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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.
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)
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.
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.
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