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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?
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.
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.
I don't think China does want that. I think they want the Islands and Taiwan and the US to fuck off from there side of the pacific. But they have zero interest it establishing global hegemony. Iran was actually closer to that with their network of bases, spies and proxies.
Getting the US to fuck off from Taiwan is equivalent to being a world power.
I agree that they're not looking to create a world order where they have replaced the current role of the US, though.
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