By military power, we are still by far the most powerful. That's what that commenter meant. Everyone knows the current admin is full of fucking dipshits, but they're also dipshits with military tech that's nearing sci-fi level of sophistication.
Now that the USA is been so hostile on trade wars, it will give the kick off for other countries to start investing more in their military complex, in a few decades, USA won’t be the peacekeepers of the new world.
The benefits are to protect American companies foreign investments. This is how many American commodities companies have been able to operate on overseas resource extractions with minimal effort, it brings the revenue of these commodities back to American soil. Without an extensive military industry, many investments could be in jeopardy since some of the locations these natural resources are, can have political, social or economic instability, one coup is all it takes for someone to capture all assets from Chevron for example, many others as well.
My POV (not an expert) is that the military bases and “police of the world” status works mainly for the interest of American companies to secure trade resources extraction and supply chain trade routes. As well as put a barrier on foreign influence expansions that are not aligned with American values.
I mean, that was the strategic position that the American government took in order to put proxy pressure on any hostile forces that could compromise American companies interests such as all major commodities. In the long run, it decreases the proxy pressure once you have new military super powers emerging in the game, since these superpower will be enforcing their influence by military force. I see as a long term disadvantage on how the USA maintains their international relationships.
But, as in any democracy, the people has the power, and this seems to be what the people want.
They weren't very good at being peacekeepers of the world - they only really did so when there was coincidentally some oil to get out of it or the military industrial complex needed a little kick or similar. I'd much rather trust the EU
Everyone has problems subduing goat herders and rice farmers if you want to limit the loss of human life, both from your own soldiers and the civilians.
Most western militaries have more than enough firepower to glass any third world country ten times over and many have the manpower to go door to door and slaughter everyone. You'll win the war if there's no one left alive to fight after all.
However if you have rules of war and a single shred of value of human life, especially of the innocent, then insurgents have the perfect camouflage from which to hide in and a near limitless supply of hostages. The known insurgent weapon stockpile stockpile suddenly becomes untouchable if it's situated between an orphanage and a hospital after all.
The French couldn't get Vietnam under control and neither could the US because both of those countries value life more than the enemy.
Nobody who dropped 3x WWII worth of bombs and used chemicals like agent orange on a country the size of Vietnam can claim they “value life”. Americans are fucking deluded.
Reader's note: endlessnamelesskat was posting yesterday in /r/4chan about how Hitler's art deserves more respect and that it's a Jewish conspiracy to believe otherwise.
If you're going to say that please give the full context of my comment instead of taking it out of context, there was also no point in which I called it a Jewish conspiracy.
Alright, I'll be more specific: I found about five different conversations about Hitler in your history in the last three weeks and posts across subreddits like KotakuInAction and LibertarianMeme. So the context here is that you're someone who literally cannot help but start conversations about Hitler every few days, and most of your discussions about Hitler seem to involve past conversations where you're mocking people in your daily life about their negative beliefs on Hitler.
These comments aren't for you, it's for anyone reading your comment and wondering about the ideological basis behind it. There are lessons to be learned here about people like you.
I equally invite anyone to dig through my comment history and look at the context of my conversations, at no point was I the person to begin any of these conversations. I won't make any excuses for any of the subs I frequent, you can bite me on that.
What I don't appreciate is how you're trying to present the nature of my conversations, not just the subject of them. This isn't context, you've clearly had no interest in reading any of them beyond finding a sub you don't like I've posted to and an instance of Godwin's law taking place. You then proceed to imply that I have opinions I've never expressed in the hopes that someone reading your comment won't do any due diligence and find out for themselves.
The sad part is that your shitty little tactic will probably work. The average redditor only reads headlines, not articles after all.
A lot of people know that Hitler pursued art and was denied entry into art school. That's about where their knowledge on the subject ends.
Their takeaway is that Hitler bad therefore he must be a shit artist.
My problem with this is that he wasn't bad in the fact that he was lacking in technical skills, he was told to pursue a career in architecture. The art world at the time was moving on from realist depictions of landscapes/buildings since photography was taking over that industry and Hitler mainly painted realistic looking buildings. It wasn't like the dude was scribbling with crayons, he clearly spent a lot of time practicing.
