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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?
American military might over the middle east was pretty much already well established, we had boots on the ground in Afghanistan for almost two decades with basically complete dominance and barely anyone back home noticed. We hardly lift a finger while they fight for their lives.
But military might is just a means to an end, and even it has limits. After all, the Afghanistan example didn't turn out very well in the long run. Across the political spectrum our actions there are now widely viewed as a mistake. Yet you can go back and see the discussions of time, people were hyped as shit and drunk on power in the early parts of the war. They never would have expected such long term failures and widespread backlash, yet it happened anyway.
So yes we could attack many places, but what does it actually do? Is it an effective means to reach our goals there? What even are our goals? Does short term success get followed up with long term success or we will we keep stumbling drunk into more forever wars and unintended second and third order effects? These are all important questions. The Iranian leaders being evil and deserving of death doesn't make it simple and easy, because the same thing was true about much of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran is not Afghanistan. I think Afghanistan is say like the Southside of Chicago and Iran is like Naperville? Afghanistan just can’t be civilized. You can pump money into the country and they will be your friend until you quit giving them money. And then you leave and the go back to being Afghani’s and doing what they’ve done for a few thousand years. Iran has actual civilization that you can take away from them. If you blow up their government then they need a new government and loon for you to be in charge.
A place with the complexities of civilization can be conquered where as hill tribesmen can’t be conquered.
Yeah, I think people are underestimating what a big deal it is to change the regime of Iran. Even if it had no broader reaching effects, we're talking about a very large and old center of civilization. Nobody really cared much what happened in Afghanistan, but people are going to start caring about Iran once relations open up and we can go visit there and talk to them as normal human beings.
Exactly. Give me any sort of semi-stable foreigner welcoming Iranian government and I'd love to visit Tehran. The Persian diaspora generally way more functional and pleasant to deal with than the Arabs.
The Persian diaspora, though, is heavily selected -- they're largely the urbanized, westernized, supporters of the old Shah and their descendants. The people who back the Ayatollahs and their descendants may be rather less functional and pleasant.
One of my best friends is Persian. It seems to me half his family still lives in Iran. The country does not appear to be completely brain drained. It seem to me like there would still be people to work with.
Haiti seems like a place with zero existing elites remaining. Cuba if we opened it up and tried to govern it now my gut say there would not be a lot of local people remaining we can expect to put in charge because half the population already left.
Galaxy brain moment: make Miami the ruling capital of Cuba and run it as a colonial extension of Florida. Reunite the Cuban diaspora. Little Marco for Floridian emperor. I hear Florida even has a widely-recognized castle he can live in.
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