Originally Posted by
rickair7777
It's not actually empire building, the idea is to maintain a world order that allows for economic freedom and prosperity. We have ideals about democracy and humanity too, but it's the economics that underpin that.
It's a legit debate as to whether we should save all that money, resign as global cop, let Europe and Asia fall to the usual suspects, and go full isolationist. Since we (second only to Australia) have the largest moat in the history of warfare we could be reasonably secure in fortress North America.
But the economic cost of isolation would actually be far more than the bill for global cop, and rather disruptive to many sectors of our economy too. That's why you don't see too many politicians trying to go there. They all understand that, even if many of their constituents don't. I do agree that many of our allies need to pony up their contractual share of the defense bill... we should stand with them, not prop them up.
But I think you'll get your wish with regard to UK... Uncle Vlad is smart enough to slow boil that problem without a 1939-style overt invasion and that will give western politicians just enough political wiggle room to avoid an armed confrontation. Note how he "recognized" the breakaway regionals... now that they're recognized independent states he can claim they have the authority to invite Russian forces in for "peacekeeping" purposes.
Also note how we've been pretty careful about which eastern states we let into NATO... that preserves Russia's ability to use force to influence their neighbors without triggering Article 5.
We can't even maintain order in our own country, look at the damn border. We played global cop in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism, yet today, the communists exist in all of our major institutions, especially education, which is literally the worst outcome if you want to stop the spread of communism. And there are people who clearly support communist style policies to force those who disagree with them to acquiesce to whatever the party narrative at the time may be. Covid is the most obvious example of this. Funny how now that there is proof in data that all the covid dogma was mostly a lie, with the worst part being that we could have started treating people right away with cheap generic drugs given in the right doses, with doctors publishing specific protocols that they had used successfully, all the attention has suddenly been switched back to Russia Russia Russia.
All the manufacturing the built up the middle class after WWII has been shipped to communist countries after we figured out, hey we can use slaves over there and just not say anything about it, so everything will be cheaper to make and we can sell it for more money. Now, all the people who would have had these manufacturing jobs that used to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle with one person in the household working, are left with restaurant, grocery, housekeeping, etc industry jobs that don't pay enough to even rent an single apartment. To make things even better, the currency has been devalued to basically being worthless, and this inflation we're seeing now is probably just from the 20 years of war in the Middle East. The people who are going to deal with the covid inflation aren't even born yet. Unfortunately the part you make about ending the constant state of war being disruptive to the economy is accurate, and really sad that it's come down to that, and the endless defense spending is what's brought our currency down to the value of used toilet paper.
NATO is as good as dissolved, as it should be. The damn cold war ended over 30 years ago. The Europe needs the Russian gas, he'll just freeze them out in the winter if they want to fight. Vlad wins.