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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

I think you underestimate the US military a lot. The petrodollar or whatever is only powerful because the US is able to protect economic interests with its military power. Last I checked the next best countries are a decade or more and several hundred billion dollars behind. Although, a good argument can me made about internal fighting and political in-fighting and weak stomach of the US voter-base, which can be remedied with the next Iraq/vietnam.

Several parties playing a game. One plays chess, the other Go, and yet another checkers. Long term victory,Long term dominance and permanent superiority or win a lot of short term battles and exhaust your enemy. I don't know who will win but make no mistake this is a war, if not cold then maybe deep-frozen.

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Your worldview seems to be from the 1970’s. I do not mean that as an insult; you’re just wildly out of date in terms of understanding modern geopolitics.

The US military today is a bloated, inefficient force sucking up resources that would be better spent elsewhere. They’re funding blimps to watch drug smugglers at the US border, for Christ’s sake.

The populace of the US will not stand for additional military adventurism on the scale of Vietnam or Iraq. Trump started the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan and was lucky that Biden got stuck with the mess Trump made of it. It was forecast to be a broadly popular move and would have been had execution been slightly better handled.

Why do you think the execution was poor?

There's no way to "better handle" leaving your corrupt puppet state to fend for itself after decades of fighting the will of the people who wanted a native Islamic government with their cultural values to rule. Americans universally fail to understand how unpopular we are abroad, how awful our low regulation capitalist values are, and how our military is seen as the murder machine that keeps our world-wide bullying going. There was never political will or loyalty in the puppet government or puppet military we built in Afghanistan. The only question was who was going to hold the bag when we finally had to leave.

The only good way to do this was to never invade and conquer but instead to chase ObL and capture him and fight the Taliban only as needed. How Bush got out of any responsibility for his reckless adventurism, not only here but the unforgivable tragedy of endless war crimes and crimes against humanity his Iraq invasion was, is the real tragedy here not Biden's "execution" somehow being sub-par. Per usual Democrats have to clean up after Republicans.

Hey man, Obama had 8 years to start a pullback. Otherwise I agree though. America probably seemed like a rainbow painted boot stomping on a human face forever.

> There's no way to "better handle" leaving your corrupt puppet state to fend for itself after decades of fighting the will of the people who wanted a native Islamic government with their cultural values to rule.

Decimate the country and leave ASAP. Rebuilding and making sure terrorists aren't harbored again is between the people and their new government. Either permanently occupy or leave after decimation. Half assing it like with vietnam will always end in wasted lives and resources.

In every conflict since WWII the US mil won conventional war and it has a better fighting force and weaponry than any country (and bases+carriers+allies). What they lost every time is public support for the war long after dominance and/or invasion has been established.

I mean, look at afghanistan, the war ended in 2004. The US could have declared that country their new territory and every conflict would be domestic terror. They did not need to stay after 04, they stayed to keep the place stable not to defeat the taliban (which militarily, they did).

But can we defend ukraine and taiwan at the same time? Can we afford to?

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