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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?
That is not what the Shanghai coopreration organization is. China has no military allies, this is a significant weakness but it is also a significant strength. It means China has okay relations with every country in the middle east, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel. The idea that there is a kind of anti western alliance is largely fictitious. This narrative is promoted by both anti Americans (so that their cause does not seem as hopeless as it really is) and by American interventionists (so that their cause does not seem as pointless as it really is).
America is an enemy of Iran because of Israeli lobbying, not because Iran is a Chinese ally.
How many Americans can Russia and China kill? 30 million? 40? 50? 90? It would be the greatest catastrophe in American history by far.
There's always this two-step dance about what exactly the SCO is. I think the legal details are unimportant, since these aren't countries that are going to be follow the exact letter of any treaty. The fact remains that they were cooperating, and Iran was one of very few countries directly helping China, and now they're gone. All China has left is, what, Myanmar and North Korea? Good luck with that. Any country that starts helping them too much because of "Belt and Road" or whatever can easily be "convinced" to change their ways by US military power.
Notice how even your largest numbers still fall far short of total annihilation. The fear during the cold war was that they might kill everyone, with just a few scattered survivors living in underground bunkers. Now the best they could possibly hope for is just massacring some cities, while the US would certainly survive and overwhelmingly destroy them in response.
The idea that the sheer number of nukes a country holds is the most important factor in an engagement is just silly; maintenance is costly and Russia and the US have so many nuclear bombs partially because of Cold War-era posturing. Strategically speaking, you don't actually need 2000+ nukes to do the job properly, it's not about saturation as much as it is having the capacity to hit enough targets to deter attacks. If you have even a nominal amount of nukes and a proper delivery system, that is more than enough. MAD doesn't need to be even close to total, if you wipe out the largest cities in the US the vast majority of its economy is gone in a handful of hours (and note, you'll not only kill people directly but also through the collateral damage such as complete collapse of infrastructure and radiation percolation into the water system).
Note that China has 600+ nukes, which would certainly be capable of levelling large swaths of the US; striking first is incredibly stupid. Theoretically you could remove their second strike capability by attempting an attack on their silos, but realistically you aren't going to be able to identify the locations of every Chinese silo and submarine and target them before China mounts its offence. Even if just 20 of China's most antiquated ICBMs hit the US, that's 50 million dead according to some possible ballpark estimates, how would you feel about 300? China certainly has enough for credible deterrence against the US, and that's largely what its nuclear arsenal appears to be designed for - out of the major nuclear powers, it's the only one that actually maintains an unconditional no-first-strike policy. Even so, of the nuclear powers it's the one scaling up production fastest.
And speaking of missile defence systems, China has the Hongqi-19, which has a reportedly superior maximum operational range (up to 500-600 km) compared to THAAD (200 km). Claiming "overwhelming nuclear dominance" such that it would allow the US to steamroll any country it feels like is premature, to say the least.
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
Notably, during the Korean war when we were actively fighting with China, we still didn't dare attack China directly for fear of triggering a nuclear war. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, they were able to supply North Vietnam freely with weapons and support- the US had to go out of its way to avoid hurting China or the USSR. That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
And that's just for now. Despite their considerable advances in many fields of technology, China still lags behind the US in aerospace tech. The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD. If the US continues to invest in ground based defense like THAAD, plus gets a working space defense working through Golden Dome... China rapidly runs out of options to hurt the US. But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I don't think the US wants to enter a contest of mass production and industrial capacity with China. Missile defence has never been cost-effective, isn't today (as we see all these missiles piercing the existing Iron Dome whether via saturation or just outright penetration) and likely won't in the future unless there are major developments in laser efficiency. It's not that hard to make low-flying nuclear cruise missiles or fractional orbital bombardment systems or HGVs, very hard to shoot them all down.
Chinese missile defence probably doesn't work either. But at the end of the day, they do have this huge pool of talented engineers (much more than America), they do have all these robots and industrial machinery, they're marching up the value chain in all kinds of industries. Drones, 5G, renewable energy, shipbuilding, steel, nuclear power... There's no reason they can't match and surpass anything the US can do, given enough time. If an American engineer can make something, so can a Chinese engineer.
Well they'd just push the US out of North Korea like last time, probably. I think people just don't understand the scale of what China can field, if they really want to. They have 20 Million men turning 18 each year. Imagine facing an army of 20 Million at the front, imagine facing 85% of the world's drone production fired off at you day and night, imagine facing the production engineers that are brutalizing the world's car industry with their 'overproduction'. That's not even a fully mobilized China. The US mobilized about 12% of the population in WW2 for the military, so for China that'd be well over 100 million men.
You have to kill 20 million in a year just to keep up - they'll have another 20 million to throw at you next year! It's a ruthless autocracy, a party-state with total internal control and massive propaganda capabilities. Don't take them lightly!
They do, and I have tremendous respect for China's ability to do high tech manufacturing at massive scale. But I still argue that they're a step behind the US in terms of the most cutting edge tech. We see this in many areas- stealth, radar, targetting, cyberwarfare, AI, and now space launch. We will if they ever manage to catch up and surpass us in one of those fields. But they better do so soon, because their population is rapidly aging.
We arguably did just face that! If you count Iran's Basij force of 25 million reservists. But it doesn't matter how big their army is, no one moves without command and logistical support. And they're also not zombies, they're not going to march themselves off to die in North Korea if they have a choice.
(but yes, I am perhaps speaking too lightly and glibly. I'm sure the people in the Pentagon take this a lot more seriously than I am. But still... just imagine the possibilities...)
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I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories. Having fewer, and using them only as a last-ditch resort, means that countries struggle to project force outside their boundaries, as China does today. It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
That seems like a rather fear-mongering article, essentially taking all of China's claims at face-value despite a complete lack of tests, while assuming that the US can't do anything in response (eg, using satellites to increase tracking range instead of relying solely on THAAD). It's probably written to encourage more spending on missile defense. But yes, I do agree that THAAD isn't a huge central point for this discussion, it's just one of many weapons systems where the US now enjoys a considerable advantage that it never had before.
I would argue it shows up rarely, and I really want to attack this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument and I'm not certain it makes much sense. I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is absolutely impossible to detect and destroy literally every silo and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that towards the end of the 1960s, there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and eventual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself recognised the absolute ridiculousness of keeping a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. In total, you could deter the world with about 1000 warheads. At the height of the Cold War the US held like 12,000 warheads. It was excessive by any reasonable standard.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
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