An America eternally ‘at war’

A great power without a significant enemy? That's what the U.S. has become.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self. The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces. The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throwaway from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing.

The U.S., by contrast, has 1,000 or more bases around the world. It spends as much on its military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies) combined.

It will spend an estimated $1.45 trillion to produce and operate a new aircraft, the F-35 — more than any country, the U.S. included, now spends on its national defense annually. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces, dominates the global waves, and the U.S. Air Force controls the skies in much of the world. And the president now has at his command two specialized armies to supplement the traditional armed forces: the CIA, which has been heavily militarized and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air wars throughout the Middle East and environs; and the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military, whose members are deployed to hot spots around the globe.

By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way. And yet it couldn't be more obvious that it's not. Despite its overwhelming military superiority, nothing seems to work out in an imperially satisfying way.

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HT: T-19