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Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is on obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
This isn't new. Very little of this is new - the US has been in a massively dominant conventional position since the end of the Cold War. The reason we haven't done stuff like this in the past (except for when we have) is that it isn't particularly useful most of the time. Even in dictatorships, individual leaders are usually fairly replaceable, as we have seen in Venezuela (and will likely see in Iran), and actually achieving lasting results tends to require putting troops on the ground to enforce your will (as we've seen with the failures in Yemen) and a real plan for victory (such as was lacking in Afghanistan).
Precisely because the US has overwhelming conventional dominance, the number of foreign policy problems we have than can be solved by the quick, sharp exercise of conventional force is pretty limited. Nobody tries anymore because they know how it's going to go.
This is, in fact, the problem. A lot of "isolationist" sentiment in the US is a mixture of short-attention span and anti-internationalism. The reason US public turned against the Iraq War wasn't because of some general opposition to getting involved overseas, but because it was a miserable slog that they felt had been entered into under false pretenses. A lot of them recover their adventurous spirit the moment they get to see the US military absolutely pasting the latest guy dumb enough to stick his head up. And lose it again when it turns out (as mentioned) that brute force actually has pretty limited utility against modern problems.
The actual military problems the US has tend to be intractable (terrorism, piracy, and insurgency) or really boring (ship building, munitions production, diplomacy). The reason people are correctly calling Trump a retard for threatening to invade Greenland is not that the US couldn't take Greenland but that the whole affair reflects a kind of short-sighted thuggishness that reflects poorly on Trump and his supporters.
I mean... if a geopoltical foe demonstrates the ability to bypass your entire defense grid and either abduct or atomize you at any time... do you have any CHOICE but to accept their terms?
That's what seems new. No protacted invasion, no insurgency period, just a chopper full of spec ops on your roof, or a missile through your window. Most of this conducted from the sky.
Only completely decentralized organization, similar the Taliban, could expect to withstand this particular approach. If your leadership is forced hid in a maximum security fortress at all times just to function, are they even 'sovereign' over their own nation?
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Iran had been undergoing water and energy shortages, as well as 40-50% annual inflation, leading up to the strikes.Decapitating that regime is hardly proof of being a hyperpower, or beat China in a war. What were you expecting a peer China to do in response, strike us, try to start a proxy war? Why would a China do anything else other than say mean things? What? I'm not a nuclear expert but nevertheless am quite confident that we aren't "rapidly approaching" "overwhelming nuclear dominance", especially since your evidence is that THAAD is hitting missiles that aren't nuclear ICBMs and trump is funding the golden dome and ... spacex? While the post spends two words evaluating China (the most significant potential competitor)'s military capability, "relatively small". I don't think this was a good post.
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American military might over the middle east was pretty much already well established, we had boots on the ground in Afghanistan for almost two decades with basically complete dominance and barely anyone back home noticed. We hardly lift a finger while they fight for their lives.
But military might is just a means to an end, and even it has limits. After all, the Afghanistan example didn't turn out very well in the long run. Across the political spectrum our actions there are now widely viewed as a mistake. Yet you can go back and see the discussions of time, people were hyped as shit and drunk on power in the early parts of the war. They never would have expected such long term failures and widespread backlash, yet it happened anyway.
So yes we could attack many places, but what does it actually do? Is it an effective means to reach our goals there? What even are our goals? Does short term success get followed up with long term success or we will we keep stumbling drunk into more forever wars and unintended second and third order effects? These are all important questions. The Iranian leaders being evil and deserving of death doesn't make it simple and easy, because the same thing was true about much of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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I'm hedging my bets because the general American appetite for more ME misadventures is pretty much nil. And one of several reasons people voted Trump was that his "America First" policy could be interpreted quite easily as no more foreign misadventures.
Granted, on a sheer logistics, wonk and warhawk perspective, this stuff is crazy impressive. But in terms of things the regular American sees, what they see is America and Israel pissing off the entire Middle East. They don't give a shit about Iran gunning down their protesters and they might not even know it happened, because Americans don't care about foreign news. Not to mention, the media will jump on anything that makes Trump look worse and look the other way when he tries to take credit.
There are a couple of other things to note: I think people have forgotten what expensive oil looks like, end-consumer wise. And this is already with pressure on the energy market from the buildout in data centers.
It's also worth noting how Iran will just go down swinging at everything in reach. While people are saying Dubai might cheer the move due to the Sunni/Shia split, they're going to start grinding their teeth a bit when panicked multimillionaires start fleeing Dubai in droves for fear of catching debris or being trapped there. And the Arab world as a whole is no fan of Israel. Anyone in the ME who stands to eat collateral damage from Iran is going to wish that this hadn't happened. While I think that this might be overly cynical of me, I'm reminded of that old saw about how American foreign policy creates new terrorists faster than it kills them.
