CrossLOPER said:
I'm not denying, it's just that your entire thesis is centered around eternal worldwide US military superiority and your wish to keep others "under" the US. This is flawed thinking.
You mean the fact that I want to keep the US as the dominant world power, and have no problem with removing threats to the US and it's interests? Yes, that is true. Nothing at all flawed about that, as most people would feel the same way in our position. Those who don't think so, are lying to themselves.
At the end of the day, I do not want China in paticular to wind up becoming a more dominant global power, to overcome the US, or the western world in general. China of course wants to become as powerful as possible, and become the dominant world power, and pretty much control the world, towards that end it's involved in a massive military build
up, and could very well succeed if we decide to take an entirely reactive approach as opposed to shutting down their military build up before it reaches that level.
All of this is a very Pro-US/Pro-Western view, I don't deny that. I very specifically do not want someone else to become powerful or take over the world in order to maintain my own nation/culture. At the end of the day this is reality, typically there is no real good or evil when it comes to warfare, simply "us or them" and like pretty much everyone given that choice I am going to pick "us" and favor my own side every time.
On a more longer term level however, I am someone that believes that the world DOES need to be unified into a single goverment/superculture for the basic survival of humanity, it is the only way we are going to engage in serious space exploration, expansion, and colonization (which is whole differant discussion). Ultimatly I feel that most of this will happen slowly, over a period of time, due to the spread of ideas, eventually enough people will more or less get together and then wipe out the dissenters leading to the world humanity needs. To an extent we see it happening already. This isn't quite as dark as it sounds, but it does have it's bad elements.
Right now though the US needs to remain the dominant power and cultural force for this to really work, we need to pursue our own interests, and ultimatly do whatever is nessicary to see that our ideas reach and influance as many people as possible, to keep things as peacful as possible.
Now, before you misunderstand I believe in the final equasion every nation is pretty much going to dissolve, including the USA itself, with a world goverment being created.... speaking in the long term. It's simply American principles (which are a little differant from the actual practice of the USA) that it will operate under. Right now it's pretty much the best possible option for that to happen.
To put things into perspective, at least in principle the US's moral ideals and belief in basic human rights, freedom, and equality are what is going to allow the most people to live under the highest degree of freedom. A nation like China could also in theory unify the planet, but their central philsophy is one of their own superiority on a fundemental ethnic level, the nation and the ethnicities making it up largely being one and the same, the same can be said of Japan and a lot of other nations, many of which are quite powerful. Should China pretty much take over the world, their principles would ultimatly have all other ethnicities as second class citizens at the best, indeed a lot of it's rhetoric today is less about any kind of high humantarian principles, as much as it is about avenging itself on a
world that it feels has wronged it.
Is the US perfect? Not really, but viewed objectively it's the best shot humanity has as far as principles go. If it wasn't I'm more than critical enough to say so.
That said, the US does need to operate in a fashion to ensure it's own survival, so those principles can continue, and be spread. That means acting aggressively in it's own interests.
When I talk about going to war with China, understand I don't want to conquer China, rule it, or kill everyone there for the lulz. I simply believe in rendering it fundementally harmless to the rest of the world, and opening it up to outside ideas, and of course due to the damage it's robber economy has been doing, forcing it to abide by international trade laws and stop stealing ideas from the US and knocking them off. While millions of people might die if I did things my way, at the end of the day not much would change, it's just China would have a lot more in the way of free speech and internal human rights (well the survivors would), and it wouldn't have any kind of offensive military abillity capable of threatening anyone. It would pretty much continue to self govern while simply providing no threat to anyone.
In the case of China in paticular, understand that I don't think China represents any direct threat to the US in the short term. If they start invading countries they are more than likely to hit Europe first before trying to reach accross the entire bloody globe to try and fight the USA directly. If allowed to continue unchecked though they are going to build up the force to start invading, and if they manage to negate the threat of ICBM delivered WMD and the resulting MAD, the sheer monolithic size of their military would allow them to easily overrun a lot of nations and have a good chance of taking over the world, including the USA, which would probably be one of the last nations to fall due to simple geography if nothing else. It's also quite possible we'd stop them reactively, but by that point a lot more people would die.
Truthfully I think a surprising number of people are coming to the same basic opinion of China right now, but it's very slow, and hardly a "major" point of view which is why we've wound up with dweebs like Obama in the White House, letting China and Kim Jong Un bend him over the desk in the oval office and have their way with him. I mean seriously Kim Jong Un pretty much just spanked the US when you get down to it, we put down a line, Obama backed down, China got involved and talked some smack about a "Mad Dog" but didn't do anything. At the end of the day Kim Jong Un made us change our plans to accomodate him, threatened us with nuclear missles, and had absolutly nothing happen to him. For all the smack talk he's probably high fiving Chinese leadership behind everyone's back.... the big question right now is whether enough people are going to wake up in time for it to make a differance. As I also said, I think a lot of allies would join the US if we actually took direct action instead of waffling like we do, as it would help serve their best interests. After all the current status quo isn't terrible as the US has largely left most countries to their own devices (far more than we should), it's a lot better than China invading your country, killing all of it's people they can find, and then colonizing the land, which is pretty much their endgame for their military build up. Under their leadership anyone conquered who survives is likely to be a second or third class citizen for not being of the proper ethnicity.... people like to overlook exactly how racist the Chinese are... picking on rednecks in US trailer parks while not bothering to look at entire nations of xenocidal racists sharpening their swords for revenge over perceived sleights.
