I guess actually the USA would be one of the powers that it would be pretty easy to get people to unite against, with enough propaganda and such… especially with this financial crisis thing. Combine that with some nice facts (and spin) about the cold war, global destabilization, exploitation of third world countries (I know, I know, we do that too, but we don’t need to tell them, huh? ;)) Not that I seriously hate you guys or think this should be done, don’t misunderstand me, but in such a hypothetical situation you gotta play dirty.
And yeah, I’d guess you can take Belgium. Say what, invade in the next 2 hours and you get the Netherlands for free!
Can we all at least agree that any fighting is going to happen in Europe? Probably flaring up around either hardened or bare-bones U.S. military bases? Shortly thereafter the carrier groups and bombing raids arrive.
I think the chances of the U.S. having any meaningful invasion/occupation force are very slim, but probably an order of magnitude higher than the chance of an E.U. boot on U.S. soil.
U.S. Strategy: Naval blockade, attempt to establish air superiority and pound major industry and cities into submission. Sow seeds of discord among member nations and offer truces to individual nations. Resistance at home isn’t as much an issue, as the US likely won’t experience much damage on the home front, they attacked our boys on the bases first, and there is a common government, language, culture, and economy. Encourage Russia and the Middle East to halt energy sales. Long war of attrition, maybe token landings to keep European ground forces mobilized and occupied.
E.U: Unleash hell from the skies and harden airplane and anti-aircraft production. Stay on the defensive, keep trade and diplomatic relations as open as possible with all land-based neighbors. Keep a steady supply of blockade runners to overextend American naval power. Make it an unholy disaster that the US can’t maintain.
In the end, I think it becomes pretty clear after a couple years that neither side is really winning. The E.U. makes token concessions or individual member nations sign an armistice on rather friendly terms. Whatever the original disagreement was over seems trivial in retrospect.
I’m not sure you can effectively overwhelm a blockade in a world with cruise missiles with 1000 mile range. The guy at the console can push the button pretty quickly I’d bet.
Wouldn’t this be part of the European strategy, too? Then it just becomes a question of who’s better at doing the encouraging, and I’m not sure that would be us. Russia self-identifies as European, and Middle Easterners are a major immigrant bloc in Europe. And if military force becomes necessary as part of the encouragement, both Russia and the Middle East are accessible via ground from Europe. We’d still have access to South American oil, true, as well as whatever we can get domestically from Texas, Alaska, et al., but that’d still put a serious pinch on us. And the US economy is also more dependent on oil than is the European.
Rules of the “game” were set in the thread the OP spoke about as more than one American poster spoke of invading Europe – moreover, the OP himself speaks of a US invasion. I was simply responding to said scenario.
Having said that, it’s your game…have fun with it.
What it has to do with “Great Debates” beats the hell out of me.
Now there would be a thought as unlikely as in 1944 Germany’s allegiance to the West against the USSR. The only way to blockade Europe would be an American-Russian-Alliance to cut communications from the East. Europe doesn’t really have much of a coastline, all of it on the Atlantic. Other coasts are inland seas only approachable from the Atlantic. As long as the Straits of Gibraltar are held, food can continue to fly in from Africa, and even if the North African ‘Arab’ countries could be persuaded to prevent overflight (luck persuading Libya!) Europe is no more a ‘real’ continent than ‘India’, just a cultural concept that ends at Istanbul going South and a couple of thousand miles further East in the Urals for the sake of cultural distinction from ‘Asia’.
Even the way Europeans name it admits as much. West, Central and Eastern Europe really mean those divisions of the western half (or less) that is not Russia. Eastern Europe (and very likely Central Europe) geographically is the minority of Russia that is not in Asia. Russia is less of a country than a space that nobody carve up into countries. The only way to blockade political Europe, the EU, would be with North African, Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian support. Russian would be easy enough; they’re a bunch of whores who’ll go where the money is. That leaves Ukraine open because they will instinctively do whatever pisses Russia off. They haven’t forgotten that Kiev was the original ‘Rus’ (but have that it was Swedish ‘Vikings’ who founded it)
Georgia and Armenia now seem to accepted as ‘European’ although they are on the wrong side of the Black Sea, but Tadjikistan not because it is Muslim. Even if the other two were about the first to be declared heretical churches, they are still Christian heresies. Europe is too open to the East for attack. Days of the Cold War, yes we were in possible danger from those American bases if we thought the wrong way.
