It can be said that all wars are economic, but that is a trite observation.
Nor is it accurate; there are other reasons. But really large wars of conquest, attempts to build empires seem to be mostly economic, at least in the present era. WWI and WWII were in large part possible because of the widespread belief that wars of conquest & building a colonial empire were profitable enterprises. These days it’s become obvious that building an empire by conquest is a money-losing proposition.
Apologies - I posted that last bit by mistake. Here’s the rest.
To be trite about it, all wars are economic. America has covered itself in layers of dirt since becoming a superpower, but has done no worse than any other similar nation.
Since WW2 there have been only brushfire wars as America stared down the Orwellian states of China and the USSR. The USSR in particular would clearly have brought as many nations under the Iron Curtain as they could had not the “free world” opposed them. The free world was bolstered by American military might.
The free world was also being screwed-over big-time by American and European corporations during this period, but that’s another story.
While American might kept most wars of conquest from even getting started, there was still an appetite for them. Consider Yugoslavia, Tibet, Kuwait, Georgia, and Korea. How many more would there have been without the US (or US-backed UN) lurking? You say few, I think there would have been many.
In todays world, though, national borders are becoming less important. This is mostly due to technology and globalization, but the long-term influence of the US and UN have also contributed.
Yugoslavia was not a war of conquest, it was a civil war, as could Tibet be considered if you ask the Chinese. Pretty poor examples. Considering it’s hard to find a single war between two democracies, it seems like what discourages war is not the USA but “not being a shithole”.
And you considering America’s track record with “encouraging democracies” I would say we are a net-negative effect world wide on peace.
I’m inclined to think that the reason we have to have a military with such long arms is because we operate in parts of the world where we aren’t wanted. Putting money from the military budget into alternate energy plantations and research for replacing any minerals we can’t mine domestically (or, at least, in the Western Hemi) makes a lot of sense to me. build domestic energy production, bring home the troops, save lots of money long run.
No, that’s just the American ideological obsession with capitalism talking. Economics is certainly a major motive, but hardly the only one. Human beings are not one dimensional profit machines, regardless of what America’s capitalism fetish insists that humans are “really like”.
I hear that claimed a lot, and my response is “so what”? “Jimmy does it too” is a grade school kid’s excuse to his mother, not a viable moral philosophy.
That’s nonsense; there’s been plenty of slaughter, much of it by America or at America’s instigation. And outside its own borders America has been no better than the USSR or China, despite its fantasies about being a “good guy”. Actually living in America is better, but being raped or tortured or murdered by an American puppet dictatorship is no more pleasant than being raped, tortured or murdered by a Soviet one.
Two points to make with this:
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I’ve never understood America’s fascination with supporting democracies. We make it a precondition for any aid or support on the idea that a democracy is inherently the best form of government for any situation. This is false. A lot of these third-world nations are so screwed up and so corrupt that attempting to install a transparent, accountable, democratic government is a recipe for disaster. We need to admit to ourselves that sometimes democracy is a goal to be developed over the course of generations rather than something that emerges all at once.
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I’m getting rather tired of seeing people criticize the previous administrations of the US. I got it, there was a lot of stuff the CIA and various presidents did that was really screwed up. At the same time, we again see this expectation that our nation should have emerged in 1776 with a complete set of modern mores and ethics. I get the idea that people expect the nation to immediately appear fully formed and perfect, like Athena emerging from Zeus. Attempting to apply modern standards and ethics to judge the state even 60 years ago (when Communist forces were actively attempting global insurgencies and nuclear annihilation was a daily threat) is a foolish enterprise. Given that we modern, enlightened Americans can’t agree on squat nowadays, maybe we should stop looking at previous generations with the expectation of monolithic and omniscient decision-making.
Agreed. The power of deterrence and the leverage of a strong military prevents wars rather than encourages them. Helping smaller nations defend themselves (as we do in Europe and southeast Asia) is an important part of our alliances with these countries that benefits us in many ways.
A lot of people in this thread comment that there is no threat of global war that requires such a large military. I maintain that a large military helps keep it that way.
You’ll also notice that a lot of those wars you mentioned (plus all the little ones in Africa and South America) took place in areas that had little to no US or NATO presence. It is a matter of historical fact that the presence of local US forces prevents war from breaking out (which, lets face it, is the real reason for the continued existence of USFK).
I also believe the moral component of interventionism is under-rated. I remember reading an interview with the US ambassador to the UN that basically stated our support for the Libyan intervention was largely borne of our failure to act in places like Rwanda and Cambodia. There are a great number of wars where people have said, “It’s not our problem, let them fight their own war,” and then had to live with the moral consequences of apathy while genocide unfolds.
Obviously, we cannot and should not intervene in every single conflict, but the idea that we should be isolationist and never commit forces outside our own borders is just as flawed and morally bankrupt.
There are various valid ways to view Social Security. It is, sort of, a retirement pension plan. It is, sort of, a way to transfer income from current workers to retired workers. About 99% of Americans understand that such a system is desirable, as long as we don’t think old people should be required to continue working until they are dead.
There are also several invalid ways to view Social Security. Erroneous concepts about it abound; right-wingers like to spread untruths about Social Security to feed their malicious agenda.
