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Mnementh said:
OK, I will not answer everything in detail. But I think you want problems in the world that indeed are bad should be solved by the old means (mainly military) that are the reason these problems cropped up in the first place. I think you can't control a fire by burning down the house. Let me explain. The US does not only have direct influence over the politics of other countries, as the or one of the dominating forces in the world for around 100 years now it has a lot of indirect influence, which means countries look at what the US does and make their conclusions based on that. What can be consistently viewed from the world is, that the US is using military solutions to solve their problems all over the world for many decades now and even with no direct military involvement uses the might of their forces to get their way. And other countries take notice. China has a quite small military, compared with it's geographic, demographic or economic size. Yet Xi Yinping took notice and is expanding the size of the military for some time now. It will take more time, but as China is bigger than the US, it will inevitably end up with a bigger military, rendering the politics the US did for the last 100 years as pointless, as it relied on being the biggest military power. But the US cannot win a cold war against China, because China is so big and also because the US ruins iutself domestically. The ignorance of the internal problems will also make them weaker in foreign politics. If we look at current problems: Putin has built the military for a long time now. True, Russia had a lot of military left over from the cold war, but the cold war had ruined them and they were willing to reduce weaponry to focus more on economic growth. In the pre-Putin era there were multiple treaties between the Soviet Union/Russia and the US for reduction of weaponry, most notably START and SALT (which includes ABM). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty That ended with George W. Bush who retreated from ABM in 2002. The Duma (russian parliament) had ratified START II under the condition that the US respects the ABM, so that killed START as well. That is the start of Putins presidency. Putin and Bush made a new contract (SORT), which was considerably weaker than the ones before. In the following years the US seeked to improve strategically on their military capabilities and voided all efforts for disarmament and gave Putin room to grow the russian military as well with the goal to take control of the former soviet influence sphere by military means. This sphere includes Ukraine. So yes, the politics you and many others want to use to solve the invasion in the Ukraine is cause for these problems in the first place. And not only there, as I said before other countries like China seek also military power, simply as the US shows how they can use it. I would prefer a world that is going back to disarmament treaties like after the cold war and would this time include new powers like China and India and regional powers like Saudi-Arabia. The NATO bears the same problem. It is a hammer in a world that need more soft solutions. The NATO is designed by principle to protect the interests of North American and european countries. Africa, South America and Asia are for the most part out of the equation here and basically see themself opposed by this military alliance. No wonder they seek their own military power to counter it. You say the UN is toothless. But it is so because the NATO powers make sure the UN never gains more influence. NATO powers have often opposed UN solutions and instead stepped in as NATO to solve problems with military. The UN had not the opportunity to built up their own forces and they are sidestepped if the NATO want to directly deal with stuff. So the weakness of the UN is a result of the existance of the NATO. But as the NATO is one-sided everyone outside wants to grow their own military power as they are potentially targetted by NATO if they ever cross the interests of the US or western europe. So the existance of the NATO brews military conflict. If instead the regulating force is internationally controlled other countries wouldn't have the need to grow their own military to counter them, as they are part of it and part of the decision making. So yes, for a safer world NATO needs to disband. Not over night obviously, it has to be reduced in power step by step with the UN growing power in accordance. Overall your band-aid (and that of many politicians) to problems resulting of these military centered politics is more military centered politics. And if these exact politics lead to more problems they say: "See, we need that military." That is putting oil in the fire, it is no sufficient solution. Also I want to add, that domestic issues also have a massive influence world wide. As I said, the US is a dominating force, that does not mean military alone, but also economics or cultural leadership (Hollywood is still dominating most screens in the world). The domestic issues are well-known in the world and also the inability to address them. It is visible that things get worse and worse for around 30 years by now. This does embolden people opposing democratic and human rights values, as they squarely point to the US and say: see, it is shit. So the US needs to get their shit together and not by more violence, but by sustainable solutions. I don't see Trump or Biden or Kennedy offering any of this. |
Problem is historically when countries were more balanced militarily, there were a lot more wars, some very deadly. Ever since the advent of superpowers like the UsA, wars have been a lot less frequent and a lot less deadly. If America loses a significant amount of military budget, then it is likely more wars will come and when the UsA goes to war, there will be more casualties. Americas massive military budget is not only for hurting the enemy, but for protecting their own soldiers.
Countries like China and Russia cheap out on their military budget because they don't care about their soldiers very much.
