If it really wanted to could the US take over the world?

Great Debates
1

Assuming the following counter factual conditions,

  1. The US government decides it really wants to take over the world.
  2. This change in US policy is instantaneous and is not visible to the world at large until concrete steps are taken in that direction. So it may take some time for the rest of the world to accept such a radical shift in US foreign policy.
  3. The US doesn’t care about ethics or civilian causalities. Nuking a city, or setting up secret police and death squads against dissidents is hunky dory.
  4. The Military and the vast majority US population generally supports this idea with great patriotic fervor.
  5. Large domestic casualties are also acceptable.

By taking over the world I mean that in all countries the US government is the primary authority. Smallish insurgencies (ala the Taliban in Afghanistan) cropping up now and then are OK. The US wants to control the world not destroy it, so the US winning the mineshaft gap doesn’t count.

I’m imagining as a first salvo the US sneaks nuclear weapons into a number of nations capitals. Then announces that they have discovered a Terrorist nuke in Washington DC and managed to disarm it. 2 hours later the other nuclear weapons are detonated.

The US blames the attack on North Korea or some other plausible scape goat, while preparing for a second wave of attacks to take advantage of the confusion. This second wave may involve a larger number of covertly placed Nukes, or other attacks.

It may be that MAD is so entrenched that it isn’t possible to take over the world without destroying it, but I wanted to see if any of the dopers could see a way of utilizing surprise to get it done.

2

The US is not big enough.

It’s marginally possible that through surprise nuclear attack and brute force the US could force governments to submit, however keeping large hostile populations in line for very long would be impossible, even if the US employed every single one of its citizens man, woman, and child to police them.

If it were going to happen, it would be a very slow process, not a quick, decisive one. We would have to slowly convince first our immediate neighboring countries, i.e. Canada and Mexico, to join us, whether through goodwill, some kind of natural disaster that would require them joining us to ensure their very survival, or discreet subversion and manipulation to cause them to “voluntarily” submit to annexation. Then we’d have to repeat the process with our new neighbors to the south, all the way through the Caribbean and South America, and outward from there. This would probably take hundreds of years just to take all of the Americas.

3

This is a major hurdle. Consider the world’s Ballistic missile submarine fleets. They are undetectable and can operate autonomously for long periods. Sooner or later, they will devastate the U.S. with nuclear missiles to prevent the conquest plan from going any further.

Also, I’m fairly certain that the source of nuclear material can be identified after a detenation. It’s called nuclear forensics. This means that the North Korea ruse wouldn’t hold up for long.

4

It’s already happened.

It would have been self-defeating for the US to destroy its markets and trading partners, in fact it was very cost-effective for us to rebuild them after WW2. The way we took over the world was via petrodollar commerce. Indirect hegemony using proxies and local puppets was far better business, and it allowed us to maintain the veneer that we were different from prior historical examples. We are Conquest 3.0 – it’s our world, everybody else is just (often literally) paying rent.

C 1.0: direct occupation and genocide or relocation of subject peoples (Assyria, Rome)
C 2.0: colonalism and mercantilist exploitation (France, Britain)
C 3.0: commercial and ideological dominance via global financial institutions (USA)

Now that we run the show we recognize very clearly that we need an “Outside” to keep the empire humming.

BTW, recognizing it’s an empire doesn’t necessarily mean opposing it. Some of us do, but most of us probably weigh the cost-benefit and think Johan Six Pack is better off under this model than any precursor empire. Better dentistry, anyway.

5

I don’t think this would be feasible, no. The US already has a large influence on a lot of countries, but it’s a pretty tenuous influence, and as can be seen those countries can and will go their own way if they feel it’s in their best interest. Certainly the US could destroy the world (in various ways), but control it? No, not in any way I can think of, even given your assumptions earlier.

Yeah, that would work initially, though unless we managed to acquire nukes from other countries to do this sort of false flag operation then it would be apparent that we did it when the dust settled.

It would all hinge on how much you were willing to destroy I suppose. If you someone managed to catch most of the worlds governments in the initial attacks, and you moved in quickly enough to kill or capture their means of retaliation before the dust settled (especially their nuke capabilities), and then you told the world that you had placed nukes in all their major cities, and unless they join the US (or whatever the goal here is) you will start setting them off then…well, you might be able to get away with it for a time. But what would you actually achieve? You’d gut the economies of those nations, it would cost you more in rebuilding cost, and you’d spark a retaliation of hate that would make the current worlds views on the US look like love and joy. In the end, you’d be constantly putting out hot spots with the military and/or periodically nuking cities and draining more and more resources and sparking more hate and discontent.

