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Cord The Seeker's avatar

"That leaves Western democracies with the ability to fight only one kind of war: atomic war – ... This is not diplomacy at all. ... But that is the only tactic that remains available to the United States and NATO Europe."

Perhaps not even that. We have not taken a nuclear weapon out of storage and tested it in a long time, and we no longer have the ability to produce tritium.

I don't have much use for hubris, nemesis, karma, or belief in a just world. America's leaders have, for generations, behaved as though the country had some bottomless strategic reserve to draw on in the event of trouble. In 1945 it did, but that was a long time ago. American leaders lack a skill that European statemen were once known for - the ability to maintain a balance of power among the Great Powers. That means both conserving your own strength and recognizing it's limitations. It also means the ability to work in cooperation with others, and not just dictating to vassals.

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T. Paine Redux's avatar

That was awfully long and it's a Saturday night here. For simple people like me it comes to simple things. We've borrowed from the future to pay for the now. When I say "we" I kind of me "they" because I never voted for any of it. A guy I listen to religiously says the simple part out loud, I paraphrase, "the laws of economics haven't gone away. They're out there, waiting to drop the hammer." This nation is hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt. When you take into account promises made by our cancerous federal gov't, we owe more than the entire world could produce for years. We are finacially doomed with no path to return to some sort of normal.

An analogy I heard once may be apropos - We went off the cliff sometime ago. We're just falling and don't know it. Sometime fairly soon we're gonna hit the bottom. When it happens we have a couple of scenarios - violence or we just simply fade away as a functioning nation-state. I don;t know which way is goes but I'm certainly no optimistic

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