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It really does feel like the late-game stages of a Civ IV game where your economic and tech tree advantages have snowballed, so you can roll a doomstack of advanced military units up to any city on the map you want and take it out in a single turn.
And maybe, similar to Civ, the only thing that might stop such a power is if the other players can all agree on cooperation against that player and launch coordinated efforts to rein them in before they achieve space victory.
Which is functionally impossible in the real world.
And yes, I think Cuba goes splat later this year.
More to the point, it really makes you think that the whole problem of the last twenty years was leaders who were aware of U.S. dominance but had other goals in mind, probably including enrichment of cronies, that depended on the U.S. sandbagging hard. And arguably this is just the U.S. being let off the leash. We haven't even removed the leg weights yet.
"Soft Power" has an abysmal record, methinks. I do think Trump prefers the carrot to the stick, but the stick gets results.
It's interesting. I don't have the exact tweets to hand but I've seen a fair few that go along the lines of "If it's this easy, what have we been doing the last several decades"?
I'm willing to believe that the technological gap wasn't as notable prior to 2005.
But then I read accounts of Operation Desert Storm absolutely stomping the Iraqis in Kuwait, and then the invasion of Iraq proper ALSO stomping their conventional military.
And my conclusion is that the U.S. has, since the Cold War, always had the logistical capacity to bring overwhelming force to bear on any country with an ocean view. And air supremacy to ensure we can get in and out quickly and with minimal casualties, absolutely NO need to have permanent presence.
The decision to engage in protracted occupation and nation-building, therefore, was absolutely an intentional one and the ill-defined goals of such an endeavor, as opposed to "kill off opposing leadership until somebody accepts surrender", were tailor made for creating an expensive quagmire.
I'm extremely curious to see what types of movies get made about these campaigns. There's really no way to couch them than utterly triumphant for the U.S.
I think I can go on record to say that I bet the U.S. has the capability to kill Vladmir Putin at almost any time if they committed the same degree of planning to it, but the nuclear deterrent is the only thing that would ALWAYS shift the risk calculus against such a move.
China remains a question... but I suspect the apparent failure of the Chinese-made anti-air/anti-stealth radars is a wake up call for THEM too.
Point being, the U.S. military is unquestionably the apex predator of the planet, but much of its doctrine for a long time required that this never be made explicit.
No more.
Yeah, Russia also has the ability to off Donald Trump from space too, what of it? Nobody survives in either direction.
I simply don't believe that.
I also believe that almost every other country aside from the U.S. has been overstating their capabilities because culturally that's how you scare enemies.
Whereas the U.S. has been understating its capabilities because that's how you take enemies by surprise.
The surprise being that the U.S. is even further ahead of everyone else than anyone, even the U.S. realized.
I'm not sure I understand what this means. Do you think that the US military has magic AD protecting Trump that it has never deployed anywhere else in the world? If it's something more reasonable like "in a realistic scenario, Trump would hide in a bunker before anyone gets a hit on him", why not just say that? Sure, the Ayatollah allegedly refused instructions to go hide in a bunker bunker, but this is not such a prestigious military technology otherwise inaccessible to your adversaries.
If it's something like "the US can bomb them more", then sure, that's why it's a good idea to have nukes.
... I'm not counting something like this out entirely.
But I don't think any other country has a capability that they could deploy with any confidence that it would ensure Trump's demise, as long as he is serving in the Office of POTUS.
That's just magical thinking. A hypersonic missile could off him easily and the US does not have capabilities of countering them.
Hypersonic missile launched from where?
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