DTG said:
The US couldn't win in Vietnam and it can't win in Iraq. While it has the largest military budget the US military is all but incapable of winning wars. The Chinese military budget is expected to surpass the US military budget by 2025. Russia's military though downsized is still very powerful capable of operating on a global scale. While the US can send the world back into a stone age Russia can do that ten times over with a larger nuclear stockpile than the us. It's called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. If the US were to attack Russia then both countries would invariably be sent back a few thousand years under a hail of nuclear weapons. The US can only attack and possibly prevail against countries that do not have the nuclear power to murder millions of civilians in the US homeland. Russia and China do not need to answer to the public, both are more or less authoritarian, The US pulic however would not allow it's government to sacrifice millions of lives in a pointless war.
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The Vietnam war was essentially unwinnable. North Vietnam was recieving the majority of its arms (particularly aircraft, like Migs) from China, and there were plenty of Chinese soldiers fighting under the North Vietnamese flag, often attacking US forces in South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia. Without taking on China themselves, the North Vietnamese could never have been fully defeated by the US. Even if we had somehow managed to take control of the entire region, we would've ended up right on the Chinese border, causing the conflict to escalate much further.