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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

If the US ever tries to have conscription again, it will destroy the state as it exists.

I would have thought that in the 90s but the fervor around 9/11 made me think that such popular consideration is fickle in both directions. If we were fighting an actual, military threat to the country, conscription would have almost certainly happened.

I'm not actually sure another 9/11 would have the same unifying effect it did in 2001. Today the information ecosystem is so much more fractured, there's way more material and reputational reward for being a "counter-consensus" voice, and polarization has increased to the point where it has totally undermined even the potential of national unity -- hop on Twitter and you can easily find tons of partisans declaring that they'd rather live under Chinese communist or Russian anti-liberal "trad" rule today, if that were an option.

My guess would be that if something like 9/11 happened again today, you'd see [tribe controlling the White House] try to use it as a unifying event, and this would immediately catalyze a furious reaction and counter-narrative from [tribe not controlling the White House] denouncing it as cynical grift, especially if it was used to try and justify a draft.

I agree with you that the US does not have the political legitimacy for conscription right now, and its surprising that they did for WW1, WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. None of those conflicts were existential for the US, they were all power plays of some kind.

How in the world was WW2 a power play for the US?

To be concise, power shifted to the US. The colonial era ended or was slated to end. Former colonies were liberated and became client states of the US. The US retained an industrial base, Europe did not. The Bretton Woods agreement was signed. The Marshall plan was enacted. The Euro-Dollar system followed. As the sole remaining industrial power the US was able to dictate terms to the rest of the world.

The topic goes quite deep. I'm sure better minds have written books arguing the specifics.

That's a very different claim from what was said originally though. It's true that World War II resulted in the US being much more powerful, but the evidence that this was the intention all along in joining the war is very shaky. Both among national elites, and even moreso among the general public, opinion was pretty strongly isolationist and against getting involved in World War II until Pearl Harbor happened. There's not really any reason to believe that there was a master plan to make the US the global superpower by entering the war, it just kind of happened.

That's my understanding as well. We _may_ have entered the war if Pearl Harbor had never happened.

If the Japanese had not attacked, the United States certainly would've entered the war later, but I don't think you could ever refer to it as a "power play".

Entering later rather than sooner was a power play.

Ascribing intent is tricky here. Personifying the modern state is another iffy area. "Directed history" is another can of worms.

Again, I think this is wrong and you're suffering some hindsight bias. In retrospect it can look like the entry of the United States into WWII was always inevitable, but this is not how people saw things at the time. Up through 1941 the American public saw the war as a European affair that was not our problem: people were strongly against actual military involvement and even the Lend-Lease Act was quite controversial. It wasn't until Pearl Harbor that the entry of the US into the war was a sure thing.

It is too subjective to ascribe intent. It is worse than psychoanalysis because "the US" isn't a distinct individual. Instead there's a collection of individuals, all with different sets of sometimes overlapping incentives.

Inevitability isn't the question. Rather, "power play" in terms of post-hoc analysis is the only question we can probe. Suggesting otherwise is a leap beyond conjecture.

Without implying that this was the analysis at the time, we can safely say that the US was positioned to be the sole remaining industrial superpower post war, if the US entered the war at the time which it did. If it had entered earlier or not at all, this may not have been the case.

The original comment was concise. Perhaps it was appropriate for a simple assertion, but it did leave room for ambiguity.

You're totally right: the outcome of WW2 had a lot of effects that ultimately benefited the United States.

My reply was directed towards the idea that the US entered WW2 as a "power play", not that the outcome of the war resulted in more power for the US.

The primary reason the US entered WW2 was because of Pearl Harbor.

There is a reason that FDR fully intended to fight a pacific war years before pearl harbor ever happened. Japan doesn't just attack Hawaii because they were deranged.

The United States might not have entered the war at all had the Japanese not attacked. The American public was split up until Pearl Harbor.

Entering WW2 is the most righteous thing the US has ever done. I know that the US has done a lot of wrong, but I cannot imagine how much more suffering there would've been if the Axis had won.

WW2 wasn't existential?

If WW2 wasn't existential I don't know where the bar is.

There was zero threat to CONUS during WW2. If you understand that FDR was planning on fighting a pacific war long before pearl harbor it makes a lot more sense.

The USA is not just CONUS.

Also there was a Japanese plan to unlease the plague on San Diego - it was ended by WW2.

Not...quite sure how much of a threat "attacked Hawaii, allies under attack, plans to send plague to San Diego" all groups up to be, but yeah it was existential.

I'd wager conscription would only be relevant if the state was effectively dying anyway.

The US has no national security threats in its region. Conscription would only be about fighting a war with China, which would be a war of choice (like all US wars).

It wouldn’t be a war of choice.

It would be a war of choice in the sense that it's not an existential threat.

You can relatively easily conceive of scenarios where the US either needs to directly confront China, or lose its geo-strategic preeminence, but it much much harder to conceive of scenarios over the next 50 years in which direct confrontation with China is 'actually existential' (in the sense that if the US loss or did not partake in the confrontation, that the US would domestically cease to exist in a recognizable form).

Effectively, the US' challenge for recruitment (and honestly a lot of things) is to convince enough of its population that US hegemony/preeminence is "a good thing" and worth fighting and dying for.

Too bad the US pissed away a good chunk of that capital with GWOT.

This is absolutely true - in the current information environment.

Slowly boil the frog by removing internet freedom for 50 years, and close down independent media outlets, prevent growth of organic networks? Sure.

There's no guarantee that our freedoms continue unabated. Look at Jan 6th and how dangerously close we came to authoritarians seizing power. There was a false elector scheme!

Or a "backdoor" where as soon as the authoritarians grab power, they flip a switch and the only networks you have are ham radio enthusiasts. Not good.

Well sure. The state as it exists will cease to be, and there will be a new state that's a lot like the old one but with conscription. You can say the same about every change to the state. Are you positing that the replacement state will be better, or worse, or is this just an observation that changing something makes it different?

I was being charitable. It will be vastly worse for the US. And in the event of a war with China it could very plausibly be the end of the US as a unified state. There will certainly be plenty of political violence.

Why would they? There is no any reason to do that. It's the opposite of the situation in Russia where Putin is afraid to lose face so he is ready to send the next hundred thousands of cannon fodder.

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