I guess the answer is, you COULD do what you are talking about, but it doesn’t seem to me that the gain would be worth it, even if all your assumptions would be valid.

6

This.

7

Being very generous and assuming the rest of the world falls for it (which is wildly improbable - North Korea doesn’t make a remotely plausible scapegoat), what has this accomplished in terms of the US taking over the world? If Paris, London, Moscow, etc suddenly disappear in mushroom clouds it does nothing to further the US taking control of other countries. As soon as the US starts sending ground troops to take over nuclear armed nations who’s capitals have so recently met with such unpleasant fates, the cat is out of the bag and ‘victory’ is only going to be measured by winning the mineshaft gap.

The whole point of MAD is to make a surprise attack unfeasible to the point of suicidal, it’s the assured in Mutual Assured Destruction. The size of the arsenals are large enough that even the most wildly optimistic outcome of a surprise first strike is more than enough weapons either survive or are launched in time to completely destroy the attacking nation as a functioning society. See also the etymology of the word overkill.

8

Look, we ARE the strongest nation in the world militarily… but that means far less than you’d think.

Do we have the money or manpower to invade and conquer Canada or Mexico? No! We don’t. If we can’t conquer our closest neighbors (who have far smaller armies than we do, have far fewer people than we do, and have largely undefended borders), how could we take over the entire WORLD???

If Obama were as ruthless and amoral as you propose, perhaps he could do what the Kim regimes in North Korea have done, and threaten the world with nuclear strikes until we got our way. Certainly, we could kill most of the world’s population with nukes.

But no, there’s absolutely no way we could conquer the world, even if we devoted ALL our military resources to that task.

9

“Brain: Are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky: Whoof, oh, I’d have to say the odds of that are terribly slim, Brain.”

Kepler1571, there is an element of agreement on the “it already happened” angle, but it is not so simple, a few nations still have nukes pointed at us, regardless of how much economic control we have over them. And oil producing nations and the ones producing most of the goods we use nowadays have a lot of influence over the USA.

10

It could, but not in a physical sense. Buy or otherwise negate Russia’s nukes and obliterate China and India, and the rest of the world will grovel before the might that is Imperial America.

11

Seriously? We needed this thread? WTF?

12

The U.S. is much too divided! Conquer the world? Hell, could anyone “conquer” the U.S.?

Yes: this. If we were sufficiently of one mind – if we had the national will to accomplish this, and it was very widely accepted as our number one goal – then, slowly, carefully, wisely, by diplomatic initiatives, we could make progress.

Heck, there’s talk, right now, of an American/European common market. How’s that for a clever first step? Once we’ve integrated all the world’s economies, the mechanisms of legislation could be made to follow.

No… I don’t need a bag of Fritos either, but I have one, and am enjoying it.

13

China and Russia would be very difficult to take control of, if not impossible. You would basically have to wipe out the entire civilian population of both countries and then re-populate it.

It took 10 years to track and find OBL. He’s one guy.

Trying to overthrow the rest of the world’s governments is a far more difficult task.
Also, as mentioned, in a MAD world, with the presence of nuclear and biological weapons, I just don’t see how it is possible. You would have an entire population living in fear and paranoia, and that’s not good for anyone.

14

We are in uncharted territories because nobody’s tried to dominate the world the way we are, and we’re not quite sure what happens next.

Another worldview could rise to challenge the American system. This was true to a fractional extent with Marxism, but that was still a politico-economic theory based on materialist assumptions about history. Beating it was basically beating off a challenge from an incompetent brother. “Fredo. You broke my heart.”

The wildcard now seems to be fundamentalist eschatology. It’s not an accident that lunatic fringe Christianists and Islamists are cropping up all over and trying to overturn elected governments and create theocracies. We’re not quite sure how to fight them because it’s incredibly embarrassing to have a small but loud chunk of them right here at home.

