America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

That is typical American binary thinking again, black-white-painting. Either we are a superprower, or we are a wellfare state. No in between. It is stupid to think like this.

Typical American binary thinking?

Originally Posted by Some German guy in another thread

.
Germany has just decided to fully pull out of nuclear energy within the next ten years.

What nobody says today is: the Shroeder government before merkel also had ruled that. Then came the CDU to power and opened the deal again, fully trusting into nuclear power. Then came Fzuskushima, and what many people do not understand is that us Germans have suffered much much dearer from Fukushima than those Japanese: we immediatly felt so much Angst that now Merkel opportunistically U-turned again and set course for leaving nuclear energy behind.

Folks who throw stones ought not to live in glass houses!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Lol, so wel'll be a 3rd rate miltary power and a welfare state. The world needs a few more of those.

I understand what you're suggesting, and that's a good route, but sometimes binary thinking fits the bill.

Neal, last time I checked the numbers your nation spent more on military issues than the world's 15 next biggest military spenders alltogether. Russia and China together would not even make up for just one third of your defence budget!

US black budgets not even counted!

[mookiemookie]

Off topic, yeah...

The WSJ has become nothing but a right wing rag sheet ever since Murdoch took it over. Once upon a time, you'd actually find economic and market news in it. Then the Op Ed section became like watching Fox News. And now, the noise machine has invaded the rest of the paper - the supposed unbiased "news." It's become just another mouthpiece for the propaganda machine who can't even get their facts right in many cases. Those that rely on the WSJ for making investment decisions are putting themselves at risk as the conflation of investment advice and political bias is a bad mix in general and a sure way to lose money.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

Typical American binary thinking?



Folks who throw stones ought not to live in glass houses!

I throw inside and outside the glass house. Regarding stone throwing, I am totally impartial.

[Armistead]

It seems with the cost of military comes the desire to constantly use it. Bush ran against Clinton's nation building and now we nation build through wars and constantly police the world. We're rebuilding infrastructure in other nations why ours crumbles. It seems the US must always pay the price. Wars alone cost us over a trillion. Let's face it, much profit to be made from war.

The cold war is over. Many of the platforms we have today give us very little bang for the buck. We spend more than the next five nations combined and to many that's not enough.

We could easily shut down over 100 cold war military bases in Europe.

No doubt the defense budget isn't gonna break us, but it must be on the table. My concern is constant wars and conflicts, why can't we mind our business. Our border is a warzone, let's protect it first.

The bigger welfare state is the bail outs of corporations that stopped working for americans long ago.

[Gerald]

Many bases are not in use today in Europe, which on the whole represents a very small cost on the whole.

[Oberon]

Italy was a superpower once, Britain too, as was Egypt, and Iraq. Great powers rise and fall, history shows us this, it's in how you accept this that governs the outcome of the nation. You can either keep holding on until the last minute and collapse in violence and chaos like Rome did, or slowly wind down like others did.

To be honest, I'd be a little less worried about one nation toppling and more worried about society as a whole collapsing, we are perhaps one great big superpower now, the whole planet is linked in a manner that, even fifty years ago (a gnats fingernail in the terms of the history of humanity) would only have been possible in the confines of one country. You can travel from New York to Paris in the same sort of convenience that you could from New York to *looks at US map* Philadelphia. You go back fifty or sixty years and such a trek would have involved a long trip by ship, go back another fifty years and it would have been an even longer trip. The concept of nationstates is fast becoming outdated, divisions are erupting not through race or nationality but through ideals, primarily because on this new world of the internet you can be any nationality or race, but generally you keep to one ideal. However the ticking bomb is resources, oil, water, food, our growing population and longer living society which places the accumulation of resources as a personal goal, well...unless we can pull some pretty nifty tech out of our backsides within the next century...heck probably even half that, well...we're looking at a nasty shock.

It's not governments that need to change...society needs to change.

Just my two cents and topic derailment...I'll call the breakdown gang...

[Betonov]

Why would one even want to be a superpower. All the stress, bad publicity, nr.1 target of rouge states. It's not as if the world is a VictoriaII game, where you have to be a great power to influence other states and get first dibs on resources. Anything can be bought anywhere anytime. Slovenia is a tiny nations with as much influence in the geopolitical game than a midget has in a basketball game. But still, we have anything we want, because we can buy it anywhere, anytime.

[Hottentot]

Interesting discussion and Betonov's comment especially reminded me of a good book I read about this recently. So I'm just using this chance to suggest Barry Buzan's "The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century".