Finally, I think America has shown the world the blueprint for the future of data-harvested precision targeting, and if people don't think this will be a capability not levied against them at some point, they need to take a good hard look at how many Iranian leaders suffered critical existence failure in the last 48 hours.
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Trump is really going for the hat trick in his first year. I'm ambivalent on the long-term wisdom of the military operations, time will tell. But, at least in the short term, this stuff looks very good for Trump, and Hegseth, despite being panned as a lightweight, is at least delegating like an absolute champ. The first and second Iran operations and Venezuela are some of the wildest operations to be successfully pulled off by any world power, ever. And they're all in the first year.
My theory is that Trump does things that everyone else does, just louder, and more obvious. This dispels the illusions in some ways, makes the machinery of superpower status too plain. Who knows what the long term effects will be?
Trump is one of those guys Dan Carlin talks about having a "reality distortion field" around them. Historical figures who warped their societies and history itself around their ideas and goals. Ironically, it worked best on Carlin himself.
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It really does feel like the late-game stages of a Civ IV game where your economic and tech tree advantages have snowballed, so you can roll a doomstack of advanced military units up to any city on the map you want and take it out in a single turn.
And maybe, similar to Civ, the only thing that might stop such a power is if the other players can all agree on cooperation against that player and launch coordinated efforts to rein them in before they achieve space victory.
Which is functionally impossible in the real world.
And yes, I think Cuba goes splat later this year.
More to the point, it really makes you think that the whole problem of the last twenty years was leaders who were aware of U.S. dominance but had other goals in mind, probably including enrichment of cronies, that depended on the U.S. sandbagging hard. And arguably this is just the U.S. being let off the leash. We haven't even removed the leg weights yet.
"Soft Power" has an abysmal record, methinks. I do think Trump prefers the carrot to the stick, but the stick gets results.
It's interesting. I don't have the exact tweets to hand but I've seen a fair few that go along the lines of "If it's this easy, what have we been doing the last several decades"?
I'm willing to believe that the technological gap wasn't as notable prior to 2005.
But then I read accounts of Operation Desert Storm absolutely stomping the Iraqis in Kuwait, and then the invasion of Iraq proper ALSO stomping their conventional military.
And my conclusion is that the U.S. has, since the Cold War, always had the logistical capacity to bring overwhelming force to bear on any country with an ocean view. And air supremacy to ensure we can get in and out quickly and with minimal casualties, absolutely NO need to have permanent presence.
The decision to engage in protracted occupation and nation-building, therefore, was absolutely an intentional one and the ill-defined goals of such an endeavor, as opposed to "kill off opposing leadership until somebody accepts surrender", were tailor made for creating an expensive quagmire.
I'm extremely curious to see what types of movies get made about these campaigns. There's really no way to couch them than utterly triumphant for the U.S.
I think I can go on record to say that I bet the U.S. has the capability to kill Vladmir Putin at almost any time if they committed the same degree of planning to it, but the nuclear deterrent is the only thing that would ALWAYS shift the risk calculus against such a move.
China remains a question... but I suspect the apparent failure of the Chinese-made anti-air/anti-steal radars is a wake up call for THEM too.
Point being, the U.S. military is unquestionably the apex predator of the planet, but much of its doctrine for a long time required that this never be made explicit.
No more.
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The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan was never 'getting in'. In Iraq we were actually there to nation build and the CPA fucked it up. In Afghanistan we could conceivably have declared 'mission accomplished' and left if we got OBL, but alas...
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I think the main factor is the ability to do strikes. I don't mean as firing a missile from plane, that's just the culmination of the strike, but to have such a good understanding of the situation and the available materiel to plan and execute. The US is not sending a multirole fighter with a mix of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles with a goal of "go kill this person, we believe he's hiding in this building and he's behind several layers of air defences and the might have some fighters in the area. Good luck and godspeed!". The actual mission involves clockwork removal of all known obstacles and contingencies for the unknowns. So the mission will be more like "launch at 0400, at 0600 tomahawks will destroy the air defenses in grid yyy, you will then destroy the marked target between 0615 and 0700, the airfield close will be the target of another strike in the morning, in case some of the jets manage to scramble before you will have an escort of F-22s."
Planning everything like that requires time, and these strike plans can expire as targets and defenses are moved, so if you are the US you plan as many strikes as you can for the opening of the war, start with an orgy of destruction to remove as many defenses as you can so that when you run out of pre-planned strikes you don't need to be as fastidious in your planning. If you're Iran, you can't do much to stop the strikes or cause much damage to the strike forces, so you shuffle your defenses and targets around and hope that by the time the US run out of preplanned strikes, they still don't have uncontested air superiority or achieved their objectives, then the US will either have to accept more risk in their operations or slow the cadence of strikes.
