Nope. The U.S. was able to create its own puppet government in Afghanistan that governed the country, by its own with token help from other countries that wanted to show their fealty to the United States. Russia has set up nothing of the sort in Ukraine. And even all the more remarkable since Afghanistan is thousands of miles away from the U.S. and Ukraine borders Russia; the Afghanistan war caused literally no economic adjustments in the U.S. - hence the common refrain “the marines went to war while Americans went to the mall” - but the Ukraine war has caused a complete and total restructuring of economic life in Russia. The U.S. was able to land a larger, more complex mission in Afg. with far more dexterity and effectiveness with minimal impact elsewhere while Russia can’t even land a simple land invasion of a bordering country without failing miserably and causing yet another turn of the turmoil wheel that Russia has been spinning nonstop since the 1800s.
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- Thread starter bd popeye
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This was true in the past, but the world is changing really fast with China acquiring far more patents than the US in all these fields, and the US is getting weaker and weaker sinking deeper into debt.
The US could sanction everyone in the past due to the fact that they made all modern tech and could easily deprive any adversary by ordering their corporations and EU puppets to block trade with the target state, forcing their own expensive and unreliable product on everyone, but this is no longer working on non Western states and is doing serious harm to the purchasing power of EU states and other compliant states. A good example here is the Nordstream pipeline vs US energy that costs three to ten times as much as Russian energy. This situation is causing resentment against the US in all of the EU, and we see this in the elections of France and Germany for example, with people choosing to vote for anti US pro Russian governments. Eventually, the EU may very well say enough is enough to the US and free themselves from the occupation.
China's emergence in the aviation, defence, semiconductors, politics, medicine and other important sectors, is already gradually rendering US sanctions less useful by the day, and this is only the beginning. We can already see how sanctions imposed by the US on other states, serve more as a blockade against US businesses than they do the sanctioned states, because in the past, a US sanctioned entity had no other options, but now they can go to China and Russia for alternatives that are in most cases better, and in all cases cheaper. We are fast approaching the point where China's high tech sector becomes fully indigenous, and that is when the US sanctions will fail entirely.
A good example of this is Iran beating US sanctions by joining BRICS and the SCO, and now the very important INSTC that will make trade between Asia and Eurasia faster and cheaper and more importantly, sanction proof. This is how these states are standing up to the US, by taking the USD and US controlled trade routes out of the equation, and with China establishing a true alternative to US product, leaving the US powerless in hindering their progress, and rendering the USD irrelevant.
minimal cost?. US went into trillions in debt , deindustrialization and above all mass immigration.
The speed of US agro deficit ($43b) means that there are more people than counted hence lower actual productivity.
Ukraine war is too complex to put in few sentences but it transforming Russia that Gulf Royals can lend there soft power to it. first order of business is increasing soft Power not occupying area.
The Russians helped set up de facto protectorates in Donbass with their own governments as well. As for Afghanistan while on paper it had a real government controlling the whole country at one point, the reality was quite different. The government controlled Kabul and then you had warlords in different regions each doing his own thing.
Ridiculous. The US never had as many troops in Afghanistan as Russia has in Ukraine. The US has not seen a war of such a scale since Korea.
- US is broke precisely because it's unable to pay for the social security while already having a fully private healthcare industry.
- Healthcare spending accounts for 17% of US GDP, GDP that countries with socialized healthcare does not generate or not nearly as much, so even with inflated GDP from private healthcare America still couldn't afford social security.
- Exchange rate is just an observation of intrinsic USD dealuation. Fixing your frame of reference on the deprecaiting USD does not prevent it from devaluing. This is especially true considering US runs $1 trillion a year trade deficit which is very much affected by exchange rate.
- Nothing exist into perpetuity, both capital stock and technology are among the fastest depreciating assets in human history with technology often becoming obselete within 5-10 years. The fact that your thesis on American economic relevancy relies on non-depreciation directly implies actual US economic irrevelancy.
- America benifited from geographical seclusion from 19th and 20th century conflicts in Euroasia, and the resources gained through genocidial conquest, but at it's core America has never developed past the societal complexity of a tribal state, still to this day unable to comprehend any strategy other than zero-sum conflict, unable make long term plans for its own future and its prosperity still reliant entirely on enforcing external variables.
America's lottery winning ran out when its no longer able to enforce external variables, and like all lottery winners without any intrinsic skill to create wealth, it find itself bankrupt.
US simply repeated the same mistake as the Soviet Union, got kicked out after 20 years suffering not only direct financial cost, but opportunity cost in term of defence technology development that they might never recover from.
Russia on the other hand learned from Soviet Union, and will actually be able to hold Ukraine, if only because there are no more Ukrainians left.
Whether you like or hate Trump you have to agree that his assessment at 12:30 mark is spot on.
