Remove the US as a trading partner, and the rest of the world will cave, eventually. There is no way for any other power of note to invade the US. There isn’t the amphibious capability existing that can transport that many troops and supplies. Also, as RickJay has noted, we have a large, well-armed population that reacts quite violently when attacked. You think insurgency in Iraq is bad? Try landing Chinese troops in Southern California and see what happens.
Not to mention that there are certain sections of New York, Seven, that I wouldn’t advise them to try to invade.
Now my geography is really quite poor, I know this - but surely you could invade Alaska from Russia?
If the rest of the world ever did decide to go for it, and then for some similarly improbable reason everyone then agreed to follow gentlemen’s rules and not get the nukes out, wouldn’t it be a case of focus as much airpower as possible on the 50 mile gap of the Bering Straight to form some sort of corridor, and then start shipping troops across in as many cruise liners and other vessels as you can appropriate?
It might be bad for a few days, but how many of these gun owners have a stockpile of ammo?
Most people I know (the average person) who have guns only keep a small amount of ammo at home. They normally pick some up on the way to the range.
When I lived in the states and had guns, I had at best 150 rounds of 9mm, perhaps 20 shotgun slugs and a box or two of light target load shells, and 300 or so .22 rounds in my house. That wouldn’t last long.
Once an invation starts, getting rounds is going to be hard.
If we use Katrina as a backdrop for an attack, the looting would start as soon as people knew there were not enough police to stop them. Gun shops would be one of the first looted. If the attack moves from So-Cal up to No-Cal, they might be able to start bringing shipments in, but bullets would be low on the list. How long did it take to get water and basic supplies into Katrina’s ground zero?
So, where would average gun-owner Joe get bullets?
And once you reach Alaska, what then? Setting up a huge logistical trail across a bleak, frozen wasteland didn’t work so well for Napoleon and Hitler.
Actually, getting from Alaska to anywhere populated in North America is far worse logistically than even those doomed invasions of Russia. There’s only one road, the Alaska Highway which runs fifteen hundred miles through parts of northern British Columbia and the Yukon with virtually no population. Trying to move troops, vehicles, and supplies over that road in the face of opposition would be complete suicide without absolute 100% effective air superiority. Western Russia was populated, with roads and the like. Armies had options in terms of where they moved. Coming south from Alaska, it’s the Highway or pushing straight through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. As difficult as it would be, pushing up through Central America would be easier. Heck, even a direct transoceanic amphibious invasion might be easier.
Several problems with invading Alaska via Siberia:
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Siberia. No roads, no support facilities, no ports, no major airfields, winter.
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Alaska. No roads, no support facilities, no heavy traffic ports anywhere near the Bering Straights, heavily armed populace, winter.
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No access to the Lower 48. What’s the point of invading then?
Amateur. 
I’ve got better than 10, 000 rounds for the various weapons stashed, plus reloading supplies. If I need more, I just shift to the AKs and take ammo from the dead Chinese soldiers. If the invaders are using NATO equipment, then I’ll use the Mini-14. Ammo is not going to be a problem.
Look at what the Iraqis are doing with homemade bombs and old rifles. And that’s a population one fourteenth the size of the USA.
You don’t need a huge number of rounds to disrupt an occupying force. How many rounds sit in private hands in the USa right now, honestly? A billion? Ten billion? There’s more than enough bullets and bomb-making stuff to kill ten million soldiers.
We’re not talking about conventional warfare, we’re talking about insurgency warfare. Insurgents do not need the vast stockpiles that a regular, professional army possesses. Controlling the USA would be an impossible task; it has nothing to do with the population allegedly being “well armed” and “violent.” It’s that you have a population of 300 million people in a country with ten million square kilometres to occupy. Even if just one out of 300 people is actively involved in the resistance you’re facing an insurgency of a million people, spread out over a country as big as Europe, who’re impossible to distinguish from the other 299 million. It’s a logistical impossibility. As we’re seeing in Iraq, the force you’d need to defeat the country’s conventional forces is not nearly large enough to occupy and pacify the same country.
But thing about insurgencies is they don’t on the whole win wars against large occupying armies. They just inflict enough casualties that the occupying power ups-sticks and goes home.
But the unbeleivable number of casualties that would be have been inflicted during an invasion of the US would dwarf any casulties from an occupation. So that would never happen.
To get to the point of an invasion, whatever conflict caused it would have to have got to the “total war” stage. Where the only thing that matters is defeat or victory and any other costs are irrelevant.
Don’t fight the hypothetical. But if you really want me to come up with an uneducated, unlikely scenario, then I will. Dick Cheney gets elected POTUS in 2008. He expands the war to Iran and then to Saudi Arabia. The UN gets pissed, and he tells them to go piss up a rope. He expands the war to every ME country, including Israel. The rest of the world gets fed up with us fucking with the oil supply.
That’s the best that I can do. The thing about this scenario is that it leaves most of our military tied up in the Middle East. And that affects the hypothetical. And that’s why I don’t fight the hypothetical.
So, are we taking it as a given that the US immediately takes over Mexico and Canada?
And while we’re at it, is most of the US military in the ME, or are they all back at home in this scenario? We need to set some ground rules.
For the sake of argument let us say that the military is currently deployed as is.
You’ve obviously never seen Red Dawn.