In 2011, income to the S.S. Trust fund totaled $805 billion. Benefits paid that year totaled $725 billion. Even with the $6 billion administrative overhead, the program actually showed a profit for that year!
The take-away message here is NOT that S.S. is, for the time being, still profitable. The take-away message is that S.S. is nothing else than what it claims to be – a transfer program with the government just serving as administrator. To treat it as a budget item for comparison with defense spending shows gross ignorance. Comments as in the quoted text have no use in this debate, except for what they may tell us about the quotee.
No, they haven’t. They have supplemented, not replaced the role of reconnaissance by manned aircraft, and have made headlines for being used to conduct strikes/assassinations in countries without the countries approval, but that’s it. You won’t see them conducting air campaigns such as the ones in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or in support of the rebels in Libya (too slow, not enough payload and too vulnerable) or conducting CAS (Close Air Support) anywhere US forces are in direct contact with the enemy (too vulnerable and not enough situational awareness for conducting strikes that will kill friendlies if they hit the wrong target in the confusion). So no, they haven’t taken over the role of many, or even any of our manned aircraft and have only supplemented a very few roles.
Again, they are a long, long way off if ever. One of the main functions of the personnel on destroyers and submarines is maintenance to keep them functioning during lengthy deployments. Until you can automate ships to fix everything that breaks during a deployment, you won’t see an unmanned navy.
The point he was making was that they were captured intact by means of hacking them, something that can’t be done to manned aircraft. Useful intel can sometimes be gleaned from the wreckage of crashed aircraft, but you only have wreckage to work with, not an intact plane. Regarding reductions in the number of manned aircraft, we are not, however, replacing them with drones.
That’s slicing it pretty thin. The wars in Yugoslavia came about as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it’s hard to term the Serbian invasions of Croatia or Bosnia as civil war versus conquest. Terming Tibet civil war or more likely land China had a historical precedent to owning might go down as the official line in China, but nobody else would take it seriously.
It’s not that hard to find a single war between democracies. It was the bloodiest war the US has ever fought, the US Civil War.
Blah blah blah. You’re on the “Team USA world police brings about peace” claimants, so you can not weasel out of all the wars the USA has started and democracies we have toppled. You are literally not allowed to do it.
I agree Tibet shouldn’t count, but I think Yugoslavia was much more of an ethnic/civil war than a war of conquest. If we put “Roman expansionism” on one side of the graph and “civil war” on the other side, Yugoslavia is much closer to a civil war than a war of conquest/expansionism.
Does not count, the south was not a seperate country from the union, we settled this 150-odd years ago. Also that’s funny you have to go back that far, and single out a country fighting itself, please show two modern democracies, going to war with each other. It’s incredibly difficult if not impossible.
Which furthers my point, that being a democracy is much more important to avoiding war, than America’s world policing which doesn’t have anything to do with keeping peace, but has to do with keeping certain people rich.
Who holds these accounts? Because if it’s the same party holding both accounts, it doesn’t make a whit of difference in terms of how much you’re in debt.
I can see your point, and classifying the Yugoslavian wars is a bit fuzzy, but Croatia didn’t see it as a civil war. Yugoslavia was mashed together after WWI from countries that had individual identities historically. Croatia declared its independence, and Serbia responded by invading.
Because they lost. Declaring that it doesn’t count based upon the Union position that it was not a legitimate country is rather No True Scotsmanny, it took a 4 year war and over 600,000 deaths to prove that point.
I don’t have to go back that far, ironically we’ve already been discussing a recent example: the Croatian War of Independence. There’s an interesting list here of democracies that have fought each other along with rebuttals of why they shouldn’t count and counter-rebuttals of why they should. I should also note that the notion that democracies don’t fight each other has been used as justification for wars that you no doubt object to, as do I, such as ‘spreading democracy’ by invading Iraq.
Yes, some people somewhere, made a poor and hypocritical argument. Not sure of the relevance.
Why does it have to be one-sided? The OP didn’t suggest ONLY cutting defense spending, and leaving all other spending right where it is.
It certainly encouraged the war in Iraq, at any rate.
They take place in impoverished nations with dysfunctional governments. There’s no US or NATO forces on hand because there is nothing of value to the US or NATO nations to protect. This goes to the larger point, which has already been raised: war is a money-losing proposition; the nations wealthy enough to raise powerful militaries are aware of this, and refrain from wars of conquest (to say nothing of the nuclear deterrent). Therefore, there’s no need to maintain a massive standing army, there’s no threat to check.
If more of our military entanglements were motivated by altruism, you’d have a point, but the fact is they are not.
Who has advocated isolationism?
It wasn’t some people, somewhere. It was decision makers back in 2004 deciding to invade Iraq. One of the justifications given was to spread democracy throughout the Mid East, the virtue being that democracies (supposedly) don’t go to war with each other. The relevence is that you brought up the canard that democracies don’t go to war with each other.
Libyan fleets! Oh you mean the couple of dozen obsolete old pieces of shit, mostly non-functional, and armed with even more obsolete soviet weaponry from the 80’s? The one kept bottled up by a rag-tag handful of NATO ships? Those ‘fleets’?