Quote: (06-18-2014 04:27 PM)Que enspastic Wrote:
The US from 1991-2003 had unilateral power of a scale never before seen, the likes of which may never be seen again. It was greater than the British Empire at its zenith, Napoleonic France or the great Roman Empire in 117AD. It was a preponderance of power that faced no significant constraints by rivals whatsoever in the international sphere.
That is the mainstream narrative, and I think it's bullshit.
From 1991 to 2003, the U.S. had enough firepower to kill all living beings in the Middle East, human and otherwise. The U.S. still has that firepower, actually. But, then, so does Russia.
Let's see what the U.S. did in those 12 years. In 1993 it got humiliated in Somalia (everybody has watched
Black Hawk Down). In 1995 it finally ended the conflict in Bosnia, after 3 years of fighting that revealed how utterly impotent Europeans have become since 1945. In 1998 it bombed Iraq. In 1999 it bombed Serbia. On both occasions it had air superiority, of course.
Yet, the U.S. left Somalia without fixing the country. And the U.S. defeated Serbia not by bombing, but by engineering a color revolution (Georgia and Ukraine would follow in 2003 and 2004, respectively).
The British Empire would have conquered Serbia. The Mongols would have done it, too. The Ottomans actually did. The U.S. bombed from 30,000 feet above because Clinton did not want to see Americans dragged on the streets ever again. Mogadishu 1993 was enough.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a success. But pacifying the country took 8 years. The mongols pacified Baghdad a lot quicker, and left some 1 million skeletons behind.
The point I am trying to make is that the U.S. has enough firepower to split the Earth in two, but it's not really that powerful. Why? Because the U.S. cannot use most of its firepower, especially due to Russia and China. The Romans could use maximum brutality, because China was very far away from Rome at the time. The British could, because photographs and electronic communications had not been invented (or made ubiquitous) yet. The U.S. cannot because the American public does not understand what war is and, much more importantly, because the portable video camera is mightier than the sword.
The mere fact that people believe that you need "hearts & minds" to win wars says it all about our pathetic Zeitgeist. Did the Mongols win battles because they conquered hearts & minds?
Where the U.S. attains supremacy is in the diplomatic arena. The U.S. State Department has more power than the Pentagon, because the weapons of the former are more socially acceptable in the 21st century than the weapons of the latter.