Sometimes this question sneaks up to me like an intrusive thought, but recent events have made me give this question a lot more consideration.
“Comply with us, or we will kidnap your leader, bomb and occupy your land. Resist further and we will use nuclear weapons.”
They have no need to dress their words in the clothes of decency and legality. They hold the power and technology to force anyone to comply, even if a country had nuclear weapons too such factor would only become relevant if the country had a nuclear triad and a stockpile over 2 digits.
Operation Northwoods and September 11th prove that the leadership of the U.S. would gladly welcome violence on Americans if it can be used as justification for further violence against enemies of the state, combine that with the knowledge that the leadership of the U.S. is the only one in the world that has proven itself capable of using nuclear weapons on civilians. They are bandits unshackled by morality, humanity or consequences.
There would be no international consequences, there is no collective of states in the world strong enough and willing to challenge the U.S. if it started making demands backed by the threat of nuclear bombardment.
There would be no domestic consequences, the U.S. has the most obedient population in the world as well as the world’s most advanced police state.
So, what is stopping the U.S. from holding the world hostage with a nuclear gun?
Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil. It could start annexing all of the Western Hemisphere tomorrow as enslaved resource colonies and the world couldn’t stop them. It could force every country in the world except Russia and China to pay half their economy as tribute to keep American capitalism going for another 200 years and all it would need to do so is the threat of carpet bombing and nuclear terrorism.
The rate of profit will continue to fall either way, capitalism is inherently unsustainable, it will cease to exist no matter if it takes 50 years or 300. But in the short term I see it as a looming possibility that the administration of the U.S. will drop all pretenses and just take what they want whenever they want, backing their threats with nuclear weapons as it desperately seeks more resources to plunder, like a dying vampire thirsting for blood.
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I don’t know how I’d otherwise describe post-1945 history. Japan was nuked to intimidate the Soviets, nukes were threatened from the 1950s onward in Vietnam, they were almost used in Korea against China, and the Cold War was a nuclear threat against non-white self-determination globally. American nukes exist to enforce American hegemony. Any other country is given the choice to accept/support military invasion or face nuclear annihilation.
I suppose it was my naivety to think otherwise. But despite me accidentally describing modern American global dominance, nuclear bombs were not dropped on a civilian population post-1945, the Cold War forced the U.S. administration to mask themselves as heroes because the U.S.S.R. had the ability to shoot back with nuclear payloads.
I really have this morbid curiosity about how far the U.S. will take things in the age where there is no peer opponent willing to oppose them.
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nothing, and they already are, lmao
the soviet union
:((
They are doing anything exactly that
That’s the imperialism playbook. It’s what the US has always done. Give us your resources or we’ll fuck you up and take them.
what’s falling away is the pretenses and Liberal ideological mask
If anything it’s more cost-effective for the US to fuck countries up and take them because then they get to test out their latest toys on a live populace of “others” instead of at home where they might meet a modicum of political resistance.
at home where they might meet a modicum of political resistance.
hard to imagine it.
What do you mean, stopping?
The reality of nukes is that for as many genocidal hands and intents have been on them, even the most despicable people are terrified of using them. even against people they’re 100% sure don’t have them. once a bomb goes off, anywhere, every nuclear state in the world is on a razor’s edge deciding if they’re under attack and need to retaliate, and small mistakes and provocations can cascade into global destruction.
I hope this still holds true. I really do.
Russia is hardly the USSR but it’s nuclear interests and capability fill the same role strategically. As a chauvinistic capitalist country it’s even less ‘safe’ to push boundaries with.
the west has been pushing boundaries since at least 2014, with putin having declared so many red lines that they slowly turned into a red carpet.
They already are
There is plenty of things countries and people, even singular humans, can do, if they are willing to operate on entirely different level of spite.
But despite all propaganda, even hezbollah and hamas were not going after civilians specifically, even it were advantageous to do so.
