Posted on 04/02/2024 7:32:34 AM PDT by daniel1212
America’s antagonists may not be formally allied, but they are aligned in a critical area — the Eurasian heartland — and in critical ways. An overstretched US cannot react to one problem without considering the impact on its ability to deal with others. The demands on American statecraft will be severe, as Washington confronts an array of problems it can’t easily walk away from and certainly can’t afford to see escalate all at once.
In some ways, America’s predicament resembles the period before World War II. Leave aside that no US rival has committed aggression or atrocity on the scale of the Axis powers — although China’s repression of the Uyghurs and Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine are haunting echoes of that past. Leave aside, also, that Putin’s brutal bumbling in Ukraine presently looks more like an imitation of Benito Mussolini than of Adolf Hitler. The basic patterns of geopolitics look painfully familiar.
Then as now, the international system was being battered from many directions. Japan was seeking dominance in the Far East. Hitler’s Germany was bidding for primacy in Europe and beyond. Mussolini’s Italy was making a bloody push for empire in the Mediterranean and Africa. The Soviet Union would ultimately end up fighting Hitler — but only after helping him carve up Eastern Europe.
There was little intimacy among these revisionist states. The differing racist ideologies that motivated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible. Although Berlin, Rome and Tokyo did sign their Tripartite Pact in 1940, omnidirectional mistrust ensured that this was little more than a loose agreement to blow up the existing order and build separate empires amid the rubble.
Yet if the Axis powers made cynical partners, there was a deep, destructive synergy among the programs of radical expansion they pursued.
The dictators supported each other at critical moments: Mussolini’s backing aided Hitler’s bloodless conquest of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Advances by one fascist power emboldened the others: Germany’s romp through Western Europe in 1940 helped persuade Japan to push into Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the expense of a defeated France, a desperate Britain and a distracted America.
Then as now, a democratic great-power facing trouble everywhere struggled to act decisively anywhere. During the late 1930s, Britain hesitated to draw a hard line against Germany while facing simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan. The US had similar problems amid worsening crises in Europe and Asia. “I simply have not got enough Navy to go round,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941.
Even wartime mobilization didn’t fully solve this problem. From beginning to end, a fight against multiple antagonists forced the Allies to make agonizing trade-offs. It didn’t take a fully integrated alliance of totalitarian adversaries to throw the democracies off balance — and create the gravest, most generalized crisis of global security the world has seen.
In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to foresee how quickly regional crises could cause a global meltdown. Similarly, most post-Cold War policymakers never thought America’s unipolar moment would end like this. It’s not news that autocratic powers have been building up their militaries and coercing their neighbors. What is new is that all these challenges are threatening to turn acute.
America is 11 times bankrupt and can’t take any of them on.
America is invaded & conquered, with the support of the GOP grifters.
US, under Biden couldn’t take on Haiti.
At least one poster here thinks we can do it easily, in fact throw in North Korea which would be in that mix anyway.
Somebody posted this yesterday.
“”””Laughable. What country do you see as a military threat to the USA? We are more powerful that the next 7 combined.””””
The simple answer is Yes !
We simply drop a nuke on Iran, and say Who wants next ?
I thought the new ad slogan was “we never leave our buddies’ behind”.
And yet, by promoting Wokeism it continuing in a war against God, and deterring its most able recruitment base from enlisting. Suicidal.
If Haiti attacked Israel maybe they would get more help.
That is absurd if not laughable. The US could not prevail today in a protracted war with just China (and Russia and Muslims could chime in), which is the only nation which comes close to the industrial might the US had for WW2, which it could not fight today even due to the lack of character of recruits.
No, even with China, Russia and Persia having militaries that suck.
Six years ago no problem.
5.56mm
We have no manufacturing capacity, so no.
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