Thankya, it’s one that rolls around in my head more and more as I get older
Ok, but I don’t see any of its competitors currently rising to control national governments and making said nations powerful players in the world. I’m not saying those sorts of movements don’t exist, but they aren’t turning their nations into say, Imperial Japan these days. Perhaps we’re working on different definitions of materialist, but most of the nations that are successful these days seem to accept the primacy of their economies when considering the happiness of their population. Even a government that did have environmental concerns would still consider whether they could feed their people while addressing them.
If they don’t like the company they keep, they should find a new group. If that’s political suicide, tough. We all have bad choices in our past that have less than desirable effects later.
If you’re talking predictions about what happens after industrial production isn’t possible; I think it’s more likely that it’s on a continuum between Mad Max and The Road, rather than anything with a theory behind it.
Nah, that’s just our technological bias that recoils from any world that lacks electric toothbrushes.
The Earth abides, and so does humanity. It will find a way to organize itself into new configurations once the toys are all broken.
The reason the competitors can’t gain any ground right now is the current system is rather well suited for the environmental niche of prevailing conditions (which is why it’s triumphant in the first place). Eventually conditions will change, either with a bang or a whimper, and then other ways of thinking about the world will fit better.
It’s a little like asking a puddle what shape it will be next year. Just because it can’t know doesn’t mean its current shape is forever.
I was responding to the idea that we should buy Russia out of nukes, and vaporize China and India. Aside from the question of who would sell, last I heard Russia has way more nukes than China and India put together. So from an admittedly insane yet financially sound point of view, it’s Russia we should vaporize. The cost savings of not buying their nukes can probably buy the whole rest of the world’s nuke stockpiles.
The U.S. could mess the whole world up really bad but no, it couldn’t conquer it. The closest we’ve come to being able to do that would have been right after WWII, we were the sole nuclear power and would be for some time, our fleet was bigger than that of the rest of the world’s combined. The only power that could have slowed us down was the USSR, which was strategically well positioned versus us on the European continent because they had a lot more troops called up and in theater.
However if for some reason Truman was hell bent on some modicum of world conquest he could have taken the Soviets out using nuclear weapons, but he’d have to be smart about it. Even at that point, while I don’t think any combination of the remaining military powers in the world could stop us, at best we could just force them to submit to some form of tributary status. We still had nowhere near the manpower to actually conquer/hold much of the world’s territory. Those tributary relationships would be hard to keep enforced, and overtime the effort would bankrupt the United States and destroy us as a country even if no enemy soldiers ever landed on our shores.
Of course the truth is in the modern world, among large industrialized powers, the benefits of territorial conquest are always negated by the huge costs involved in winning and holding territory. It’s just a very different calculus than what the world used to be. It’s far more beneficial for example to have a healthy trade relationship with Germany and Japan than it is to try and hold them as occupied vassal states.
What we would need is a massive breeding program for American soldiers/conquerors. But first, we need more “living room” – I believe the Germans called it lebensraum.
The United States of America could absolutely take over the world.
When I say take over the world I’m not talking about militarily invading every country in the world, I’m talking about dismantling the worlds military powers and forcing them into submission.
The United States’ defense budget is larger then the next top 10 nations budgets combined that is, 619 Billion dollars a year. The U.S.A has more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined and the only nation that has nuclear powered carriers. America has the most highly trained soldiers in the world by far, the most advanced spec ops teams, by far the largest navy, most powerful air force by far, and the most powerful nuclear arsenal. I’m not even going to go into the technology aspect of it not only because it would require a book the size of the Bible to describe in detail America’s technological power and that’s not even including the technology that is classified; technology that is decades ahead of even our own active arsenal (Anti-matter bombs) lazer weapons, robotics weapons etc.
First, America would inherrit Canada’s oil supply just because they wouldn’t be able to refuse. That would make America’s oil supply by far the largest in the world. All the federal government would have to do is give a warning to every nation in the world to either submit to America’s
request or be taken over by force.
After that the United States would begin deploying naval fleets to Russian and Chinese waters and simply launch carrier originated air strikes, guided missile strikes, and amphibious assaults to Chinese and Russian key naval operations bases. Navy seals and delta forces would be inserted to nuclear silos and surveillance bases where they would tactically destroy and equipment that could be used against the U.S. If any nation were to launch nuclear war heads on American deployments they would be shot down by advanced anti-missile systems.
No country in the world has missiles capable of reaching the United States and even if they did, they would be shot down in mid air. Also, the USA would retaliate with nuclear strikes by launching long-ranged missiles from nuclear submarines with are secretly hidden all over the world’s oceans.
Basically the United States would force half of the world to submit through threats alone. The world’s “power houses” such as China, Russia, and NATO would be the only chance of defending against overthrow but they wouldn’t last long due to the fact that America’s navy is larger than the rest of the worlds combined. Russia, China, and NATO’s man and tank numbers are massive but that dosn’t mean anything when they can be pin point target by laser guided missile systems.
The United States has firepower that is so classified that, only a handful of highly ranked federal employees have access to that information. To go into a little bit of detail the United States have been experimenting with anti matter for dozens of years. Anti matter is a type of substance where you have the basic elements such as copper and hydrogen and anti matter would be like anti-copper and anti-hydrogen. Not going to into scientific detail, when an element collides with its opposite element such as hydrogen and anti-hydrogen, they annihilate each other which causes a release of energy thousands of times more powerful than nuclear reactions. I can guarantee you that the United States has been using this science to develop weapons that can destroy entire continents.
In conclusion, if the United States of America tapped into every resource in its arsenal including those that are entirely unknown to 99 percent of the world. It could not only destroy every nation in the world but could probably do it twice over.
The United States has a much more powerful and advance submarine fleet than the world. America has nuclear submarines under the polar ice caps haha. America could crush the world’s military power but could not take over the world and set up a one world government due to the fact that it is just to large an area to control.
And if America went on a conquest spree it would no longer be able to afford that as the world economy collapsed and everyone refused to trade with it.
And then America is destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse.
I think it would be like a giant version of the United States’ takeover of Iraq in 2003. It would succeed at first, especially if the United States could somehow destroy all other nuclear weapons in the world and achieve a nuclear monopoly.
The United States wouldn’t invade anyone, of course, just strike from long range. But eventually the rest of the world would simply unite in anti-Americanism and eventually prevail by virtue of outnumbering the US 22-to-1.
