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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground

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.

But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power.

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.

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.

I think it needs to be added that one of the major constraints holding the United States (and other similarly situated countries) back from doing this kind of thing was also the presence of a genuine Christian faith and set of values grounding the actions of most military commanders. Our leaders used to have moral frontiers they would not cross, now we do not.

When JFK's generals were proposing a surprise attack on Cuba, RFK slipped him a note saying that they would be no better than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. There was a genuine shared sense of honor, and a sense of mortal sin, that made certain actions off limits as dishonorable, as endangering one's immortal soul. Tradition stretching back through history to Chivalry, to the Romans who believed that war had to be validly declared with all due ceremony before it could be engaged in honorably. The surprise attack, the assassination, the murder, these were not avoided for mechanical reasons but because they were sins, they harmed one's soul.

Trump simply doesn't share that moral grounding. He has no belief that these are acts that would stain his soul, assuming he believes in a soul. He sees nothing wrong with launching a surprise attack in the middle of negotiations, as long as it achieves the goal. He is a pure utilitarian, there is no means that cannot be justified by sufficiently good ends.

The long term consequences of the Sucker-Punch Doctrine have yet to be seen.

One of the greatest shows of military might ever in history was done to North Korea over the course of three whole years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20635%2C000%20tons,(including%20160%2C000%20on%20Japan)

Air Force estimates of the destruction of towns and cities in North Korea ranged from 40 to 90%, with 18 out of North Korea’s 22 major cities being at least 50% destroyed.[2] The U.S. dropped approximately 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm during the war, mostly on North Korea (compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II).[3] In other words, the United States dropped more bombs on North Korea during the Korean War than it had dropped on the entire Pacific theater during the Second World War.[4]

Incredibly destructive (some estimates go as high as 20% of the population in NK dead from it) and yet as we all know now, it didn't really matter, the communists are still around and they even have nukes now. Military might is an incredibly important thing to have, but even such insanely overwhelming numbers do not make a simple fix to our problems. There must be more to it, and we've already failed at this in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan. Heck even in Iraq itself just a few years ago. Maybe it succeeds this time without a hitch, but it can't be taken for granted.

Sure, that's the conventional wisdom. I've heard that sort of thing all my life, that Korea, Vietnam, etc. prove the limits of what strategic bombing can accomplishment. But I'm not so sure that's a universal truth, or simply a limit of 20th century technology. It's sort of like how electric cars were always slow and useless, until suddenly they weren't. Previous wars involved bombing wildly and indescriminately, with the US first being unable to hit its targets (most of the 20th century) and then struggling to identify just who it should be targeting (most of the war on terror). It no longer has that limitation- It knew exactly where all the key leaders of Iran were, and targetted them very precisely in the first day of the war. It can continue to do this as long as anyone in Iran tries to resist. But so far there hasn't been any organized resistance, and the Iranian people seem pretty happy that their dictator is gone.

The US carved out a state in Korea despite the endless onslaught of millions of Chinese bodies in a zerg rush and the risk that the Soviets would send millions more. That’s very impressive. There was no need at the time to fight further and harder to get a few more map inches up the Korean Peninsula, which was broadly seen as just another offshoot of communist China.

Modern birthrates might make it a bit more effective when replenishment takes significantly longer

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).

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 organizations, similar to the Taliban, could expect to withstand this particular approach. If your leadership is forced to hide in a maximum security fortress at all times just to function, are they even 'sovereign' over their own nation?

The point is more that you can't get actual, willing obedience this way, all you can get is kayfabe. Any possible leader of Iran both doesn't like you much from the start, and will resent being under the cosh, so they will be reluctant servants at best and you can't actually slaughter them every year for that without looking (and being) somewhat insane.

So you have a choice: either you give orders from afar which are only carried out on the surface level, or you start putting Americans in the actually supervise these things at a low level. Accidents happen to those Americans - even if the top level don't want to get bombed b/c of dead Americans, they genuinely don't have the power or legitimacy to control idiots and murderers and rogue elements because they're considered pathetic poodles of the Great Satan. The more effort you make to protect your American observers and to help them fulfil their role, the more people hate and resent you, until the entire population becomes a distributed machine for lying to and fooling Americans.

Sometimes those top level guys get killed by their own people, and you have to replace them. This is what happened to the Shah for example. And eventually you may get revolution, and then you're back where you started, except that now you're bombing somewhat sympathetic freedom-fighters instead of fat ayatollahs.

This is the story of Britain in the ME, it's the story of Russian in the ME, and it's the story of America in the ME.

TLDR:

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?

No, but this is now your problem because you want control over Iran not control over the 'leadership'.

I think you just want an Iran that you can keep supervised closely enough to not blow up their neighbors unexpectedly.

Since multiple other ME countries have been nominally brought 'into the fold' (I won't pretend this is a permanent thing) there must be some path to it.

Actual, willing, obedience isn't necessary. If you pull off something like Venezuela and the new president is willing to play ball when it counts (not selling oil to Cuba and China seeming to be "what counts"), that's enough of a victory given the limited effort that was required to achieve it.

You can dynamically align the interests of the local elite with yourself. The US and UK did this with large parts of the Middle East (not least the Gulf) already, and quite successfully.

Don’t kid yourself that these people are ideological zealots. Every few years there’s a scandal in Iran because senior IR regime figures are caught on vacation, wives unveiled, chilling in some vacation destination. The son of the ayatollah is a westernized property developer. There are a lot of people even at the top whose devotion to the revolutionary crusade is limited at best. The reason they didn’t concede wasn’t ideological zealotry but the knowledge that if the whole regime was overthrown, which is possible in a kind of Gorbachev-cascade, they’d have nowhere to hide from the people angry about 50 years of domestic repression.

That said, this will go badly because the most zealous anti-government protestors were killed months ago.

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