A Dish Served Cold

I've decided that the reason the US is so damn belligerent is because there hasn't been a real war, or even attack on the US mainland in living memory.

Oh sure, there was Pearl Harbor, a few minor fire balloon attacks on the West Coast, and a battle or two in the Aleutian Islands during WW2, but there really hasn't been a major war or attack on the US mainland since the US Civil War.

It's easy to go to war when all the damage is on someone else's home turf.  The two world wars chewed up most of the face of the Earth, but the US mainland was unscathed.  All of America's big battles have been elsewhere for far more than a century.

Americans, at least anyone alive in the past 60 years, has never seen war come to their homes.  They have all been radio and TeeVee events shipped overseas.  Americans have never experienced someone dropping bombs on their houses, destroying their cities, rolling tanks through their streets.  It's all a kind of fantasy/theoretical thing with shell-shocked soldiers coming home, but that's about it.

You can point to 9/11, and we can argue over who done what, but the fact is those folks who were there that day experienced what the US does to dozens of other nations on a daily basis.

Imagine a 9/11-type attack once a month for years.  Remember the shock and disbelief when that happened?  Suppose your daily life felt that way.

I suspect that Americans would be a lot less gleeful about waging wars on other people if they ever experienced what it is really like. I bet they'd be a lot more reticent to invade and bomb other countries if they had living memories of their neighbor's house vanishing one night, or dodging bodies in the street, or sleeping with weapon-fire all around.

I bet they'd stop all this nonsense if death squads roamed their shopping centers and foreign soldiers set up check-points every mile or two, and gangs of military thugs busted down their doors once a month to search for _______ (fill in the blank).

Yes, American love war because they've never dealt with the consequences.  America is a superpower today because it was one of the few nations on Earth that wasn't reduced to rubble after WW2.  America has been lucky...so far.

But America, with all it's self-righteous meddling and destruction of other nations will eventually piss off enough people that it will get a taste of it's own export.

Russians are delightful people with a kind of no-nonsense attitude, when it comes to how other treat them.  A Russian will defend you to the death, unless you do something to cause them harm - like surround his country with foreign militaries and threaten his economy with sanctions and invade his neighbors on false pretenses.

The Chinese are wily folk.  They are all business and rarely let their hair down.  Chinese especially like order and predictability, and spend a lot of time trying to build businesses and ensure a steady flow of income.  Until you start messing with his trade flow and blocking his customers and making business less orderly and predictable.

We could go on discussing all the other countries, like Germany and France, who like their lives pretty much the way they are, and don't take kindly to folks who disrupt the status quo.

Assuming that the old saying about the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then what's to stop all these folks from banding together to kick a little American ass so they can all get back to business without all the damn interference?

US foreign policy and intervention is based on the fact that the American people have never had their collective asses thoroughly whipped.  Like the neighborhood bully, the rest of the kids will go along for a while, but not forever.  Eventually, the bully will go too far and the rest of the kids will gang up on him.  What's worse, when the bully is shown to be vulnerable, a lot of other kids join in just to ensure the bully doesn't stir shit again.

I don't think it's a matter of "if," but rather "when."

The US has spent the last two decades dropping bombs and rattling sabres all over the world, and at some point, the world will return the favor.  What's more, with today's technology, a lot of folks can sit at home and launch all kinds of stuff, like drones and missiles, and go home for dinner, just like those good folks at the Pentagon.

There are two things the US policy makers have been counting on: the fact that the US is fairly isolated, and that it controls the world's financial system.

In the first case, nothing is too far away to attack now.  A dozen nations have fairly advanced space programs, and a dozen more have drone technology.

As for the second issue, eventually folks will get tired enough that crashing the global economy will seem like a small price to pay to shut the bastards up.

If you think it would never happen, then I suggest pulling out a good book on world history.  Better yet, how about The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?  It can happen.  It has happened.  I will happen again.

The question is, will the American people take control of their government before it's too late?

As the old proverb says, "Vengeance is often more satisfying if it is not exacted immediately."  And the longer it waits, the more destructive it gets.