But the reality turned out to be expecting the USSR to protect us against the USA was like expecting Satan to protect against Beelzebub.
I don’t think the US imports a critical amount of energy from Russia; Europe does. The big difference, I think, is the U.S. is pretty much limited to encouragement, whereas Europe can take out the Suez Canal and play nice with Russia if necessary. That one opens up a whole can of non-nuclear worms.
And presumably only the U.S energy supply is in question, not its infrastructure. I’m guessing European refining capacity will be highly diminished as soon as possible. Meanwhile, this could finally get America motivated to switch to a sustainable energy source with heavy conservation, or annex some tar sands.
And I misspoke when I said blockade in my earlier post. What I meant was more along the lines of total naval superiority. I’m guessing that E.U. cruise missiles will pose a pretty menacing threat within mounted gun range.
No, the MAJORITY of those weapons are on SSBNs. That’s the primary means by which the UK and France ensure their retaliatory strike capability. Any one of those submarines could cause unimaginable destruction and horror to the United States; any two could cause the United States to cease to be as a functioning nation-state.
If we rule out nuclear weapons, I suspect the war is inevitable a grinding stalemate. The United States has the superior navy, which doesn’t help much in occupying Berlin unless you can find a way to put really big wheels on an aircraft carrier.
What hasn’t been mentioned so far (that I can see) is that the balance of weapon lethality to the number of available soldiers and weapons platforms is extreme in its imbalance as compared to, say, 1945. Armies are smaller than they used to be, with fewer, but much more advanced, weapons and weapons platforms. The American military, powerful though it is, just does not have the manpower or materiel to successfully invade and occupy a significant amount of European territory in the face of determined resistance. They’d just plain run out of fancy weapons long before Europe was subdued. Europe’s a THOUSAND times more powerful than Iraq; anyone who thinks they’d collapse the way Iraq did is fooling themselves.
Conversely, Europe couldn’t even begin to mount a serious invasion of the USA. The trip across the Atlantic would be very exciting and much shorter than planned.
If the war continues on, the United States’s advantage doesn’t go up, it goes down. Europe’s just as populous, just as technologically advanced, and has access to resources just as great through the rest of Eurasia.
It’s fantasy, because any such war would either be solved diplomatically very quickly or go nuclear, but in a conventional war scenario there would be no real winner, unless you start postulating new entries into the fun, such as South American uniting and declaring war on the USA, or Russia joining the USA and invading Europe, or something like that.
As soon as the EU concentrates its attention on the west, Russia will come in from the east and finish what it started in the 40s. As a nation very recently at war with the US, Britain will not enjoy the same relationship with the US it had in 1940.
It’s diminished in the EU as well. Much of what is said about the US’s de-industrializing is also true for Europe and in many cases the EU is even more dependent on the service sector and financial sector than we are. All those closed up Auto plants and steels mills could and would easily be ramped up in war time. The only reason they are idle now is due to the lack of money, not the lack of capable workers or resources.
The US is dramatically more resource rich than the EU. The EU has access to plenty of goodies over land from Africa and Asia but I’m not sure it’s fair to assume that would continue in a WWIII scenario. The US has domestic resources of Oil, Steel and just about everything else that are much larger than the EU. Most of the EU’s domestic Oil is offshore which is pretty damned vulnerable to a US Navy. Supposing the entire international shipping and transport network were to crumble as a result of the war, the US would have a sizable advantage.
Also, the US has a long reach. Even if there are areas in which the EU has a manufacturing edge the US could pretty regularly disrupt and even destroy those capabilities in short order. The EU would have a very difficult time slowing the US supply and production.
The US still has a much deeper culture of blue-collar work than the EU. And the socialized aspects of the EU and worker rights would create a environment much less willing to over-extend their work force to reach goals. The icon of Rosie the Riveter is not lost on modern Americans. I’m not sure the French, Spanish and Italians are going to be pulling triple shifts and getting the ladies in overalls as readily as the US.
