I’m not English, have no English ancestry that I’m aware of, and I don’t own a donkey. I do believe in giving credit where it’s due, which is why I credit the Brits with saving themselves in 1940 with very little help from the USA.
As someone else has already stated, the Nazis lost their chance at invading Britain in late 1940, because the RAF fought off the Luftwaffe, and not even Hitler was crazy enough to think that they could invade Britain without air superiority. Over a year before Pearl Harbour, Britain won a strategically vital victory over the Nazi war machine.
Britain was safe from invasion after 1940. The Nazis wouldn’t have attacked Russia if they were still planning on trying to invade England, and everybody knew it.
The rest of the world pays less on their defense forces because they know they can always fall back on the good old USA. No-one assumes we pay for everything or even a majority. Or even a large minority. 1% is too much.
I just don’t think we should pay anything for ungrateful snotty ‘allies’ who use the money saved on their own home defense to try and defeat us economically. Defend yourself and let us bring our boys home.
I can, at least, spell “arrogant”. Personally, I found the assumptions behind your OP to be highly offensive to the various nations that are (and always have been) allied with the USA.
“the world, as much as they purport to hate the US, has become very complacent with the idea that they don’t have to try to make things better because the USA will always be there if things go amiss.”
How is that not a flat-out insult to, well, everywhere except the USA? Do you seriously believe that no country besides the US ever does anything to help maintain stability and peace? Is that what you’re claiming? And then calling me arrogant?
You don’t know my assumptions. You can’t read my mind. You started the name-calling. No-one but you said that other countries do nothing. So address the OP or shut up.
OK - specifically in regard to your OP: “Do you seriously believe that no country besides the US ever does anything to help maintain stability and peace? Is that what you’re claiming?”
A simple yes or no will suffice, if you don’t wish to elaborate.
Your assumption seems to be that the US does all the work, pays all the bills, and that no other nation makes a substantial contribution to its own national defence, or to international peacekeeping. Is that correct?
I can’t read your mind, so here’s your chance to tell me whether or not I’ve understood correctly what you were saying in your OP.
And I’m pretty sure I didn’t call anyone any rude names.
The US spends more than twice as much (in actual dollars) as the entire European Union which is in second place! In 2006 the EU just beat the US in GDP.
Pay more attention. The US FAR outstrips anyone else in the world in military spending. No one else is remotely close.
As I’ve already said. I make no such assumption that the US does everything, or even a majority to maintain stability or peace. You shoved that idea into this thread.
I just want to know what people think would happen if the US brought all non-embassy military personnel home.
I think you’re the one kidding me. You answered a question I didn’t ask as if it was the one I did. You’re not a politician, by any chance?
I didn’t say the US didn’t spend a monstrous amount of money on the military. I didn’t claim that the US didn’t spend far more than anywhere else.
What I asked was if you could find a single US ally that doesn’t spend a large percentage of its national budget on its own defence force. I’m still waiting for your answer on that one. The fact that the US spends more is a) something I never denied, and b) not the question I asked.
What I find obnoxious here is the fact that many Americans assume that their allies are not doing any of the work and/or paying any of the bills. You know what? Our people are fighting and occasionally dying beside their American allies. British, Australian, and Canadian troops, for instance, are getting shot at in various hellholes in support of their US allies right now. You want to claim that no-one else is doing anything? You want to claim that US allies are getting a free ride at the expense of the USA?
Try telling that to the families of the non-American troops who have died in Afghanistan or Iraq. The fact that more Americans die than US-allied troops isn’t really the point: it’s your war, why are we even there? Because we support our American allies, is the answer. A little gratitude wouldn’t be out of place, and the assumption that your allies are getting a free ride at your expense is incredibly offensive. You’re insulting people who are fighting alongside you for your cause.
You want to claim that the non-US troops that are putting their lives on the line in support of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are getting armed and outfitted by US taxpayers? Bullshit: not only are those troops supplied and funded by their own country’s taxpayers, they’re often supplied with billions of dollars of US-made military hardware, bought and paid for at the expense of their own taxpayers. We’re putting money into your economy at a much higher rate than we’re costing you money.
If you have any evidence of the US supplying military hardware to the national troops of of any major US ally for free, let’s see it. I’ll save you the effort: there isn’t any. US taxpayers might well be funding the outfitting of Iraqi security forces, for instance, but the Brits, Australians, and Canadians in those places are paying their own way.
