Baresark said:
Piecewise said:
Yopaz said:
So your idea of the best course of action is for America to start yet another war, this time against a massive, heavily militarized, nuclear armed country which is globally known as one of the biggest production plants in the world? Do you not realize how much money it would cost our nation? Do you realize that china is one of our major importers of materials, meaning we probably couldn't manufacture the weapons we need, even if we actually still manufactured them (a lot are made in other countries), let alone pay for them? Do you really want to have the draft reinstated and then be forced to go die in a trench with a lacerated gi track just to fulfill your inane, juvenile power fantasies?
America is a country founded on ideals of freedom, fairness and honorable action; it is not a nation of petty thieves who borrow money and then threaten to stab the lender when they ask for it back. Are you really suggesting that it's in america's best interest to become the nation equivalent of a violent, dead beat dad?
I have to say this about this argument on all sides. No one here is speaking from a realistic standpoint. No war is not the way, you are right about that. The Soviet Union died because people called in their debts to them. It took 3 days. The US Government would say, "no, screw off", and it would just lead to economic ruin. Theuromancer is wrong, but you let him troll you. Yopaz isn't doing much better either. He came back with, "haha, well you owe people money". No American who has a clue is proud of this, but the leviathan is at the moment, out of control. But left and right are both destructive forces. The anointed and benighted seem to remain clueless to this. Also, with all due respect, America does have vast amounts of resources, but they have spent the last 60 or so years buying everyone else's, so we have plenty to work with, unfortunately.
Actually I'm not a troll, I'm simply explaining things. I understand people do not LIKE the points I'm making, because it's both contrary to unworkable liberal philosophy, and also represents an attitude that the rest of the world doesn't like because it represents a stonewall to their own dreams of power.
Before pretty much every major war many people have felt that the merchants, and economic flow would prevent it from happening, this is not, and has never been true. At the end of the day it's all about what you can actually do, not about paper trails and bureaucracy.
The general people do not like the idea of war, never have, never will. Nobody wants to die, either as a soldier or as the result of being slaughtered along with a national infrastructure (which is part of an actual war). War means death and hardship even when nessicary.
The simple reality is that the world is a powder keg and hinges on the balance of military power. He with the biggest guns is the one who trades freely, ironically the US is one of the only world powers to ever forget this and not exploit it's position leading to it's currently poor economic fortunes. Due to the US mentality it's possible that the US might allow itself to fall... but if that happens it will be because we let it happen.
As someone pointed out with nuclear power, people are tending to forget that the US has the best missle interceptoion tech in the world. This is why Russia threatened to nuke Poland over hosting a US missle interception base (which kind of hedged them in), and also why there were previous tensions due to the fact that we agreed with the fallen USSR not to develop such technology and Russia felt that such agreements were still valid. Right now if the US was to go to war with the entire world, last time I checked we had roughly a 10% chance of surviving the war and the resulting enviromental fallout as anything resembling a nation. That's a small chance, until you consider that the entire globe has a 0% chance. The 80s were decades ago, the situation has changed dramatically since movies like "Wargames", we've gotten to the point where we can shoot down missles with other missles, and put that interception abillity into boats, subs, planes, and bases scattered all over the globe.
Of course in reality the US wouldn't be fighting everyone alone, which changes the situation entirely. The lines for a war over economics are liable to be East Vs. West.
China is building up it's anti-satellite technologies as it's own method of stopping ICBM bombardment and such... it's pretty much the Chinese anti-missle defense system. China is doing this because if it can remove the threat of long-distance WMD it will for one make the debt owed to them far more serious, it will allow them to more safely continue as a robber economy, and most importantly it will allow them to invade other countries and forcibly colonize them for living space due to it's own overpopulation, they have been talking about this internally for a long time now and you can find stuff about it here and there even if the left wing which controls most of the media prefers to ignore it and not cover it due to it's "peace at any price" attitudes. Basically China's big problem has been that it can't get it's huge population into other countries due to a lack of transportation abillity, but along with it's anti-satellite techs it's building up a navy capable of doing this.
It's quite possible that we might very well see a Russia & China vs. The US & Allies a lot sooner than you might think, and it might very well start over economic power.
MAD (Mutally Assured Destruction) keeps global peace, however the major nations are liable to find the threat of ICBMs non-existant within 10 years or so, right now the US is the safest but as other nations develop this tech while we don't exploit ours things are going
to come down to conventional forces, with WMD needing to be delivered at a much closer range, and far less threat being posed by things like cruise missles. This means that the balance of power will favor those with huge populations that can be militarized. China represents roughly 1/3rd of the human population alone...
At any rate, as far as my comments about not being nationalistic enough (which someone mentioned)... umm, well, consider that you won't find many Americans on these forums who believe in pushing a pro-American agenda at all. The dominant attitude largely being to let the US cease to be the dominant world power one way or another. I also tend to notice most people jump on the idea of downsizing the military (being left wing), yet don't seem to spend much time thinking about cutting the money we spend on foreign aid and relief which we can no longer afford. Nor do they bother to think in terms of doing things like say raising the prices of American wheat through the roof to make a point since a lot of nations depend
on the US for their food. Last time that was suggested I believe the comment was "The US does not use food as a weapon".... basically we're too busy being nice guys to really act in our own self interest. We're simply seen as being self-interested because somehow we've managed to remain on top despite our self-destructive tendencies.
Generally speaking the nation is polarized about 50-50 between the major idealogies, and when you consider that only half of the population, if that, supports American primacy or understands the need to be more aggressive to maintain it, I think that's a problem.
A militarized space program guaranteeing a new way to ensure MAD and institute leverage while holding onto that fronteir, cutting foreign aid and propping up other nations while we're in debt, and raising the prices of what few things the US actually still producers like beef and wheat... again, while we're still in debt. It might not be nice, or "right" but it would work. Of course I don't expect left wingers to agree (there is a huge gap here, I've known for a long time I'm in a tiny minority on these forums), and of course people outside of the US aren't going to like that idea because well.... who would?