I humbly and with total respect submit two things.
I do not believe your understanding of European culture and work ethic is especially well informed.
If you make an honest study of the history of warfare, I think you will find that in most cases that one side claimed to have some sort of cultural advantage over an allegedly inferior opponent, especially when those claims were based on vague statements such as the ones you used above, those predictions turned out to be comically and disastrously wrong.
Conceded on both points. Bad wording on my part perhaps.
However I think there’s some merit to the idea that there are more Americans living now who have firsthand experience working in a factory setting than Europeans. I also think that the tradition of a 40 hour work week with only 2 weeks paid vacation and limited holidays in the US will pay dividends in a war time environment compared to a European tradition of having more vacation and time off.
I agree with most of your points, but I object to this one. Once American bombs start landing with frequency in European cities, I doubt European workers will insist on having the entire month of August off. An existential war has a way of concentrating the mind and ramping up worker productivity. There’d be plenty of Rosa the Rivadoras (I just made that up) to build Euro war materiel.
(ETA: Neither of the above two posts were there when I made my comment. Slow fingers!)
On the nuclear tip, it appears according to Wikipedia that Britain and France each have four ballistic missle subs, for a total deployment of around 450 warheads. Bon jour, United States of Smoking Craters.
As for dropzone’s point, I can see the Russians approaching the U.S. after both sides have weakened each other considerably and proposing to carve up Europe, a la the Cold War. They’ll cut off the gas if we agree to give them everything east of France. I feel like this should be in the Diplomacy thread.
Agreed, I don’t mean to imply that the Euros won’t be willing to work. But the original comment was that the US has a advantage over the EU in manufacturing, I think this is clearly true. The fact that it would take some bombing to get the Spaniards to work in August confirms that point to some degree. It’s possible to say that the US has a higher affinity for manufacturing than the EU without trying to claim that the EU is a bunch of lazy layabouts on the dole.
I think we’ve all pretty much conceded that a traditional ground invasion/occupation is out of the question. What remains is a persistent air/naval assault on the European cities and industries. With US factories unconcerned with Jeeps, Tanks, and SUVs, we’d be pumping out planes, ships, and missiles as fast as we could make them, relatively worry free. Meanwhile, Europeans and their industries are under constant threat of destruction with more significant loss of life and capacity the longer the conflict lasts. Because occupation isn’t the goal, manpower isn’t lacking on the U.S. side.
I agree at the outset, but I think war weariness is definitely more of a factor for the E.U. Especially if a Spain or Italy doesn’t face quite the existential threat that a France or U.K. faces. I think the bond that ties the EU together is much more likely to strain under bombardment than the U.S. is while bombarding.
All of Canada is at times pro-American, at times anti-American, depending on the current political situation. There’s nothing specific to Quebec about this. Which side Canadians would favour would probably depend on just how exactly this war would unfold, and unless it happens because of some egregious action on the part of Europe or the US, we’d probably see pro-US and pro-Europe Canadians in every part of the country. The government, though, would be likely to either support the US out of economic necessity or attempt to stay out of it altogether.
Nuclear weapons are such an overwhelming advantage that they can’t be kept off the table entirely. Assuming neither side is willing to start blowing up whole cities, that leaves only tactical weapons. With the existence of tactical nukes, military size is less important than training and technological advantage. France and Germany probably have the best-equipped and best-trained soldiers in the EU (and probably the world), and they have a mutual military pact with each other outside of NATO, so they’re in the best position to fight Amerika.
Amerika’s strength has always been its ability to move large amounts of military strength in a short period of time. When fighting little brown people crawling through tunnels this gives Amerika overwhelming power, but it’s not quite as overpowering when dealing with another modern military with an effective bureaucacy. My guess is Amerika’s morale would be very quickly broken when confronted with forces capable of inflicting significant losses. Europeans have hundreds (even thousands) of years of experience seeing entire cities going up in flames, and aren’t going to balk at a few million casualties. Amerika would fold very quickly after foreign troops reduce LA and Manhattan to rubble.
Anyone of these recent immigrants young enough to fight would not have emigrated out the EU to escape dire poverty. I guess that survivors of the potato famine are not in good shape right now.