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Was Operation Rough Rider a great demonstration of American invincibility too? They brought in multiple carrier groups, bombed Yemen endlessly and assassinated plenty of Houthi leaders even up to the Houthi Prime Minister but the Houthi missile/drone capabilities were basically untouched and Trump effectively gave up after a month when stockpiles started running low.
So if this goes the same way and Iran is still firing missiles and drones a month at every country hosting American military assets, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and possibly obliterating all of the soft oil infrastructure between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea would you still consider it to be a great victory for Trump?
My understanding is that all of the Houthi missiles and drones came from Iran. So it makes sense that bombing Houthis wouldn't really stop the missile attacks, at least not without completely genociding them which the US was obviously unwilling to do. But with Iran's regime gone, the Houthi's will no longer have a source of weapons. This clears up a lot of problems if you can simply stop the weapons at the source, instead of trying to target every single insurgent.
But yes, maybe I'm wrong and Iran is still firing missiles all over the place forever, in which case this looks horrible for Trump and the USA as a whole.
I think this is basically a fair assessment, and it also fully applies to why/how Ukraine has held out for so long against Russia (contra the cheerleading narrative).
In fact proxies with high capacity to absorb suffering backed by countries with a moat against immediate retribution seems to be one strategy with which the stronger powers still can be made to bleed - arguably this scheme was prototyped in Korea (imperfectly because China still had to commit its own forces in the end) and perfected in Vietnam.
However, the stars need to align for this to work, in that it must not be possible to physically sever the proxies from their backers. NK is adjacent to Russia and China, North Vietnam is adjacent to China, Ukraine borders NATO and the Houthis are a short swim from Iran. Hizbollah can't be a good proxy for Iran because they have too much hostile ground to cover, and Cuba is almost unreachable for Russia. Iran itself doesn't seem to want to be anyone's proxy (perhaps their ability to absorb suffering is not actually that high?), and Georgia failed as a Western proxy for some mixture of low capability to absorb suffering and not being that easy to reach and support.
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No, on account of the nature of such things.
We have the biggest, heaviest, fastest, longest hammer in the world, which is very good at hammering things that can be hammered.
It doesn't help us if we need to fight an insurgent war, or a nuclear war (small is big enough, in this case), or a trade war.
In that regard it's just us and china with the eurozone in third; and probably it's actually just china 30 years out unless we do some serious communist/state capitalist central planning fucking QUICK.
Doesn't matter how good our army is if there is no civil society to hold that bitch up.
Why do you think we need to do central planning? I don't see how that helps anyone.
The US military is no longer just a hammer. It's very much a smart hammer, honed by 20 years of the global war on terror and cyber/intel development. That helps a lot if you need to find insurgents, or shoot down an ICBM.
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My initial response to this was: 'What war with Iran?' And now you're telling me it's over, and America won?
This fucking decade, man. Someone please tell God to chill out.
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A few things that come to mind:
That said, I think that China's big problem is that because the US is leagued with and can base weapons in a bunch of countries close to China, the US can probably do a lot more damage to China in a conventional war than China can do to the US. Being able to build huge numbers of missiles is good for China but not that great if most of them don't have the range and tech to reach targets in the actual US proper.
Well, I fully expected the US to win, but I thought it would take a lot longer than this! Maybe I missed the discussion on this from the past 2 years. The saying among neocons during the 2000s was "everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but only real men want to go to Tehran"- even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough.
And I'm certainly not saying the US is immune to nukes, or should seek out such a war. Just that, if it does happen, the losses would be a lot less than people might expect based on cold war thinking. And we've just seen that the US has immense power to devastate a country in the opening hours of a war, before it even has a chance to launch its missiles.
They were talking about invading Iran. I don't think there was ever any question that we could bomb Iran with impunity. Maybe they were expecting need a bit more SEAD, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that Iran would be able to directly contest the air.
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Thinking toward China, there's just a huge amount of uncertainty about how its military would do against any country, let alone the status quo superpower. I don't think anyone, even Xi Jinping, has a good idea. The fact he hasn't acted yet is good piece of evidence that he thinks the US would win; but that's inherently a point at time estimation, and he has the advantage of choosing the most advantageous time he wants to, up until his death.
I am very confident that China would put up more of a fight than Iran, which admittedly is a bar so low it's on the ground.
The fact that a good proportion of American civilians are contemplating about striking China is a good reason why Xi should stop sitting in the cuck chair and do somethingTM. A couple easy things to try first: Myanmar rebels? Naughty Zimbabwean who threaten to stop selling China lithium? Malays and Indonesians who abuse (or used to abuse) our brethren in SEA? Hope that day comes sooner than later.
Yes; if China wants to be a world power, it needs to put its military through its paces as a kind of stress test. Beyond pointing firehoses at Filipino fishing boats.
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