Historically, the pattern has always been the same: one country gets too powerful and several other countries team up to take them out. The best example is the Allies of WW2 vs Germany, but throughout history there’s examples of these temporary alliances to take out the big kid on the block. Economically, the EU is a good example of the same principle.
Secondly, the we’ve known since WW1 that defeating another country is just asking for trouble, e.g. the Treaty of Versailles. Since then, nearly all countries (with notable exceptions) have helped rebuild and stabilize their former enemies, e.g. the American occupation of Japan after WW2.
Therefore, in that sense, the US can’t defeat the rest of the world and wouldn’t do it even if they could. In other words, if they did attack any other country, they would immediately help repair them afterwards.
But, in just a hypothetical sense, I doubt the US could defeat China or Russia, the key being that they are both on the UN Security Council. Also, the logistics of a land war in Russia particularly during winter would be nearly impossible to overcome. Also, attacking one would probably be attacking both, just like attacking North Korea or Vietnam would automatically include the Chinese.
(It is certainly true though that if the US has/had any sense at all it would have hard coded into the trident missiles that they could never strike the continental US - after all if you’re striking that legitimately as the US then you should probably not be fieliding STRATEGIC nukes. Then again it may be that that safeguard could be over ridden by fooling the missiles as to where they were launched from and consequently where they were aiming at; I don’t know enough aobut them to know if that is possible or not)
((Fun fact, since the falklands are in teh news - the UK vulcan bombers who attacked the airfield at port stanley didn’t have maps of the south atlantic, not unreasonable for a number of facts. So they turned the northern hemisphere maps upside down…))
India can launch a satellite, so it has the theoretical capacity. It is also < 1 year from having a nuclear submarine.
Of course, the truth is that India has ensured that it’s missile program stops with a land launched ~5500 mi range missileprecisely to avoid raising US hackles.
It doesn’t feel the threat from the usa is sufficiently large, and minuses outweigh the pluses.
I’m sure that if Israel felt the benefit, it could create such delivery system in < 3 years.
I’ve a feeling Russia and China have more political will in the use of nuclear weapons, especially for defensive use. China’s industries and population may be as vulnerable but there are more Russians than Americans (I think) and they are spread out thinner.
Thanks. So it makes it worse for the US. Less Russians spread over an area twice that of the US. Who will end up with more live citizens (from the original population) after a nuclear exchange?
Ah yes, the Bint Jbeil ambush, so deeply embedded in lore and struggle and historic import, a veritable Waterloo, nay, an Operation Overlord, one of the Mid-East’s defining struggle of arms.
There is debate over this but I read somewhere (cannot remember if it was a forum post or a book or news article, sorry) that you are exactly right, and that the Soviets knew this and knew that because of their thinner population spread out over a greater area, that a Nuclear exchange with the US was awful but “Survivable”, which is pretty terrifying in hindsight.
Also, Russia, China, the UK or France would end in mutually assured destruction. And forget about trying to conquer any random EU nation; that’d get the rest of the EU pretty pissed at us.
leo bloom, the Israeli report on the war admitted they’d lost, or failed to achieve victory, same thing.
Steering this back to the hypothetical-- what if the US fought Israel? the US would need a massive buildup of force in a neighboring country which would take at least a year, giving Israel plenty of time to prepare defenses and mobilize reserves. But the US would quickly gain air superiority and neutralize Israeli armor. Conquering Israel and maintaining anything like control could be insanely difficult given the number of people under arms and likely fierce resistance.
On the “plus” side, in such a scenario the US could likely rely on the support of Arab states for money and men. On the minus, ongoing insurgency would be intense. My guess, initial victory followed by defeat cloaked as honorable withdrawal–a la Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.
This scenario is different than Russia/India/Pakistan/China, where I doubt the US could achieve anything like a temporary victory.
Britain, really unlikely for the US to win given lack of a base to build on–you’re talking d-day in reverse. You now assume the help of other states, as you have to in the Israel scenario, only with a water barrier. France, I don’t know. Small but prefessional army, modern state with interior lines and production. They’ve folded before when they should have won…but won when hey shouldn’t have, too.
ETA: I’m assuming no nukes, just conventional arms.
No way would it take a year to go to all out war with Israel. We have bases all over the middle east and if we could convince the Arabs+Iran we were actually serious about leveling Israel we would probably get free use of the Straight of Hormuz complete with floating flower petals.
They would be almost useless during invasion but if we didn’t care at all about the Israelis post invasion, for occupation purposes I bet the rest of the middle east would be falling over themselves to volunteer men for occupied Israel to get some payback.
There are LOADS of countries we couldn’t invade and occupy successfully. And I’m not just referring to the Chinas and Russias of the world.
As a practical matter, we don’t WANT to invade or conquer, say, Canada or Sweden. But for the hell of it, let’s assume we DID want to. Do we have enough armed, trained soldiers to invade Canada any time soon? No! It would take us months, maybe years to put together an invasion force large enough to attempt it… and in the meantime, Canada would have enough time money, and brainpower to
put together a nuclear arsenal of its own.
form some alliances (say, with China, which relies on a lot of Canada’s natural resources).
Start preparing their own defenses… which probably couldn’t withstand a truly determined American onslaught, but could certainly make the invasion bloody enough and costly enough to make us Yanks wonder why the hell we ever wanted to invade in the first place.
Are we the single most powerful nation, militarily? Sure- but that doesn’t always do us much practical good. The good news is, we can put 100,000 armed men almost anywhere in the world in a hurry. The bad news is… 100,000 armed men isn’t nearly enough to conquer and police many countries.
We could ANNIHILATE Canada with nukes, of course… but we couldn’t invade and subjugate them with conventional military force.
There is a HUGE difference between defeating the opposing military and completely subjugating the population for the long term. The US can defeat any other nation’s conventional (non nuclear) military. Even Canada’s, even Israel’s.
As has been noted, maintaining long term control and the cooperative submission of the populace is an entirely different matter. By that definition, no nation could ever truly conquer anyone without massive genocide. Even after WWII the Allies had to start letting Nazis off the hook just to prevent the Germans from revolting.
Keep in mind that some of the greatest conquerors in history never really managed to hang onto their conquests permanently. Even the Mongols who “conquered” China wound up being Chinese rather than the other way around.
FWIW, it aggravates me when people talk about America “losing” wars like Korea or Iraq. People expect wars to be like a video game where one side is entirely crushed. No war has ever been that neat and tidy. These people ignore major strategic successes and military accomplishments just because it does not match what they expect “victory” to look like, or what Hollywood has taught us to expect.
At the very end of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (spoiler coming, but so what, go see the movie),–
while nuclear war is beginning between the US and the Russians, our top strategic weapons designer (Strangelove) is talking with the President and an Air Force General. He continues to argues that the war is winnable, that after the war the only survivors will be, optimally, intelligent and powerful men and women selected for their beauty and fruitfulness who are living deep in mine shafts for a (Strangelove calculates) certain number of years until the fallout levels off to survive on the ground.
Air Force General Buck Turgidson sees the beauty of the plan, but then realizes the Russians have also probably thought of it. His last words, spoken to President Merkin Muffley, are that “we must not allow a mine gap in this country.”
In the Cold War, “missile gap” meant the gap, or disparity, between the number of ICBMs that we had and they had. It had also come to be used publicly in a threatening or frightened manner about our war-readiness.
The scene, one of the most celebrated in film history, is is YouTubed here.
Could we really? Most of the Canadian population centers are near the US/Canadian border. Vancouver B.C. is 25-30 miles from the US border, which means there would be huge amounts of nuclear fallout drifting into the U.S. Most Canadians live within 100 miles of the border.