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Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian, I guess maybe I was unclear with the 'we', I meant that the motte and the world at large only recently stumbled on this matter.
Secondly, I think there's an important distinction between internal disputes, corruption and resource reallocation and foreigners coming in to take resources. It's like crime vs warfare. Criminals get punished, enemies get killed. Ingroup outgroup distinction.
I guess you might say I'm being too vague about what decadence really is, I think it's like a magnet with domains all jumbled up, not pointing in one direction. Adam wants cheap labour, Bert wants loyal voter blocs, Charlie wants to stuff his face with food and not care about politics, Derek wants kickbacks from rich foreigners, Emma wants those poor people overseas to have human rights, Frank wants tax cuts without spending cuts... (Flavius wants to be emperor, Julius wants to be emperor, Octavius wants to be emperor,, Antonius wants to hire those cheap Gothic warriors since Romans these days don't want to fight) Anyway, Americans are not all aligned with advancing US interests, making America and Americans strong. They got complacent and stopped pushing forwards, then get ensnared by foreign interests and growing reliance on foreigners. Decadence starts slow but it gets worse and worse over time.
The Somalis who are constantly crowing about their love of and loyalty to Somalia (and sending huge amounts of money to Somalia) aren't real Americans, in my opinion. I'm not American so I guess I can't be too authoritative about this but I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here. They show no loyalty to America. They make obnoxious tiktoks about how they're coming to take over America: https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1997759022666297662
OK, it's just one guy there, Ilhan Omar and the ex-PM of Somalia over here, a few billion dollars over some years (10s of billions? More?)... Even a few billion dollars is worth caring about. How many lifetimes worth of labour have Minnesotans done only for some Somali to take it? The British didn't let the Chinese get away with disrespecting their merchants selling drugs in China, they fucked China up for that slight. That's real vigour and will.
A few hundred thousand Somalis haven't collapsed America. But they do way more damage than they should be doing, it's as if they have a 10,000x multiplier on their effectiveness against Americans that they're extracting wealth from a much stronger power. It's this effect that is the root cause of US woes. Just being united and nationalist/tribalist is an incredible source of strength. The American auto-immune system is broken, any strong leader would've gotten rid of these people or never let them in but Trump can't seem to manage it, he announces and threatens but can't seem to get rid of them because some judge nobody ever heard of will block him while Will Stancil's people will shriek and blow airhorns and get shot dead defending them... Decadence.
China does the same kind of sneaky subversion, that's how they got so powerful and menacing. They stole a tonne of IP from the US and elsewhere, they make the Somalis look like complete failures in their fraud. Anything Somalis can do, China can do better after all. They bewitched the US into cooperating with their exploitation, they bewitched the US into not stomping China when they had complete military dominance.
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
American leaders are floating around in never never land talking about vibes like 'freedom' or 'democracy' or 'human rights' or 'freedom of the seas' and the Chinese are saying whatever magic words help them in the moment to advance their true goals, doing whatever advances Chinese national strength.
The US kidnapped Maduro. That's a show of power, albeit against a country so incompetent they can't even maintain their own oil industry. But what was the point of the flex? Trump's stated objective seemed to be to secure the oil - only nobody wants to invest in Venezuela, still ruled by the commies, still with a weak oil industry, given current oil prices are low. It was another fundamentally misguided military intervention.
There is an Iran war coming up which will probably be a complete shitshow. We were told the US completely destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility, a devastating blow. It didn't even last six months, apparently they need to go in again to stop the Iranian nuclear program which has been six months away from a nuke for the last 30 years. Woolly thinking in US leaders, deceived, constantly misdirected, ever trusting, paying the price for the gains of others.
The US is simultaneously trying to confront Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Pacific. The US didn't trounce China back when China was weak, they let China walk all over them. All these little cuts and tapeworms are wearing down US power.
Decadence is when you're trying to do too much with too little, a kind of complacency about sustaining one's own strength, a lack of wisdom and good judgement. Imagine how strong and rich America would be without those trillions squandered in the Middle East, with realpolitik instead of random blundering, no DEI officers in the military, not letting IP be stolen without punishment, not corroding patriotic ideals that are the basis of military recruitment... What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
China would be prey, not predator.
My apologies. That slipped my mind.
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation, usually from other countries and their armies. I think the US is doing excellent on that front. As I've said, even if recent efforts to project power abroad have been less than effective, the continental USA is at no risk of invasion. Chinese paratroopers aren't going to land in LA no matter how bad the war in Taiwan goes. The US is too far, it is too geographically blessed. There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf, and that's before we even consider the nukes.
Could the US have been more sensible? Of course. I agree 100%. But the fact that it can hop on one leg while trying to kick itself in the balls and still be the world power means that the pressure to be smart is less than crushing.
I really don't think that even ten billion dollars would make a noticeable difference to the military budget. That's 0.5% of the F-35 program. Of course, that is because procurement is busted and everything is overpriced, but that's still the way it is. The US war machine is not starved for cash, it's suffering from lack of an effective way to convert the ridiculous amount of money it has into useful materiel. I can't blame the Somalians for that.
A thousand cuts? Fatal to small mammals. A whale might not even notice. It could hemorrhage a liter of blood a day and draw every shark in the Pacific and few would have the balls to bite it (cloaca? Idk). The fact remains that even if the USA isn't acting maximally rationally, it's still doing pretty damn well overall. It's fine to grade on a curve when nobody is going to bomb their homes.
What about the Somali fraudsters robbing American taxpayers? The cartel gangsters? The fentanyl from Chinese precursors that the cartel gangsters import? That's what, 70,000 deaths a year? It's not just China's fault (takes two to die of a fent overdose) but they do use fentanyl precursor exports as part of their diplomatic efforts to impose pressure on America. Fentanyl is an instrument of Chinese power, like the PLA is. A more limited instrument, certainly, but an instrument nonetheless.
There's a divide in international relations between people who just talk about hard power and state warfare as 'security' and then the liberals who talk about food security, energy security, economic security, political security, institutional security...
I think the latter have a point even if they usually express it in a limpwristed way. What good is it if Chinese paratroopers can't land in America but Chinese spies can take wealth out of America, steal the F-35 secrets? Does it matter to Chuck and Hank that their factory didn't get bombed by an H-20, their business was just wrecked by some Chinese hackers stealing their IP, passing it on to domestic firms who undercut them? The result is the same, the latter is better even for China since they didn't have to pay much for the bombs and they expanded their stock of national wealth.
Sure, Chuck and Hank aren't getting bayonets pointed at them, they're not made to salute the Chinese flag. Maybe they're not Minnesotans, living under the Somali flag. Chuck and Hank have lost small, not big... but a small loss is still a loss.
The F-35 is also an example of decadence. All these politicians demand production facilities in their state for political reasons. They aren't interested in the national interest, which would demand a few large production plants for economical production and efficiencies of scale. The bloat and waste is seriously harmful to America, China isn't a minnow that can be slapped aside with a few swipes. America needs to be smart to beat a country 4x bigger.
Or from another angle, the Fang Yuan school of conflict strategy prioritizes these asymmetric, cost-efficient and subversive looting campaigns. 'When weak, subvert the social structure and disguises to extract loot without punishment, use loot to become strong, when strong slaughter and loot openly. Repeat as necessary.' It'd be very easy to say 'oh he's not a big deal, even if he beat us in a few fights and steals a little wealth we're still the rulers of the world, we can lose again and again because of how big and strong we are' but then he shows up in Heavenly Court with Unlimited Qi Sea and they all get very quiet and very serious. They made a big error by not squashing him when he was small.
Just because nobody is bombing American homes right now, doesn't mean it won't happen.
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