The biggie would be the quick collapse of energy reserves. The world is fairly uninterested in the eagle astride the globe as long as they get something out of it. If we have a protracted global depression and what’s more one that becomes serious – it isn’t just killing the poor in the millions, but is costing the rich their summer homes – then everybody may decide to stop playing our game. Then it will depend on what the new game is. To be fair, we will likely be at least somewhat competent at it. I can’t see us falling completely out of the medal count.

15

Right, the Taliban are a smallish insurgency.

If you look just a little beyond the propaganda you might notice western powers control bases and usually areas immediately around bases. That’s it. Almost every attack is Taliban taking on western forces, not the reverse.

Afghanistan is as lost as Iraq was before it. And every bit as lost as Vietnam.

16

I don’t think we could do it. Others have tried, and all failed. As was stated above, we would get stuck before we got out of Mexico and Canada. Russia isn’t even really a problem we need to worry our pretty little heads about.

We are in uncharted territory every morning for almost all of time. Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. On the other hand, it’s far from the first time there was a single country dominating the known world.

It could, but are there any candidates? I don’t see any movements that deny materialist concerns running national governments. Could you provide an example of one?

Religious groups trying to hurry the end of the world aren’t anything new. I’m not a member, so I am not embarrassed by their foolish beliefs. If they’re in politics, the correct way to fight them is to point and laugh. If they have moved to politics by other means, conventional methods of fighting them work as well as they work against people who aren’t delusional.

No energy pretty much means no society no matter who is in charge. The complete collapse of energy reserves would have done in ancient Rome, as well.

The last time we had a global depression (I think they’re all probably serious), we suffered the rise of fascism. At the same time, the rich retained their homes. I don’t have high hopes for the “new game” that might arise from the next.

17

This is a great quote. :slight_smile:

Of course. There are many ideologies in competition with the current one. Technological utilitarianism is a weird anomaly compared to the way humans have thought about the world through most of history. Almost all civilizations prior to the last 300 years would regard our world as monstrous and empty.

Religious movements: if God is transcendent then social and political activity is organized around notions of “the Word” and “the sacred.” The Vatican’s opposition to birth control or the deep south’s opposition to women’s rights are examples.

Militarist-nativist movements: if the People is transcendent then social and political activity is organized around notions of “honor” and “the Nation.” There are outcroppings of this kind of ideology throughout the world, from nationalist-separatist factions to the obsession with military service, violence, and cultural (if not racial) purity in right wing politics.

Environmentalist movements: if Nature is transcendent then social and political activity is organized around notions of “stewardship” and “harmony.” Greens and “non-religious spiritual” groups on the left in most countries have a dose of this.

I’m sure there are others, but those all come to mind within a few seconds of asking the question. Our materialism is no more stable a worldview than any of the others of history.

The “embarrassment” comes from having to cater to their votes and their dollars. The Dems don’t really have a problem pointing and laughing, but if you’re an educated member of the GOP you can’t, it’s lethal to your electoral prospects in the general, assuming you even get there since you’ll probably be primaried before you can say “Elmer Gantry.”

This is a mistake born of equating a society with accidental materialist qualities. The whole point is that there are worldviews that don’t really care jack squat about technological exploitation. “Standard of living,” in those worlds, simply does not mean what it means to us.

But I was overbroad and should have said “collapse of easy access to industrial scale energy like petrochem and coal.”

Well, the first rule of paradigm shifts is legacy people don’t like them. None of us would be comfortable in whatever new civilization comes after ours, which is fine, since we’ll be long dead and the residents of that civilization would hate ours equally.

18

The US culturally, monetarily and politically dominates the world far more effectively than it ever could militarily. It is voluntary.

The OP presumably is talking about military capability. But military, as Clauswitz pointed out, is only if other methods fail, and they haven’t. The voluntary methods work because they present widespread advantages over existing systems for many people.

But by force? Not without threat of nuclear weapons.

19

No way the U.S. could do it acting alone. I doubt we could even do it with the active assistance of NATO. Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea have nukes and decent military capability. To invade, conquer, and rule those countries would take more manpower than even NATO can muster.

20

It would be cheaper to sell insurance to the rest of the world, in exchange for an up to date insurance policy, that costs x amount of money, the rest of the world can sleep in peace knowing an accidental ICBM launch cannot occur due to Chinese hacking.

Its a nice capitol, it would be a shame to see it irradiated.

Declam