I want a 200 comment struggle session by the time I go on lunch
unironically this. any number of more fucked up laws/supreme court decisions that come down and cali does this weird quasi-succession that starts the balkanization. chud president deploys regular army units, maybe we get some crazy confused fighting between a dozen factions in the state before everything gets out of hand everywhere and either a coup or the collapse comes forth :sicko-yes:
Any war with California would start over water, and you just know someone like Steven Colbert would do a skit called California uber water allies about why if you oppose a pipeline you are racist.
My bet was Canada but ultimately for the same reasons. Honestly might be both
They spooks have wanted Iran for 50 years , and time is running out.
The US's chances of success in Iran get slimmer every year as more and more sophisticated drones and missiles come on line. It'd already be a nightmare for the US - Iranians might feel all kinds of ways about their government but they all love Iran and their heritage as Iranians and I sincerely believe they would be motivated to fight like no one the US has faced since Vietnam. Iran is a much larger and more defensible country than Iraq and the Iranians have been doing everything in their power to tailor their military to have a chance of resisting a US invasion for decades.
I think the US could destroy most of the infrastructure in the country but I think a ground war would be a meatgrinder like we haven't seen before.
My bets on Afghanistan (again) but that's easy money.
My mid odds pick is Columbia. They've taken a turn to the left and they're way too close for the US to comfortably let that happen.
Long odds is Uganda.
They're not in an area the US typically intervenes in directly (it's usually through UN/France) but, well they recently found gold deposits worth 12 trillion USD and are trying to have state owned companies take a large share of that profit.
States currently considered rogue states by the United States:
Afghanistan Afghanistan (de facto)[1]
Belarus[2]
Cuba[3]
Iran[4]
Nicaragua[5]
North Korea[6]
Russia[7]
Syria[8]
Venezuela[9]
What’s a little bonesawing a journalist between friends
Ground troops? That’s a big call. It would have to be some relatively unaligned country in Latin America. Most other places they’ll just drone the shit out of.
“Venezuela, that was some mean bush.”
https://youtu.be/wBJ0gGJXDAs
Movie references aside, South America would be too spicy for the mayos to handle, I think. Some poor downtrodden African country seems more likely to me.
I don't see how the US can invade Cuba with 1.2 million paramilitary forces and 2million able bodied people ready to be called up at any time.
3.2 million people are like 25% of the population of Cuba.
The US has an air force, a navy, and all kinds of other shit Cuba just doesn't have. And there's not really anywhere to run on Cuba, it's a small country. Plus we could stage forces in Guantanamo. Having a million guys with rifles is of limited utility if you don't have the heavy weapon systems to back them up. I'm sure it would be a huge clusterfuck, but the US could absolutely maul Cuba if it wanted to. It could just do what the Saudis have done to Yemen and destroy all the civilian infrastructure, blockade the ports, and wait for everyone to starve. Unless Cuba could pull a bunch of hypersonic anti-ship missiles out of nowhere they'd be fucked with no way to retaliate.
Achieving an occupation of Cuba would require murder on the same scale as the Korean war. They can not occupy the country against millions of people willing to fight them without exterminating the people willing to fight them.
It would make Russia in Ukraine look positively friendly.
I'm not sure why they'd occupy. Cuba has nothing going on economically except sugar and the US grows plenty of sugar beets. Honestly, Idk why we'd invade Cuba at all except maybe to make an example of them. But then I don't really understand why the political class still has a hate boner for Cuba after all these years, either, so maybe I'm just not imaginative enough.
A not insignificant amount of US foreign policy is driven by the fear of looking "weak" to the US public. Look at the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how that dropped Biden's approval numbers. One major contributing factor to getting Reagan elected was Carter doing the right thing and handing over the canal to Panama. And the Vietnam war definitely went on as long as it did in part because every president back to Kennedy thought it would be political suicide to just "give up".
With Cuba, any olive branch a politician tries to extend gets painted as being soft on "dictators". Bernie got flak for speaking positively about Cuba. Karen Bass did too. Obama tried to open up relations more (maybe, I've also heard he just parroted the company line about how Cuba needs to become capitalist before the US will have a relationship with them) and also got raked over the coals. Politicians will not try and change status quo with Cuba because there's no incentive too.
At some point though, it would be useful to discuss the US public's role in empire and how we think anything less than pushing everyone's nose in the dirt is "weak".
Because it would be 100% necessary to.
I agree that the case for invasion is low. It doesn't make much strategic sense mainly because it would be extremely costly, long, difficult, and would not really be much of a gain. The position of the political class is probably driven mainly by the Cuban diaspora of business tyrants that were pushed out of the country.
Unless Cuba could pull a bunch of hypersonic anti-ship missiles out of nowhere
:kim-drip: This one weird trick will prevent the global hegemon from obliterating your sovereignty :nuke:
US can theoretically beat a lot of countries with its full force but also I feel like if Cuba got invaded it wouldnt be the whole US war machine behind it. It would be some stupid CIA led shit again.
Cuba has spent this long resisting unending US violence, I can't see why they'd fail now.
If it makes you feel better, I don't think Cuba is on the hit list. It doesn't serve any economic or strategic interest. The only reason would be for the empire to try and flex on communists. In general the state dept and CIA just want to keep the blockade in place and try and forget Cuba even exists. Even last year's state dept sponsored protests were a weak as shit effort on their part.
They've been sending a lot of troops around the mainland US during trump and the G Floyd uprisings; Portland , Minneapolis , St Lois , and 3000 troops to the Mexico boarder because of "mirgant caravan".
We had FIVE FUCKING THOUSAND troops occupying Minneapolis when the murderer Chauvin's conviction was handled down. Apparently it was per-capita one of the biggest occupations in recent history. National Guard dorks on every street corner with empty M16s and their collective dicks in their hands, making sure that if Chauvin walked no one would even think about moving.
“Pro-NATO Nazis” uhh that’s just called democracy sweaty :maybe-later-kiddo:
I could realistically see proxy wars against nations siding with China in Africa and Latin America. I think any direct war with China is unlikely, but I could maybe see some fascist ghoul kicking it off to try to unite the country around them, as fascist ghouls tend to do.
Australia is going to be forced to start becoming an ally of China instead of the commonwealth countries for economic reasons.
Then the U.S. will invent a reason to go to war with Australia as a proxy war against China.
Go lathe go! :lmayo:vs:lmayo:
Australia seems really dead set on doing everything they can to piss off China. Do you think that will change soon?
Albanese certainly isn't going to want to be China's friend, but he's rolling back the extremely dumb shit the Liberals were doing and returning more or less to Rudd's policies (and Rudd was the only PM we ever had who had even a mediocre grasp on China, certainly the only one to speak Mandarin.)
