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Israel Threatens 'Severe Consequences' for Nations Who Recognize Palestine
(www.commondreams.org)
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Militarily speaking the US is still a force to be reckoned with, they can bitch-slap any smaller non-nuclear country anywhere in the world on a moment's notice.
Soft power wise, though, the US is in freefall. And without that soft power the hard power can't be readily employed because blowback. I'd say in the future the US is going to do a lot more riding on the EU's soft power than they're currently comfortable admitting. That is, they're not going to invade random countries to bolster election results at home, they're going to knock on Brussel's door and ask "hey anything need peacekeeping right now that would be popular with the world?", then portray it as their own initiative.
Much as russia just spent their material legacy capacity in ukraine, the us spent their economic legacy capacity in Iraq/Afghanistan. We are driving around a fancy army we spent too much on, and the payments are hurting.
We still spend too much on it. We're following Germany's fallacy from World War 2 of trying to have all of our equipment be the bestest ever instead of good enough. Accounting for inflation last time I looked we're spending twice what we were when we invaded Iraq.
There's no "from WWII" about that we're still gold-plating equipment.
That's... That's my point. We won world war 2 with equipment that was great strategically and logistically, but was merely good enough tactically. We've switched positions. We need to realize that a million man military can't be gold plated.
I mean Germany is still gold-plating things. Also a million men when did you decide to cut the size of your forces in half.
I wasn't counting all of the reserves because we accept that they get old equipment.
I could go for a few decades of that. We need some humble pie.
Sure. But so are France, Russia, India, and Pakistan. A lot of the US influence comes from its extensive base network. And yet... America can't keep the Suez open in the face of some Yemeni rebels with access to a Radio Shack. They've bowed out in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're roughly holding the line in Ukraine by sheer weight of expenditure. Logistically, all very impressive. But its playing ten different chess games at once. Only impressive if you're not losing them.
I'm not even sure what the EU looks like in another thirty years. The UK is in steep decline, France is in full sell-out mode, Germany and Italy are making kissy-faces at their fascist wings. The Eastern European states never recovered from the break up of the USSR. Scandinavia is a gas station.
Europe's chips seem to be stacking up in the Middle East, under a handful of petty dictatorships and theocracies. But the real future power players are looking more and more like the member states of the South Pacific - India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia. Enormous populations, high tech industries, rapidly expanding navies, some of the last pristine wilderness anywhere on earth... These look like the countries which will be leading the world into back end of the 21st century.
We could stop the Yemenis. But it would take far more manpower and material than anyone in the US is willing to commit right now. We could go to the fortress village concept; and just generally go full scale COIN. It would stop the attacks. It would also cost a trillion dollars over a couple years and probably turn into a transitional government and peacekeeping mission.
The same way we stopped the Iraqis, the Afghanis, and the Vietnamese, sure.
Trying to teach another generation of 19 year olds broken Arabic before throwing them into a literal mine field?
We could try it. But I can't imagine it would boost enlistment rates
Enlistment? Shit at the rate we're getting into fights we're going to need conscription anyways. Let's just get it over with. /s
The only reason we have shortages is because they cannibalized an entire generation. Turns out when you keep fighting you go right through the pool of eligible volunteers.
And hey I didn't say we'd leave a stable state behind. Just that we'd stop the attacks.
I mean, it helps to understand the political situation in Yemen up to this point. Its already functionally been in and out of civil war for the last decade. The Houthis currently lobbing bombs into the Gulf of Adan are the same insurgents that Saudi-backed Yemen officials have been fighting with since the Obama Era.
Then you've got the other side of the Gulf, where pirate communities across Somalia were already a perpetual nuisance for major shipping. They've been raising the insurance rates on this boats well before the Houthis started playing Battleship with merchant vessels. This isn't a new problem for the US Navy. Its simply a numbers game. Too many ships to protect and too many potential pirating crews to combat.
The cost-efficient solution appears to be to send everyone around the Horn of Africa again, rather than trying your luck in the Canal.