this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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A lot more people gonna start realizing this here soon...
Us got fat on the goos will and we don't have to capacity to maintain this soft power empire at the gun point like Russia does.
At best we could take over mexico and canda and then spend generations on insurgencies while rest of the world moves on to China centric world.
The US got fat after being one of the few industrialized nations that still had widespread infrastructure intact after WW2.
But yeah, US had a very lucrative soft power setup going on after the rest of the world rebuilt and/or modernized. It's insane that the Trump administration has all but virtually destroyed that in the span of 1 term and only a few months into a second term. I don't even understand why his billionaire fuckwad cronies are enabling it, as this will only hurt them long-term. Then again, the majority of these dip shits are incapable of thinking long-term sustainability.
The US managed to horde 80% of global reserves of gold by selling weapons to allied nations during WW2.
Being the greatest beneficiary of WW2 is a story that rarely gets told.
I mean kudos is deserved for rapidly industrializing into a weapons manufacturing hotspot when the demand was skyrocketing but a lot of Americans are taught that US ascension post WW2 was entirely self determined which is brain rot level propoganda.
Wait, what? We have easily 10x the military capacity of Russia and quite a few more friendly foreign governments ready to indulge Trumpism (if not downright giddy at embracing it). We absolutely have the capacity to lean in harder on our warmongering.
The only problem is we've already been doing that. Iraq and Afghanistan burned out the post-Cold War military's logistical capacity. Ukraine's burned through the old NATO arms reserves. The modern US military is profits-first, and that's what is ultimately unsustainable. You can't go around spending $100M in money and manpower on a single aircraft, particularly if something in the $100k range can take it down. You certainly can't go to war with giant floating bullseyes like our modern aircraft carrier fleet unless you're ready to take a few losses.
And that's the real danger America's military faces. We can't handle the appearance of losing. So long as you can keep selling people on the war (and the US media kept up appearances for two decades in Afghanistan, so its certainly not impossible) you can do Russian-style power grabs forever.