Rather intriguingly, I see that that is the expenditure for next year. Somebody been doing a little time-travel? The list of percentage GDP is ever stranger because there the USA is beaten by 26 other countries, most of which are Arab and African nations nobody would want to visit for fun - but also including Singapore and Greece. Considering that most of the EU’s expenditure comes about because neither France nor Britain can quite understand that they have not been imperial world powers for nearly fifty years and actually Japan is high up there which isn’t supposed to even have official military forces. I am sure that if the USA reduced its military expenditure to something like Russia’s and transferred the surplus to health care (its economy would collapse) but apart from that, most of the Middle East and South America would breathe a sigh of relief and feel safe to cut theirs. American complaints about military expenditure are on a par with Julius Caesar saying it’s unfair that the Greeks and Gauls don’t match Roman expenses.
And yet, right there in the OP: I ask this because I have come to believe that the world, as much as they purport to hate the US, has become very complacent with the idea that they don’t have to try to make things better because the USA will always be there if things go amiss.
That certainly seems to me to imply that you think the rest of the world “doesn’t try to make things better because the USA will always be there if things go amiss.”
Plenty of countries, including all of the major US allies, are definitely not complacent, and are all spending plenty of their own money on national defence and international peacekeeping.
So hopefully we can agree by now that your belief was mistaken. I certainly hope so, anyway.
That being the case, what would happen if the US packed up everything military and went home? There’d be some regional instability, for sure. Maybe even a few invasions. It’s hard to predict, even hypothetically, but while I think there would be an increase in general badness, I don’t think it’d be the apocalypse.
For instance, I think if North Korea invaded SK, the Chinese would stomp them down. North Korea is useful to China as-is, but the Chinese wouldn’t allow them to get too powerful in the region. China might take Taiwan, too, but I doubt they’d make it a bloodbath. I’d say it’s bound to happen one day, anyway.
And so on. Some adjustment, both nothing globally catastrophic.
Granted they are a combination of countries but so what? They act in a concerted effort. They provide for a common defense.
I provided the cites you asked for. Have seen none from you in rebuttal. Do your own work. Want to show me that other countries spend ungodly amounts of their income on their military then YOU provide a cite like I have. And please keep it to the industrialized world (doubtless there is some third world dictator who spends vast sums compared to GDP on military to keep the peasants in line with no regard to them starving).
Allies are losing their kids in our wars. Look around this board and you will see I am no fan of those wars. I do not want either of our sons and daughters in there.
That said, even in Desert Storm I which was the most “combined” military for this stuff since WWII the US troops vastly outnumbered foreign troops. Yes other countries sent troops and I am not unaware or unappreciative of that. Despite all that the US had very nearly double the troops in that war than all other countries combined (go ahead, add them up, I did). That includes Kuwaitis who we were liberating and Saudi Arabians who we stationed out of. Great Britain sent 43,000 troops. The US had 540,000 troops there.
Time to get off your high horse. The facts are against you.
Quite aware of what it is. You need reading comprehension.
I’m done with your drive-by’s till you have something substantive to say. Been on this Board a long time, my posting history if free for you (or anyone) to see and none of it supports your accusation.
If it weren’t for Churchill and the British firewall it would have been a markedly different war. The United States was not a world power at the beginning like GB and the American populace was still gun shy after WWI. If England had fallen and Germany gained control of the infrastructure early on then we would likely have sued for peace and not developed the war machine as well as the atomic bomb. We went from a sleepy country to one capable of making one B-24 bomber an hour. Churchill was the catalyst that put it all together. If the US had not entered the war England would have eventually fallen. The V-1 buzz bomb alone represented a weapon that was much cheaper to build than a conventional bomber and could have been launched continuously without German casualties. Germany also had developed a jet bomber toward the end of the war that was capable of evading British RADAR.
While the British developed the code breakers they also shared the technology. A high-speed version of the bombe was designed and built in my home town by the National Cash Register Company.
It’s truly amazing how many decisions/technological breakthroughs went into wining the war.
As far as the op question is concerned, If the United States pulled troops back and assuming a vacuum needs to be filled it will be a tremendous financial burden.