OK, we could take over the entire world except Vietnam and Iraq. Satisfied?
What we were after in Vietnam and Iraq wasn’t to take over, but instead to have friendly governments (or puppets if you like) installed. The US hasn’t really been big on the whole overt conquest thingy since the turn of the last century at least. We are more in favor of other means than installing our own governors with permanent occupation forces and such…that’s a LOT more costly (plus, we’d have to care enough to stick it out for the long run, which we don’t…not when Survivor and Monday Night Football are starting soon!).
Which kind of gets to the heart of the OP. The US probably COULD take over the world (if we were willing to destroy the world in the process…destroy the world to save it, so the speak), but why would we want too? What would be in it for us that we don’t already have??
Of course, viewed in a certain way, the US has been taking over the world for at least the last half century at least. When you can go to really remote places or countries purportedly hostile to the US and see tee shirts that say Drink Coke! (or the like), you can see this in action. 
…Aaaaaand you lost me.
In theory you don’t need to conquer the military of foreign countries. You just need to co-op their leadership and/or use economic power. You get them deep in debt and then use that debt to control them. That or you just bribe the foreign leaders to do what you want. However bribery may not work. People like Saddam Hussein were billionaires due to domestic theft, there isn’t much the US could give them in way of bribes to make them obedient.
The US would need to take over most of the middle east and other oil producing countries to start its world conquest agenda. However China and Russia could always nuke us.
And France. And the UK. WE’RE STILL TOTALLY RELEVANT IN WORLD AFFAIRS YOU GUYS !
And India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea (I believe only those 9 countries have nukes). However I’d assume France and the UK would be less likely to nuke us than China or Russia. France & the UK seem less adversarial and more concerned about harming civilians than China or Russia.
Tom? Tom Clancy? It’s time to go back to bed Tom.
India, Pakistan, Israel (and South Africa) don’t have ICBMs, they can lock down their neighbours but not threaten the mainland US (where half of *your *means of fukhueg murder are silo’d). North Koraaahahahaha. The UK and France however not only have the means to play the Global Thermonuclear Warfare game, they have the missile submarines to play it on a 3 minute warning clock. Post-annihilation if need be.
Actually, maybe India does too these days, I’unno.
As for harming civilians, if the US is actively and aggressively trying to taaaake over the woooorld deep laugh, moustache twirl, which naturally includes the French and British bits of it at some point, then all bets are off aren’t they ?
It’d be open collateral season as far as I’m concerned, and I’m a limp-dicked hippie liberal bleeding-heart French wimp.
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that the United States could conquer and control a significant portion of the world for an extended period of time. Much of a our militaries failures overseas are due to the fact that we attempt to minimize American military casualties, civilian casualties, and refrain from using illegal methods of war. But if those things are out the window, there’s a lot more we can accomplish.
The biggest problem would be population. Right now, the military is a few million strong. At just 5% of the population, the military would be 15 million, which would be much more capable of occupying foreign nations. We’d also need to expand our population overall, but outright annexation of Canada or Mexico isn’t out of the picture. Canada is close enough in culture that a union has been proposed before. Mexico might very well agree with a combination of military pressure (“just saying, we could crush you like a flea…”) and economic incentive (better conditions for its people if they could migrate to America). Presumably we should give these countries the franchise and work on winning hearts and minds over to our world-domination side.
I don’t even think a lack of soldiers would be that big a deal though if we weren’t trying to reduce casualties. Landmines are incredibly cheap and a highly effective area denial method. We could also use drones to cheaply take out bad guys with little loss of life.