Like plausibly, and i keep mentioning this, with clean lab, diy dna sequence synthesizer and couple of gpus you can make novel viruses to your hearts content, it costs like 500k all in all + 2-3 ideologically committed people. Instead of making bombs, poisoning water supply chains is wildly cheap, even if more complicated to pull off.
The simple matter is, the countries don’t want to go full tilt on spite, even as insurance policy and rather make deals to enrich local compradors.
Say every invaded country releases some virus costing 20 million cows infected with prions, or whatever, simple, costly, impossible to detect and harder avoid, direct hit to treatlerism. Or you can spend 200 millions on conventional weapons which you don’t even turn on.
Nuke is same as other options, their (chemical and biological) barbarity is the western construct, in any plausible nuke deterrence use, you threaten to nuke population centers just the same as less sophisticated brethren in response to attack, the level of barbarity and disregard for human life is the same.
“Comply with us, or we will kidnap your leader, bomb and occupy your land. Resist further and we will use nuclear weapons.”
The US enjoys such a large advantage over most nations conventionally that nukes don’t matter at that stage. The nuclear weapons are about war with China or Russia, in military terms “peer or near peer conflict”.
And by far the scariest thing here, is that US decision makers absolutely believe nuclear war can be “won”. In a sense that the US eliminates the adversaries ability to retaliate to the fullest extent it can, and takes less losses than the adversary. Nuclear war planning is nothing like the movies or TV. The book “On Thermonuclear War” by Herman Kahn is the most infamous and public argument for such logic.
What makes you think they aren’t?
Iraq gave up their chemical weapons, and Hussein got overthrown. Libya gave up their chemical weapons, and Gaddafi got overthrown. Ukraine have up its chemicals weapons, and is being overthrown. North Korea got a nuke, and Trump met with, and praised Kim Jong Un.
Ukraine never had nukes btw, this is a popular NATOid talking point but the Ukrainian Soviet hosted nukes on their territory on behalf of the USSR. When the USSR was legally dissolved, it’s liabilities and assets were given to the Russian Federation. All nukes were transferred directly from the USSR to the Russian Federation. Not even for one millisecond did the modern state of Ukraine possess nuclear weapons
When the USSR was
legallyillegally dissolvedI mean the legal process, I was not making a comment on the legality of the destruction of the USSR, but more on the formality of the processes
To clarify, I was talking about the dissolution of the legal systems. Not the legality of the dissolution.
Makes sense
rejecting the transfer and having them on your soil and 30 years to figure out how to hack the launch system would’ve been worth something
If they rejected the transfer (that was backed by the US administration) then they would have been destroyed and couped. They had no choice but to comply to the entire international consensus that all USSR nukes be given to the Russian Federation. America would never accept nuclear proliferation throughout all the post-soviet states, so this is a total pipedream fantasy. Modern Ukraine had 0% chance of ever having nukes.
then they would have been destroyed and couped.
that happened anyway?
I mean immediately, in 1991. The new Ukrainian state had to comply to the international consensus. There was no other option. The benefactor of their own “revolution” (the destruction of the USSR backed by the USA) demanded they give up the nukes to Russia. Even “their guy” wasn’t on their side. They had 0 chance of ever getting nukes, not one state on Earth wanted Ukraine to have nukes - not their neighbors, not their opponents, not their allies, not even the Ukrainian people wanted to incur the costs and obligations associated with having them. It was basically unanimous by everyone that Ukraine would not have nukes, including the Ukrainian administration at the time.
Then 30 years later we have people retroactively imagining an alternate history where Ukraine got nukes somehow, which is part of the entire Ukraine Mythos fever-dream that has gripped the west in 2022 and made them “reimagine” history. The same brainrot that makes Liberals clap like seals at the Ghost of Kyiv also makes them believe that Ukraine shoulda held onto “their nukes”.
The US has ~80,000 special operators within its military.
The military brag about needing roughly 1,000 special operators to topple a country.
We just saw Trump do it.
The United States has become a hydra. So its nuclear arsenal is not the tip of its spear.
Yet the government of Venezuela is not toppled.
That includes green berets and shit. We don’t have 80,000 Delta.
Nothing