With all due respect, I think you’re misguided if you think that anyone that couldn’t be bothered to vote wouldn’t pick up a shotgun in the event of an invasion. About 1.5 centuries ago, a significant percentage of our population picked up arms to fight in a war for a cause that probably didn’t directly affect 1% of them. Most did it because they felt that they were being invaded… by their own countrymen. Just factor out people that avoided war because they didn’t want to shoot their own cousin/brother…
Granted, that was a long time ago, but the culture in the south hasn’t changed that much. Invading Georgia would make invading Iraq look like a cakewalk. Even if a few battallions made it onshore in a Normandy-type invasion, none would make it to the Alabama line. Every home would be a battlefield.
It would be messy.
That wasn’t a documentary, you know.
It was, however, a rather entertaining musical!
-Joe, 
If “The Rest Of the World XI” army was able to defeat the US airforce, and the US Navy, and then pull of a Normandy style beach head (remember Normandy was against an army that had been all but defeated on the eastern front and had lost all sign of air and naval superiority), then a bunch of “hicks with guns” (no offense to population of Georgia) would not bother them.
Again, modern conventional armies are not defeated by insurgencies, they are defeated by other conventional armies.
And if got to that point its not obvious how many “hicks with guns” there would be left. Presumably by that point all able bodied men (and prossible women ?) would have been drafted into the army, the situation would be analagous to the Germany at the end of WW2.
then we are pretty much doomed. Anyone care to make an estimate of how long would it take to pull out of Iraq to come and defend the mother land?
But the kids in Red Dawn (which was a movie) where in shape.
They were not the overweight and out of shape people you’ll find in the states.
60% of your average people in the States wouldn’t be able to pull off the athletic feats shown in the movie - the whole shooting runs and RUNNING away.
You obviously spend too much time watching (childish) movies. Accordingly, invading Georgia would be a cakewalk since we’d have both The Terminator and James Bond on our side.
Exactly. If we assume that the US was a ruthless as say Rome was in dealing with everybody else, then I think the US would have an excellent chance of winning in a conventional war vs the rest of the world.
Somebody asks what the US would gain by killing everyone in Mexico. The answer is one less enemy to fight. The hypothetical is that they are all attacking us, right?
Also, you wouldn’t need to kill everyone in the world to win. You send an army through mexico bombing and killing the entire population. You stop at the canal, as suggested earlier. You don’t try to hold the actual ground. Your goal is to bomb every city out of existence and the civilian population along with it. The millions of refugees left over would mostly starve in time anyway.
Once you’ve done this, you take Canada over without firing a shot. After witnessing this, the militaryless Canadians would be forced to become our protectorate. Again, we don’t need to invade and hold the territory. We simply don’t let them have an army and really brutally suppress any uprisings or terrorist acts from them.
As long as we have North America under control, we’d be OK. The rest of the world could never invade and our navy and air forces could destroy any attempts to build something to challenge us with.
“Don’t fight the scenario”? What does that mean?
The reason I made a big stink about the scenario is that the scenario is absolutely critical to guessing which side might win a war.
Who would win in a war between the United States and Iraq? Or who would win in a war between the United States and North Vietnam?
Obviously the United States can win a war against Iraq, we’ve easily “won” two wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Except, why exactly were we fighting? Are we going to “win” in the current fighting? What would “winning” mean? If we pull our troops home, does that mean that Iraq won a war against the United States?
No war is ever fought by simply lining one country’s military on one side of the battlefield, then lining the other country’s military on the other side of the battlefield and yelling “GO!”, and the country that still has soldiers left alive at the end is the winner.
Wars are fought for reasons. Rarely, as in WWII, wars are total wars for complete destruction of the enemy. Except even in WWII the goal wasn’t just to kill every German, the goal was to expel the Germans from allied countries and destroy the Nazi regime. Killing German soldiers, bombing German civilians, and blowing up German factories was just a means to an end, a German surrender. But what good would that surrender do if every other German civilian is planting improvised roadside bombs? Can we just start shooting German civilians and turn Germany into a wasteland? Or what, exactly? Do we now need to create a friendly german state to help us against our former allies, the USSR?
And so, “every country in the world against the US” doesn’t make sense unless we imagine mind-control parasites. Or we make up some scenario about how every country feels it has to attack the US. But that scenario has to include the war aims of “the world” and the US. Why are nuclear weapons off the table? Well, in the real world nuclear weapons are off the table because the civilian populations of the nuclear armed states would be against the use of nuclear weapons. But in a war of national survival would that still be the case?
Is the US merely trying to avoid being invaded? Are our overseas forces still deployed overseas or have they come home? Does the war start tomorrow (requiring mind control slugs)? Is there a buildup to the war? If the US turns fascist in your scenario, how secure is the fascist junta? Do they have mind control slugs to turn every American into fanatic supporters of the fascist regime? Or is America going through a civil war? Are the UN forces fascist? If they get a beachhead and occupy Florida are they OK with simply shooting every human being they see, or do make any attempt to minimize “civilian” casualties? Are they trying to keep factories and cities intact (maybe the hope to set up a postwar puppet state), or would total destruction suit them just as well? If so, why are they so nuke-shy? How do the home populations of the UN forces feel about the war? And so on.
Even in pre-WWII Germany the german population didn’t support total war, they didn’t want war against the other major powers (UK, France, USSR). Even an absolute dictator like Hitler had to consider what was politically palatable to the German population, he didn’t intend to spark a general war, he stumbled into it. And even in WWII the war aims and the political will of the various countries was key. It’s all very well to fight for national survival, but at some point German units started driving west so they could surrender to the Americans and British rather than the Soviets.
The whole point is that “line up country A and country B and see who wins” just doesn’t make any sense, even as a thought experiment. That wasn’t what happened even in WWII.