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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 an 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?
China. China might stop him. It's really big. It holds a lot of people. They're militarizing rapidly in terms of both quantity and quality. And they're overall no longer a third-world backwater shithole. I dare say the US has not so far faced an opponent anything like this, and may in fact not be able to deliver a clean strike. This isn't a banana republic that exists only to sell oil or an islamic near-failed state teetering on the brink of collapse already.
In other words: You're somewhat drunk, go home and sleep it off.
I didn't mean to say that attacking China would be easy. I meant that Trump has supreme command of the US military and he can order that if he so chooses. I agree it would be crazy but there's really no one who can prevent such a war if he's really determined.
More likely I see him continuing to go after small 3rd world dictatorships that he can topple within a week. So maybe North Korea.
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China has minimal interest in playing world police as long as there's a somewhat-stable global market to sell into and securing its own needs in terms of resources isn't overly threatened. I'm pretty sure they don't see a need to become hegemon, just continue to increase their economic heft whilst the USA can maintain its gigantic costly international welfare efforts.
I was referring strictly to the maximalist claim that America could attack China with impunity.
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It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years, all the while singlehandedly orchestrating the largest urban migration in human history and aggressively A/B testing their entire economy to see what worked and what didn't.
People really want this to be a Soviet Union situation where the regime is barely hanging on by a thread, only bolstering their public image via international propaganda, and where the dominance of the ever-so-enlightened USA will be assured in the end in some kind of teleological Francis Fukuyama-esque end-of-history sense "but tofu construction, but ghost cities, but CCP is going to collapse, but everything in China is fake". Their military technology at the moment lags slightly behind the US (though they're making huge strides in closing that gap), but their production pipelines and logistics are more streamlined and scalable, and yeah their population is massive.
Of course nobody can say for sure who would win in a scuff-up between the two, but I would not underestimate China.
Or, alternatively:
China being rich and prosperous is its default state for most of the last 3000 years.
True that, but China also has a long history of barely keeping it together, of fracturing into dozens of pieces, of being near-incapable of projecting power, of being paralyzed with institutional sclerosis and corruption...I'm not disagreeing with your point, really. I just wouldn't want to argue too much from historical interpretation when arguing from observable recent trends also gets the job done.
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Exactly. Also why I'm relatively optimistic about the Iranian efforts compared to a lot of other places in the broad proximity. They've got a history of functional civilization and being broadly productive. Some places are just going to be continually civilization-resistant in the longrun.
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