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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?
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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