war" appears, empirically, to be an excellent way to generate longer, bloodier, messier wars that we then go on to lose. And of course, the fact is that the firebombings didn't end the war, but the nukes, generally held to be even more horrifying, did.
The above is not an argument for securing all political desires through maximum brutality. It is an argument against "limited" and thus cheaper and more frequent war. Nor is it an argument that war should be all or nothing, that there is no place for limited strikes, raids or punitive actions. But if you are going to fight an actual, for-serious war, "proportionality" is very clearly a miserable way to do it.
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America had the strongest industrial base in the world. We made deliberate decisions to dismantle than industrial base, and to trade on generous terms with China in a way intended to help them build up their own industry and trade. We did this on the belief that Chinese economic prosperity would converge them toward a liberal, democratic "end of history". This was all public policy, debated in the open, and the effect on China's economic and industrial growth is obvious. Maybe (even likely!) they would have made good some other way, but absent specific actions we took, their ascent would have been considerably harder.
To my knowledge, none of those countries actually experienced "carpet bombing" in anything even approximating the way Japan and Germany did in WWII. We dropped a lot more bombs on Vietnam, but almost all those bombs were dropped on the countryside rather than being used to obliterate major urban centers. Subsequent wars, we haven't even dropped that many on the countryside.
The history of US military operations post-WWII is a long succession of attempts to achieve political ends without engaging in total war. Notably, the last total war we fought is popularly understood to be an overwhelming victory, and all subsequent, "limited" wars are popularly understood as stalemates or defeats, often humiliating defeats.
"Proportionality should be a guideline of war" appears, empirically, to be an excellent way to generate longer, bloodier, messier wars that we then go on to lose. And of course, the fact is that the firebombings didn't end the war, but the nukes, generally held to be even more horrifying, did.
The above is not an argument for securing all political desires through maximum brutality. It is an argument against "limited" and thus cheaper and more frequent war. Nor is it an argument that war should be all or nothing, that there is no place for limited strikes, raids or punitive actions. But if you are going to fight an actual, for-serious war, "proportionality" is very clearly a miserable way to do it.
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