Next would be the middle east. The great majority of the Middle East’s oil is located in a handful of fields around the Persian Gulf. There isn’t any need to capture the entire Middle East, or to waste money on nation-building exercises. It’s perfectly possible to control almost all of the oil while leaving the majority of the ME untouched. The world doesn’t really seem to care about what we do there anyways (sure, they shout and complain, but they don’t do anything about it). With ME, American, and Canadian oil in our pocket, we’d have significant economic pressure to exert on foreign countries. It would be pretty easy to get random South American and African countries to join our alliance, and we could work to integrate Europe into some sort of American-led union. Over time, we’d give work to change attitudes in our sphere of influence, and allow more countries to join American proper. It would take time, and we wouldn’t conquer hostile nations like China or Russia, but it should be possible to substantially expand the amount of territory we control. Possibly, reducing corruption and crime and expanding free trade could eventually make up for the huge costs of such a plan.
There are a few other, more ridiculous options as well. One would be to covertly build hundred year bunkers, then launch cobalt bombs and wipe out pretty much the entire world. We could use drones to take out any survivors. After a few decades, we could leave our bunkers, and I guess we’d be the only ones left. There wouldn’t be much of a world left to inherent though.
Another possibility would be to produce a virulent bioweapon and millions of vaccines. We release the bioweapon around the world, hoping no one else can produce a vaccine in time. Then we rush to vaccinate as many of our people as we can, and share the vaccine with those who agree to submit to us. Again, this might work, but billions would die, and the remaining Americans would pretty clearly be worse off than they were before.
Non-militarily, if the US government spent, say, $1 trillion a year on subtly influencing the politics of other nations…
…aiding pro-US candidates,
…forming spoiler parties to split-the-vote of anti-US candidates,
…assassinating anti-US dictators,
…promoting disarmament by *other *nations,
…get other nations to agree to lopsided deals in favor of the US,
Then in perhaps 40 years’ time the US might have extreme influence over the world.
IIRC, doing as much damage as they can to anyone who tries to conquer or destroy them is the explicit nuclear policy of France. It’s what their nukes are for.
That depends on what you mean by “take over the world”. If you mean make all countries ostensibly bend the knee to our government and officially accept its authority, then yes, probably, although it would be a long war.
But we wouldn’t control the world. We don’t even control our own country. We are a federal system in which the states share sovereignty with the federal government. The federal government doesn’t have the resources to subdue the US states to bring us under centralized authority, much less the ability to subdue the world in that sense. Like the US states, other countries would recognize DC’s authority officially, but the police power would remain with individual countries and they’d pretty much do whatever they wanted. I suppose we might be able to send in troops to force integration in public schools in the state of Iran on occasion, but that’s about the extent of it. Good luck collecting the individual mandate tax from Nepalese who would rather not bother with health insurance. We probably wouldn’t have much luck getting Indonesian factories to pay minimum wage either, and getting Chinese power plants to obey carbon caps, oh boy.
So yeah, if you want to ostensibly conquer the world like Alexander the Great, I think that can be done. But you can’t govern it, which I assume is the point of conquest. Now if we just want to loot everyone’s natural resources and send the profits back to the US, I’m sure we can do that.
Maybe if there was an awesome simultaneous surprise attack against Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and Japan, but I assume a kind of “fair start” like an RTS where everyone starts at home base and knows the other guy wants to fight. In which case I’d say no. Even if all the nukes were magic’d away and it was purely conventional.
One huge advantage the U.S. has is a world spanning logistical supply chain and hundreds of American-owned or friendly bases. I’d assume this collapses instantly. I guess a lot of our bases could defend themselves in some of the weaker countries, but it’d be impossible to defend most of them. I don’t even know what the plan would be – close them and bring the soldiers and staff home before declaring war, or do they get captured by the enemy? Maybe try to focus on keeping a couple strategic ones and use them to leapfrog into enemy territories?
U.S. satellites are vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons. That’s another big advantage knocked down.
How long the carriers would last in a real war is controversial, but there’s plenty of pessimists who say they’d be instant reef starter kits. Sink a couple of them and the grand plan is over right quick.
Maybe it’s all hand wringing for the MIC, but every once in awhile you see a report how the U.S. military is too reliant on foreign countries for strategically critical materials or manufactured goods, usually China or some other SE Asian country. That rug gets pulled out during WWIII. Might not matter in the first attacks, but you have to replenish your stocks and get spare parts at some point.
