The Best Trained, Most Professional Military...Just Lost Two Wars?

[Dayuhan]

The US had its chance force moral conditions on the world when the Soviet Union collapsed but failed.

I'm not sure the US has ever had an opportunity to "force moral conditions on the world", and that sounds like the kind of Quixotic quest that ends with inevitable exhaustion and failure. The world is a large place with a very low standard of morality and no particular inclination to follow American instructions. The fastest route to the collapse of American power would be to waste it in a futile effort to police the world.

The rapacious greed of US corporations needed to be tamed and to the credit of the US it has done well in that regard. But leaving the back door open for the scum of the earth to enter was not smart. You had your chance and you blew it.

Some would say the rapacious greed of American corporations was simply redirected to domestic financial dealings. Of course American corporations are as greedy and as profitable as they ever were. They've just found ways to make money under changing conditions.

The reluctance of American companies to make long-term deals in politically unstable areas has as much to do with risk tolerance as with corruption regulations. In objective terms the Chinese (for example) are doing the oil-consuming world a favor by pumping oil in places where other companies won't go. If they didn't pump it that oil would probably not come to market at all.

It will be interesting to see what happens when a government that has made long-term deals with the Chinese is faced by an insurgency that wants to change those deals. Will they write it off, or will they jump in and try to "do COIN"?

But back to the original question...

(...) President Obama has described our military as “the strongest military the world has ever known.”

There’s just one problem with this...

That military just lost two wars in a row.(...)

If our military is so great, why have the last fifty years been so disastrous? (...)

I don't see any inconsistency there. The US by any objective standard does have "the strongest military" in the world and in the history of the world. That doesn't mean it will always succeed, especially if it's used in pursuit of objectives that cannot be achieved through the use of military strength. Driving a screw with a hammer is likely to fail, but that doesn't mean you have a lousy hammer.

Fuchs' point that the US military hasn't been proven in equal contest against a peer opponent is true, but irrelevant, since "strongest in the world" is a relative measure, not an absolute measure, and the potential peer competitors have even less experience of peer conflict and far less evidence of capacity.

In theory Russia or China could threaten the US with mass, but does either have the capacity (or, really, the incentive) to deploy and support that kind of mass outside their borders in a situation where the US would be forced into a full military confrontation?