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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?
The kidnapping of Maduro and the murder of the Ayatollah went fine for the US, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The longest US op in recent memory was Afghanistan. In the end, it was a failure of comical proportions, with the Afghan army -- painstakingly trained and equipped by the US taxpayer over two decades -- surrendering to the Taliban the moment you were out of the picture.
So as much fun as the mental image of Trump gracefully playing with the globe might be for some, let's wait a bit before we declare the New American Century 2: This time We Mean It.
I am also rather bearish on nuke interception. Israel's Iron Dome works reasonably well (though they did require the cooperation of a lot of neighbors to get through the Iranian barrage unscathed). But Israel is a tiny country which spends a lot of its GDP (and some of America's GDP) on defense. The US is significantly larger, with lots of big cities on the coasts. I am frankly doubtful that you have the tech or production advantage over China to protect LA from sub-launched nukes.
And the real power of the US lies in its coalition. For countries such as Australia, Japan, Germany etc, being allied to a mostly peaceful US has been a great deal. But as some Gulf states recently found out, it also paints a bit of a target on your back for anyone who wants to strike back at the US but can't.
So the outcome of a nuclear war with China after you spend 5% of your GDP on missile defense might be that you manage to H-bomb all of China's big cities, and they only manage to nuke LA from subs and NYC by smuggling in a nuke in a container ship. So instead, China decides to nuke Japan, South Korea, Australia plus any other countries in the Pacific which host US military. Which then motivates your remaining allies in Europe to swiftly kick you out before you get them nuked when you repeat that game with Russia.
At the end of the day, you might have thrown China back a decade (because for a regime change, you would need an invasion, and I simply do not see that happening) while only having lost your empire and tanked the global economy. Do you think Trump would win the mid-terms under these circumstances?
Edit: And as far as LEO is concerned, it should be noted that it does not take a lot to make orbits unusable to anyone. A single 5mm bearing ball hitting your satellite at some km/s relative velocity is likely to turn it into space junk. Even if your price to LEO is 100x that of SpaceX, that would not stop you from getting rid of their sats, which will be the obvious strategy once they weaponize their satellites.
Do remember that a significant chunk of the Democratic base is located in LA and NYC, and thus would not be voting in this scenario. It is not immediately clear that the swing would outweigh that.
(Yes, the incentives on Trump may in fact be perverse!)
Hold on, are we considering WW3, a full nuclear exchange, global economic collapse and megadeaths on US home soil in relation to the mid-terms? Huh?
I know it's him that brought it up... but the midterms really don't matter. Elections do not matter at all in comparison, you could have a military coup and it would barely make the top 10 most important details about this situation.
I mean, I Noticed a long time ago that nuclear war means victory for the Red Tribe in the culture war (at least in the USA, and possibly in other Western nations hit). I happen to think that tearing the Blue Tribe from power isn't actually worth that, but I suspect there are some among the Trumpists sufficiently mindkilled to disagree - at the very least, my noting this factual point has been mistaken for such Posadism on three separate occasions.
(I will cop to being more of a China hawk than I might otherwise be due to the AI issue; not due to the culture war, though.)
I would predict that in this specific scenario the mid-terms would at least still probably happen, although you are correct that it's a footnote (the broader CW point less of one, but still relatively minor).
Do not be so sure.
After The End, what would "red and blue" mean anymore, what recognizable "red culture" would still exist in Fallout universe?
Big cars, big houses and giga consumption lifestyle would be out for the foreseable future, and so will be sport obssession and religion promising prosperity and worldly success.
The Fallout universe makes little sense. I expect, though, if it has an equivalent of Blue Tribe it's based in the NCR capital. The Mojave (outside the Strip proper) is obviously Red, as is the Capitol Wasteland.
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We'll always have Liberty Prime.
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So would be humanitarianism, public welfare, gender-anything, social justice, climate and pretty much every last thing valued by leftists. The American blue tribe won't have much to do anymore.
In other words, the outcome of nuclear war is everyone loses.
Well, @Eetan was specifically referring to a "Fallout" scenario, in which civilization-as-we-know-it is thoroughly scrubbed.
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