[Blood_splat]

We're no longer a superpower... We lost superman.

[PeriscopeDepth]

Originally Posted by Aramike

Examples?

I may have agreed with you 10 years ago, but today???

Sorry Aramike, not as much as a fleshed/cogent out response as I'd like right now...Calc exam and work tomorrow . If you respond I'll try and spend more time on fleshing my post out on Tues/Wed.

The type of "wars" the US military is going to spend 90+% of its time on we are ill prepared for (though, things are in better shape than they were 10 years ago. kind of). What I refer to here is trash wars like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. Afterwards, if we are so very lucky we don't spend years trying to protect our forces from a hostile native population while rebuilding their infrastructure that took us weeks to destroy. And we cannot count on having land bases near enough to base tacAir out of. And the way we do things now (fighters flying 12+ hour missions to loiter in an area and drop a 500 pound hand grenade if ground forces call for help) is farcical. From both a cost and capability stand point.

The other kind of war is against a "near peer" type opponent. You know, China. Realistically speaking at least. And in that case we will be fighting against an enemy that is as far away as Japan was during WWII, with nukes and the will to use them against our carriers. ~600nm radius F-35s able to hit two aim points (still needing jamming, anti air, tanking support) flying from a 5,000+ man CSG in range of Chinese nuclear tipped ballistic missile systems is not a recipe for success.

Large permanent tactical presences in Europe, Japan, and Korea do not help us, and we certainly can no longer afford it anymore. We have given them 50+ years and a nuclear shield to sort things out, it's time for us to leave. As for these places value as forward basing tactical forces, how long did it take for bombs to start falling on Afghanistan after a madman slaughtered ~3,000 American civilians in a major American city? Almost a month.

The military needs a leaner force structure that focuses more on unmanned tactical air platforms (radius, loiter, cost, quantity superior. and a man doesn't die when it is destroyed.), contested entry from the sea with a leaner surface force (a 5,000+ man CSG is not acceptable, we will lose ships to the Chinese in ~2030) that has more strike platforms on deck that can go further.

The backbone of our tacair (tip of the spear) being manned Cold War spec'd fighter platforms is not sustainable from a cost standpoint, and not preferable when looking at the capabilities it brings to the table either.

Originally Posted by Neal

Fixed

PD

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Neal, last time I checked the numbers your nation spent more on military issues than the world's 15 next biggest military spenders alltogether. Russia and China together would not even make up for just one third of your defence budget!

US black budgets not even counted!

I know, I know And that's more of a reflection on Europe taking a free ride on the US military than anything else.

One other thing to keep in mind, Robert Gates is fully plugged into the situation, he know more than we do, and he's smarter than you and me put together. I take his statement pretty seriously.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

Off topic, yeah...

The WSJ has become nothing but a right wing rag sheet ever since Murdoch took it over. Once upon a time, you'd actually find economic and market news in it. Then the Op Ed section became like watching Fox News. And now, the noise machine has invaded the rest of the paper - the supposed unbiased "news." It's become just another mouthpiece for the propaganda machine who can't even get their facts right in many cases. Those that rely on the WSJ for making investment decisions are putting themselves at risk as the conflation of investment advice and political bias is a bad mix in general and a sure way to lose money.

Mookie, I have a feeling anything pro-business is a right wing "rag sheet" to you. Does it matter? They simply posted a piece that supports Gates' position.

[Bakkels]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

I know, I know And that's more of a reflection on Europe taking a free ride on the US military than anything else.

Even if it's a 'free ride', that's certainly no free ride I ever asked for. I don't like the direction it's going.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

Mookie, I have a feeling anything pro-business is a right wing "rag sheet" to you. Does it matter? They simply posted a piece that supports Gates' position.

Tsk tsk, Neal... I'm hurt. I prefer to keep my financial news and politics separate. Barrons, the Economist, Business Week and Bloomberg are all pretty good at impratiality while delivering financial and economic news.

I fully agree with your statement about Europe taking a free ride on the U.S. military's dime:



The problem with Gates and this article is that they ignore a large chunk of the defense budget in their $530 bn number. It's not just the Pentagon's budget. It's the other things scattered across the budget...the $19.3 bn for our nuclear weapons program, $53 bn for the National Intelligence program, $6.6 bn for military aid to other countries. It's easy to make your case look good when you ignore large swaths of reality.

I stand by my assertion that the WSJ is nothing more than a political rag sheet anymore, and not a serious financial newspaper.