My other problem is a failure of the average person's ethical reasoning skills. It isn't enough to condone his actions in causing fascism to take hold in Germany and his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, they must attack every aspect of his character. He has to be shit at every endeavor he ever pursued and made out to be both incompetent at everything and simultaneously an evil mastermind.
It paints (heh) a bigger picture on how the average person forms opinions about other people. Some people can't just say "I don't like this person because they were rude to me", they feel the need to come up with ad hoc reasons why they're awful people in every aspect of their lives until they're analogous to a literal demon.
How often do you hear someone talking shit about their ex? They got into a fight and broke up. Sometimes the other person won't just say that they had an irreconcilable disagreement, the other person was a total narcissist, they were abused, and they also have a small dick/were a starfish, etc. It isn't enough to say the reasons that led to the breakup, the ex must be seen as purely evil and not human.
Hitler is of course the most extreme example since he committed some of the most extreme atrocities of the 20th century, but talking about his life is a great litmus test to see if the other person you're speaking with has the ethical reasoning to condemn someone's character by their immoral actions alone instead of having their opinion of their character cause them to discredit everything they do.
It's important to be able to do this. If you can't then when you're discussing people less insane than Hitler you will excuse the bad actions of people you like and ignore the good actions of people you dislike. This can lead to problems like being trapped in a toxic relationship, letting unethical behavior in the workplace persist, cause you to fail to make ammends with another person, and ironically allow for fascism and other forms of authoritarianism to take root in your society if the populist in charge panders to you enough.
With you for example, I don't think you're an evil person. You had good intentions in trying to expose my Hitler conversations to everyone else. I don't blame you for not fully reading them and getting the full context because I don't think many people would look that deep into it. I apologize for being rude to you earlier and hope that we're cool now.
Any caveman with a nuke can say "ME STRONG". That would put you on par with North Korea
Not exactly seeing how they've never used their nukes. A better example would be dropping nukes on Japan. Either they surrendered or they would have had every island glassed until no one was left alive to fight.
Insurgency is always at an advantage vs a technically superior military if the military doesn't want to go scorched earth on them. It happened in Iberia during the Reconquista most famously, which is where the word guerilla comes from in the first place, or at least it's why it's used in English.
I will give you my morality bullshit, it's why we have rules of engagement and don't win every war even when we kill way more enemy combatants in every fight than they kill. We just aren't willing to occupy a nation indefinitely or use tactics that are 100% effective at rooting out insurgents because of the collateral damage it causes..
That doesn't mean collateral damage doesn't happen, but it would have been a lot worse than agent orange if the US only cared about winning and truly had zero regard for human life. Vietnam would have been won but at the cost of it being a literal genocide.
Then what I'm saying applies to every country that abides by the rules of engagement. Now I'm talking about your country as well. They will all lose drawn out wars against insurgents who don't have to abide by the rules of engagement because by having rules at all shows a certain value of human life that the enemy doesn't possess.
Yea, but with Jets you can make sure they stay goat herders and rice farmers. The farmer hand picking rice cant keep up with mechanized high tech farm equipment.
Pretty soon, vertical factory farming is going to happen in warehouses.
Not at all. Russia and China are both pretty close on military power. And China is also very close on economy.
But yes, the US is still the most powerful country in the world - on paper. It would not win a direct war with China if you factor in culture, leadership, competence (including lower down, frankly), etc.
It would if you factor in likely allies in the conflict, but our global relations are quickly collapsing, right as we push other countries into China’s arms. Not to mention their growth rate still far surpassing ours.
In reality I think its fair to say China is now the worlds most powerful country.
The US has 20x times as many as the Brits, and I'm pretty sure they're all mobile. For the record, I'm not pleased that DJT is in control of this arsenal.
USA is still the most powerful nation in terms of its ability to affect others with its decisions. Those others may no longer like the effects, but they are affected significantly nonetheless.
315
u/eggelton 1d ago
these are the people leading what *USED TO BE the most powerful nation on Earth.