Another small problem is the U.S. economy would collapse. This might not actually matter for a little bit especially since other nations’ economies contract too, but at some point there’s going to be tremendous amounts of internal strife if not outright civil war. You’d have to divert large amounts of soldiers back home to keep order.
The scenario I’m thinking of has our allies immediately buckling under. Even Nazi Germany didn’t have to conquer everyone, some states went along because they wanted to side with the winner or felt they had a better chance of surviving under the Nazi umbrella than the Soviet umbrella. And who the hell was going to rely on the West? No one since the West had proven they’d sell out any ally for a temporary peace.
This whole idea of military conquest is so wasteful (and outdated).
Let’s start out secretly financing 'independence" or ‘secessionist’ movements in a couple of the northern states of Mexico. (Probably could be done for a small fraction of the money we’re already spending on border walls.) With the goal of having their population vote to secede from Mexico and apply for admission as a new US state. Just point out that this would immediately give them the US minimum wage, food stamps, AFDC, Social Security, etc. That could probably gain a whole lot of votes right there. Add in a bit of bribery, vote-count fixing, and we should win such an election easily.
Then the US Congress accepts their application to become a state, and it’s done. (It worked with Texas.) And if Mexico doesn’t like it, so what – wanna start a war about it? You tried that in the 1840’s – we got Arizona, Nevada, etc. out of that one.
After a couple of the northern parts of Mexico do this, start the same thing going in the other Mexican states. Or jump down to Panama, or Honduras, etc. – the economic conditions in most of Central and even South America would make joining the USA attractive to many voters in those countries.
Canada might be tougher, since their economy is about as good as ours (plus they have real single-payer health care, and no huge taxes to maintain a vast military machine). But then we had a standing offer to them to join as a state without even requiring Congressional approval in our Articles of Confederation. I don’t think that’s still in our current Constitution, but they look & talk just like us (we’d just have to get them to stop saying all the “eh’s”). And if they won’t join, so what – most of the rest of the world can’t tell Americans & Canadians apart anyway.
Then there’s Africa. Same economic imperatives there (except maybe in South Africa). For historical, sentimental reasons, let’s start with Liberia – founded by Abe Lincoln (our ads will say). For a lot of those countries, it’d just take a big bribe into the President-for-Life’s Swiss bank account to make it happen – isn’t like they are really used to accurate vote counts anyway. Once this process starts, it just becomes easier & easier.
As far as the UK, we wouldn’t have to worry much about them for quite a while. Eventually, we push for ‘Queen Elizabeth apologizes for the bad things Great-great…-grandpa George III did to us’ and ‘the colonies come home to the motherland’.
And the rest of Europe is already turning into a cheap copy of the USA, via the European Union. Just let that keep happening. (But watch those Germans – it’s been said that both the Kaiser & Hitler tried to conquer Europe militarily, and lost, so now the Germans are doing it subtly via the EU.)
Such a plan for world domination would probably take longer than any military first-strike one, but would likely cost a lot less, in both soldier’s lives and even economically.
But that’s no fun.
I wonder if the world community would even care much if we straight up rolled into Mexico, as long as we made the right mouth noises about ending corruption and human rights violations on our border. Something about drugs and human trafficking and uplifting the poor and all that jazz.
No we could not.
However you need to add into your wish list a competent executive branch that actually knows how to conduct war. This country no longer has that ability.
Probably not. Not much oil or rare resources in Mexico (that I’m aware of), it’s brown people, and nobody ever cared about any of the evil shit y’all ever pulled in Central and South America. Well, except for the South Americans.
Then again, if y’all had trouble dealing with jihadis half a world away, cartel enforcers right on your doorstep might prove a thornier problem than you think ;).
Yeah, we’d wind up with the problem all empires have to deal with: taking territory to protect your frontier just gives you a new frontier to protect.
France’s nukes are meant to kill people who own dogs.
Right? Tous 'as a mutt?