America can get conquered

"Rather the United States can or can't beat itself has nothing to do with rather or not Al Qaeda, Russia, China, the Vatican City ect can. I never said that America is safe from war or external threats. So when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Al Qaeda attacked New York, the Pentagon, and an empty field, when China attacked in the cyber world. That doesn't mean that they can conquer the United States by what would be required to conquer the United States." The question under discussion is whether or not there are rational scenarios in which the conquest of the US might be realized. The future is not knowable, of course, but are there a combination of circumstances that might sufficiently weaken the US and/or strengthen US rivals by which conquest would be made more likely attempted and more likely to succeed? The answer must always be always be yes if the US is to actively seek and counter any dynamic that might erode US security. The US was not conquered in WW2 but that doesn't mean that the US was unconquerable. Consider that popular opinion in 1939 was very much opposed to military intervention against Axis expansion (67% of men, 74% of women not one Roper poll)[1]. Pearl Harbor and Operation Barbarossa changed that, but those were strategic mistakes made by the Axis entirely out of US control. If the Axis had taken the time to consolidate holdings in Europe and Asia and guarantee Soviet neutrality or complicity, the US would have been a very likely and more vulnerable target. Indeed, Hitler understood as early as 1828 that war with the US was inevitable and victory meant bombers over New York City. [2]. If the US had remained complacent behind oceans and strong defenses, the peril of a conquered America, while not inevitable, would have become a real possibility. Similarly, my thesis is that in the 21st century there are realistic scenarios by which the US, through bad luck or bad policy or even sheer complacency along the lines demonstrated by Con, might be vulnerable to invasion. ### "Nuclear weapons would be used and the following nuclear winter and an new extinction event would negate every side's achievements up to the point before nuclear weapons were used. That would still leave America has unconquered. " To say that humanity and all its works could be extinct and yet the US remain somehow unconquered is strangelovian ideology without application to the realpolitik. Let"s assume that every American dead is a worse outcome for the US than foreign occupation, please. ### " Size and manpower were the reason why the Soviets were not conquered by the Germans".. None of these is relevant to America's surviveability." Believe so at America"s peril. Overwhelming geographic and demographic superiority did not immunize from conquest Western Rome nor the Abbasid Caliphate nor the Jin Dynasty. ### "Apparently not even close to being as well as Americans. From your source he was going to use a gun that was over 100 years old. " Let"s not let anecdote obscure the facts. Ownership of automatic weapons was and remains legal in Iraq and the most ubiquitous weapon owned was and is the AK-47. Before the war, majority Ba'athists generally received a government issued AK-47s and young men were trained to use them. After the invasion, the US tried to limit AK ownership to one per household with limited success. [3] Even as Baghdad fell, the overwhelming majority of loyalist gun owners did not come to the defense of their city and those that did offered scant resistance to the invaders. ### "American population is over 2x that number + 13 million hunters I even see tanks parked owned by citizens, there are no federal laws against the ownership of flamethrowers. Every single one of them highly patriotic"." Really? That"s quite a claim. The Bundys claim to be patriotic but unlawfully seized US Territory and preach armed resistance against the government. Can you offer evidence to prove that every American gun owner is "highly patriotic." ### "whereas Iraqis were questionable allegiance to their government The Iraqi insurgency, however, was widespread and caused more American lives and resources"" And yet were conquered. ### "The advantages that has protected the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries will ensure American sovereignty for centuries more. " Again, believe so at America"s peril. I say the lesson of history is adapt or die. ### "ASYMMETRIC WARFARE will not conquer the United States, it can defeat American efforts overseas but its not going to conquer America." Prove it. Remember the point of 9/11, according to bin Laden, was to draw the US into multiple costly, unwinnable wars. He did not look for victory so much as generations of unsustainable sapping of US resources and for 15 years that plan has proved fairly successful. Does Con believe there is no limit to the number of conflicts the US can sustain without faltering? ### "The United States has its own space fighter and has plans for Mars, being the nation with a robot traveling the planet's service. China's manned mission to the Moon... The world is playing catch up. " Agreed, the world is catching up and the US will need to greatly increase its spending to maintain present advantage. ### "Canada is top 3 in largest oil reserves, by 2020 the United States is to be one of the biggest producers. America's sources of oil is global to prevent what happened in the 1970s" 90% of Canadian oil is in highly inefficient tar sands, expensive to extract, and ruinous to the environment, and you are assuming Canada will always remain a US ally, but I think you missed the larger point. We need to get away from using oil before scarcity makes our military and society unsustainable, that means a major technological and economic shift and the US has already been sluggish compared to other nations. ### "As a lot of the wars fought by the United States a lot of them took place against other powers in North America, the United States conquered a lot of them which became states." The great size of America didn"t protect them from invasion? I thought Con said it would. ### "Looking at the Trump article, he said "I"m never going to rule anything out"I wouldn"t want to say. Even if I wasn"t, I wouldn"t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them,"" Yup. So once Trump convinces the world that the US might use nukes, does Con think the US will gain friends and lose enemies or gain enemies and lose friends? Put yourself in the place of the nukee rather than than the nuker and ask the same question. ### "A lot of your response speaks on the vulnerabilities of deterrents that hasn't helped America from being totally safe but it doesn't help you with proving that America can be conquered. Each of these deterrents has made conquest of nations very difficult and even impossible for even the most powerful of nations." And yet there are no immortal nation-states. Nations rise and fall, usually more by their own stupidity then for lack of strategic advantage. ### "Russia couldn't be conquered by the Germans cause of sheer size and population. " And Hitler"s obsession with Stalingrad, and refusals to retreat, and El-Alamein, and winter. I don"t think most historians would say that Russian victory was inevitable in spite of size and population. ### "This is the same for China. However, the Mongols conquered them but they couldn't conquer Japan whom were protected by the oceans. " Weren"t those oceans still there when the US conquered Japan in 1945? ### "Britain hasn't be conquered cause of their location and technology.. " So William the Conqueror was misnamed, then? ### "The United States has over 24 formal allies, nuclear weapons, the largest military in the world, are ahead of the world in space, one of the most populace nations in the world, the most armed nation in the world, extremely far from other nations whom could pose a threat to the United States if they were to border us. The United States has their drones but they are also creating other robots as well." All great advantages, agreed. Even the greatest advantages do little good for a nation that rests confident on laurels, refusing to counter new threats or adapt to new dynamics. Entropy alone will do in the greatest of nations given time. If the US is to remain unconquered, we must never buy into the myth of unconquerability. ### "Pro's claim that western democracies conquered the USSR is false. Internal troubles done in the Soviets, it also doesn't coincide with the definition of conquer "to take control of (a country, city, etc.) through the use of force" western democracies didn't defeat the Soviets, the Soviets defeated the Soviets." Please note, I think Con"s objection to the word "conquered" here is fair, since Western states did not occupy Soviet territory after their Cold War victory. Substitute in the word "vanquished." The USSR was conquered by the Russian people although Western competition and warfare by proxy certainly were important elements in that downfall. I look forward to Con"s concluding remarks. [1]http://web.mit.edu... [2]http://historynewsnetwork.org... [3]http://www.nytimes.com...