Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Appealing to some theoretical maximum effort is irrelevant - if you are not willing to endure the pain and costs necessary to achieve victory, then you are not able to achieve victory.
This has been a perennial failure of the US' post-CW cabinet wars, where the US government has repeatedly half-assed military endeavors out of a combination of blithe faith in its conventional supremacy to quickly secure victory and an unwillingness/inability to convince the general public to support military action on a scale necessary to succeed. The current war with Iran is perhaps the apotheosis of this: the administration clearly expected the Iranian government to be overawed (or perhaps simply collapse) in the face of sheer US strike dominance, and didn't give any question to thoughts like "what if this country of 90m people, led by religious fanatics, doesn't immediately surrender" and "is there some asymmetry of effort that might partially offset the massive disparity in capabilities"? Even in operations like Iraq and Afghanistan, we were still half-assing it, because while we put in more effort in absolute terms, we still acted like these were fundamentally sideshows, not major national endeavors requiring sacrifice and commitment from the citizenry.
The trouble is that this kind of failure will keep happening because it never really blows back hard on the US. The US can just walk away from the fallout and a certain kind of tough guy can tell themselves "we totally could have fucked them up if we wanted, plus look at our KDR." Not helped by the fact that there is a cult of brutality that holds the core problem with US military operations is that we aren't reckless and bloodthirsty enough.
I think the most interesting questions are downstream of this: American adversaries don't seem to think we can be realistically defeated by force of arms, so what do they do in response?
I think this relates to other projects we talk about here like the role of foreign botnets in agenda setting in U.S. politics. It isn't really clear to me what extent that's a paranoid conspiracy theory vs. an actual thing in truth (it seems likely to be latter but I would like to know more).
You are right that the difference is practically immense between ability and will but it has felt to me in the last few months most people have forgotten those are two different things, even if the will is going to be more practically predictive.
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