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Go look at its on-paper force numbers in 2020 and compare it with other European numbers. Ukraine did not necessarily have the latest and greatest (although they had more of that after Russia seized Crimea) but they had an absolutely gigantic inherited Russian ground force. I think they probably could have beaten any other single European power in a conventional war.
But Russia is doing better in Ukraine than the US is doing in Afghanistan. And since Afghanistan is less powerful than Ukraine, so Russia is more powerful than the US.
Or perhaps the fact that Russia derped up in Ukraine (which, again, is not fighting Russia by itself, but rather with the direct support the EU and US!) has little bearing on whether or not Russia became more militarily capable since the end of the Cold War (they have) and does not predict whether or not they might increase in power in the future, NATO's Top Guy warned a couple of years ago. (This wouldn't be unusual, militaries typically become more powerful in wartime, not less.)
But they have not, so the US is not an unambiguous unipolar hegemon.
(Also, we might expect that a Chinese failure in Taiwan could be even more disastrous for the Chinese military than Putin's excursion into Ukraine, just because ships are a lot more expensive, time-consuming, and finicky to build than tanks and China will likely lose them at unsustainable rates if they lose a war with Taiwan. Whereas Russia can replace tanks pretty easily. This is part of why Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian ships and strategic aircraft is so noteworthy.)
You asked me where the US military went, I answered your question.
We certainly saved money in the short term. Now we're having to pay to build out a lot of that production capability again, and we're having a difficult time doing so. I think it's possible that small investments upstream might have paid off in the long run. Just as one example, the tooling to make the F-22 was destroyed after the production line ended. The manufacturers aren't just going to keep stuff sitting around (where they have to pay for it). Perhaps spending more on munitions and capability expansion and maintenance upstream would have led to long-term savings, I don't know. Given the good 20-year gap between now and the end of the Cold War, probably not. On the other hand, we may yet have reason to regret trying to save. Who can say?
I do know that the US military and defense industrial base shrunk after the end of the Cold War.
The American voter does not like it when price go up. They also do not like it when Made In China. (The American voter contains multitudes.) American voters like computers. Computers use chips. Many chips made in Taiwan. China take Taiwan, price go up AND made in China. Not good!
I agree with you that the average American voter doesn't really think about China very much, though, and often wants less overseas intervention. But overseas intervention doesn't mean being weak. Your average American probably thinks "talk softly and carry a big stick." And moreover, an actual full-blown war in the Pacific would lead to all sorts of supply chain insanity, and so even if Americans don't realize they care about that (and lots more of them do realize, after COVID), they wouldn't.
Well, do you want to discuss that? Like, did you actually disagree with my lil "here are the Top Five Bad Things that happened in the US after 1990 and they were mostly elite mismanagement" list? I learn all sorts of things from people disagreeing with me, don't hold back. I'd be delighted to learn the actual worst thing that happened was onion deregulation which was pushed by a coalition of left-right populists in 1998. But unless you give me reasons to believe something like that, I'm gonna keep pointing back to failing to prevent 9/11 despite that being entirely possible as "key mismanagement."
I've been pretty consistently saying "you are right to be wary of populists." I am not endorsing voting for Alex Jones just because they were turning the frogs gay, or something.
I would be very unsurprised to learn that lots of people (particularly in NYC) in the banking sector were OWS types. But you're arguing against a position I am not endorsing.
In this manner they are no different from the gatekeepers.
I mean, I see where you are coming from on Vance, but this model of the world seems to me to be values-inverted populism.
This is looney toons logic. The united states militarily completely dominated Afghanistan. The thing we failed at was nation building after easily winning the war. It'd be comparable if the Russian Tanks really did take over all of Ukraine in a couple weeks but there was still guerilla warfare ongoing.
Right so it's ambiguous.
Sorry, I wasn't asking where the military went, I was asking where the title went as in what it bought us. You said "But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.", I'm asking what it bought us in the 90s that we aren't getting today. What material impact does it have on Americans that would justify a feeling of decline? We're going back and forth on trying to measure whether our military might has declined and I'm just trying to determine why anyone should care that much. Care to the point I would like to point out, that we might as well just have one of our two political parties taken over by communists.
This is a relevant prediction of a future possible decline. But I'm to believe we've been declining, again to the point where one of our major political parties might as well be taken over by communists. Where is the decline caused by a relatively less dominant military than we enjoyed in the early 90s?
I just don't really think this is a useful lens to investigate populism. It's like asking who should be managing the houses finances, the dogs or the parents and then litigating all the poor financial decisions that the parents have made. We could discuss them, for instance I think your read on the sub prime crash as being downstream of banking deregulation is overly simplified. But the dog being in charge of the financials wasn't going to divert it, like what possible empowered populist pathway averts the sub prime crisis? You think populists would have been in favor of declining a lot more home loans?
Left populists would have declared being worried about hijackers flying a plane into the world trade centers as baseless islamophobia and anyways we'd deserve it if it happened because of our support for Israel. Right populists might have stopped it but because they'd not have allowed foreigners to come within a 100 miles of the mainland or maybe they'd declare the FAA a tyranny against the 2nd amendment and the terrorists would have been totally within their rights to own private jet fights without any need to hijack.
I kid, a bit, but I really don't think the existence of flawed governance justifies the doomer narrative or support populist alternatives. Was pre-90s governance really not error prone? I can think of quite a few boondoggles.
I mean what are you trying to do then?
I agree, we shouldn't use it. Instead, we should look at tangible things (like readiness and force numbers) and statements from subject matter experts, with the cautious understanding of the significant blind spots in both areas. Those tell us that Russia is stronger now than it was in the early 2000s.
Besides America ego, because a less powerful United States is subject to greater use of coercive force by its adversaries. This results in things like, for instance, supply chain shortages and increasing oil costs when American adversaries attempt to restrict travel in international waterways (although the American military was never omnipotent, of course.)
I would like to discuss it! I agree that it's simplified. I'd love to learn more about it.
Well, what I concretely said was
so presumably I don't think that, necessarily.
If we're not going to litigate all the poor decisions our leaders have made, we should scrap democracy and save ourselves the time and energy.
I agree. I think those were forgiven and/or covered up in part because the West was in an supposedly existential struggle with Communism. The sins of the governance of the 1990s was unique in that it squandered the peace dividend.
Well, I chimed in because I thought it was possible to discuss the errors of the gatekeepers without getting bogged down in partisan nonsense. And I think we've mostly avoided the partisan nonsense here, although we've also avoided discussing the errors of the gatekeepers.
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