Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
The world has come a long way since then and found the weaknesses in the US's armour.

For example, one bomb in the Lebanon (killing 299) Marines in 1983 sent the US packing.

In 1993 in Mogadishu after 18 dead and 73 wounded the US folded.

Only a fool will entice the US into a conventional conflict and so we see a variation on the fiendishly cunning Chinese approach of 'death by a thousand cuts' being amended to 'death by a thousand IEDS' in Afghanistan and the US is already all but defeated.

Ken, I suggest that it is delusional to believe that the US (sleeping giant) will wake up to a real existential threat and defeat it. Those days are past and the potential enemies of the future will be smart enough to understand how to deal with the standard US game plan.
I suspect the examples cited are not germane to the final paragraph. US involvement in the Levant and SWA/Afghanistan is at best, adventurism or a display of testosterone (not unlike Grenada and Panama) on the part of some US leaders. To draw conclusions from the engagements of the last 20 odd years about how the US might respond to a perceived existential threat is a mistake because no meaningful basis of analogy exists between the two sorts of cases.

BTW, the earlier appeal to Korea as an esample of US capabilities vis-a-vis PRC is equally a mistake. If memory serves, the principle global concern of the US senior leadership during the Korean conflict was the USSR advancing further in Western Europe. I seem to recall that the US sent as many or more troops to reinforce Europe as were sent to fight on the Korean peninsula.