Imagine, for a moment, that the US had fallen into the hands of a madman, who took control of the world’s largest military and used it in an enterprise that had the most threadbare premise. To nearly all of the rest of the world, the action would be morally indefensible.
What would be the likely result, taking as much into consideration as practical? Would the rest of the world (including or excluding the big superpowers) be likely to subdue/punish the US, or are its alliances too strong? Is it economy too critical to global stability?
Lunatic takes over the USA, does something really stupid that pisses off the world: does the world retaliate and take down the US? Is the US too powerful/economically important to be taken down?
As we’re discovering right this very minute, the federal government of the USA is such a mire of red tape that at least one lunatic is literally incapable of navigating it with even a marginal degree of success.
Norm MacDonald has a bit about Germany and the world wars. He starts talking about WWI and how Germany decided to go to war against the entire world. You’d figure the world had a huge advantage but actually it was pretty close.
Let’s keep all current politics out of this thread, please.
While the premise of the OP is a bit goofy, this basically boils down to a factual question about how powerful is the US compared to the rest of the world (militarily and economically), so let’s focus on that.
I don’t see how you get around the nuclear weapons issue from the get go. In your premise, the entire world is against the US–understood. With time and effort, the coordinated efforts of all other countries could build fleets, air forces, and armies sufficient to invade and conquer the US. At which point the US fires off its nukes at the fleets at seas and the major cities of the world. Presumably the other nuclear armed powers retaliate. Smoking ruin.
Exactly. I assume the madman in this scenario isn’t suicidal, in which case the nukes are unlikely to be deployed.
I assume that what would happen is that we’d have extensive negotiations about this “military enterprise” both before and during any military action. The world’s unlikely to collectively say, “The US is run by a madman, let’s take them all out!” Matters tend to be handled through things like sanctions, or withdrawing diplomats… just look at how the rest of the world handles North Korea. What makes you think that they’d be more likely to take direct military action against a nation that’s vastly superior?
Germany did not have a go at the world; the Great War arose from A-H, an enormous fraction of Europe at the time, joined early on by Germany. Then there was that whole dustup with Nicky vs. Vladimir, which kind of compromised the strength of the rest of the world.
Well, yeah, internal support would be an important issue. And getting the Pentagon onboard might not be as simple as issuing orders.
Norm MacDonald is a comedian. Of course it’s all complicated, but he was pointing out that a war between one nation and everyone else isn’t a slam dunk for the rest of the world.
There are any number of countries around the world doing things that are arguably morally indefensible right now, and by and large the world does not interfere. The times when it does tend to involve a combination of multiple complex influences and are difficult to predict ex ante.
As Napoleon said: “In war, three-quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.”
So take for example the war we just went through over in Iraq. What happened? Did our awesome military advantages mean that we won the war? I mean, we did steamroll over Saddam’s army. And then what? I certainly is true that Saddam Hussein no longer controls Iraq, and Iraq doesn’t have a chemical weapons program.
But Iraq is now much more closely allied with Iran than with the US, ISIS emerged, and the Bush administration goal of turning Iraq into a democratic western-allied showpiece turned into quite the disaster, and instead showed the exact opposite.
I mean, we could still be in Iraq blasting insurgents, and we could do that for another hundred years. Except we got tired of that, didn’t we? So we declared victory and headed home. I guess since we didn’t have a helicopters from the roof the the embassy moment, it wasn’t a complete and utter failure, just mostly a failure.
And this is why these sorts of threads don’t make sense. You can’t just take various militaries to Battleworld and line them up on opposite sides like you’re the Beyonder, and blow the whistle and have them fight it out to see who’s strongest. War doesn’t work like that. War is politics by other means. War is an attempt to use violence to accomplish some goal.
Are you trying to loot the enemy city and carry away the population as slaves? Are you trying to prevent the enemy army from looting your city and carrying your population away as slaves? Well then you have a pretty simple war aim. But what if your war aim is to defeat the enemy army then install a friendly client government? And you defeat the enemy army and install a friendly client government and go home and then the enemy city rebels against your stooges? Now you’ve got to go back.
So in a case where the United States is fighting a war against an alliance of every other country on Earth, what does that even mean? What is the war about? What motivates the various sides of the conflict? What do the various sides in the conflict want? What motivates popular opinion among the citizens of the various sides?
Another Lee Harvey Oswald will come along and set things straight. We were very close to this scenario in the early 60s, with a dangerously charismatic leader at the helm.
This could be an ipso facto thing: North Korea is a small country that is not much of a threat to anyone but SK and maybe Japan. The US gone out of control could be a serious problem for a lot of other countries, which is why I imagine the possibility of the world raising a response.
Of course it can be done…but only if everyone else attacks at once. Any country trying to be the first to get the ball rolling by making a first strike is just committing suicide. Multiple strikes from several countries at once might do it, but that much collusion would be hard to accomplish and harder even to keep secret from the U.S.
