America can get conquered

CON:"The US was certainly, most definitely unconquerable at the time[1941]" PRO: Con asserts that even if the Axis had held their fire until Europe and China were conquered, even if the USSR had been neutralized, the US would have remained unconquerable. We have no way of proving otherwise, of course, but Axis victory has consistently been one of the most revisited "what if"s" in alternative history for good reason. What if, for example, Werner Von Braun, the father of rocket science, had remained a Nazi developing intermediate and intercontinental ballistics for the Axis? If the US had remained out of the war, would the Manhattan Project have developed an atomic bomb first? Not likely. If by, say, 1947, the Axis had the sole capacity to nuke the eastern seaboard and American fleets (a reasonable enough hypothetical if the US had not joined the war), would the US still seem unconquerable? CON: "If Hitler was born in 1828"" PRO: Typo. The referenced material documents Hitler writing about bombing New York City in 1928. CON: Throughout American history, invasion has always been a threat, conquest of the United States, even when it was a minor power, was shown way to difficult and costly to be realized. PRO: Difficult and costly, yes, but that"s not the same bar as unconquerable. Less likely scenarios have succeeded, after all- Alexander in Persia, Cortes in Mexico. CON:"The British Empire during the American Revolutionary War was unachievable for the same reasons as I've stated, patriotic Americans, guns, oceans, geographic location, and allies." PRO: French intervention in 1778 was critical to American independence and hardly inevitable. France lost more combatants and spent more money in the struggle than the colonies, made mass invasion impossible for the British, and forced the Surrender at Yorktown. Louis XVI"s chief military and economic advisors were against intervention and the King was skeptical in spite of popular support for war. If France had rebuffed American appeals, the revolution"s failure would have been one very possible outcome. [1] CON: "A nuclear armageddon is no good thing but that would leave America as unconquerable." PRO: Be sure to tell that to the Roach King when his army arrives. CON:"Rome, Abbasid Caliphate, Jin Dynasty, Iraq, Japan, Germany, China, Russia... Not America." PRO: The basic tenant of the blind faith that is American exceptionalism. Americans are just as vulnerable to bad policy and geopolitical shift as any other nation of peoples. I recommend Barbara Tuchman"s "The March of Folly" for a detailed account of nation states, including the US, refusing to learn the lessons of history. CON:"Your own source of evidence spoke of Iraqis dusting off corroded weapons dating back to the 1890s." PRO: Again, a single anecdote does not refute the fact that Iraqi civilians were well armed in 2003 and had cause to resist invasion but the majority of civilians chose not to: a well-armed population is not necessarily unconquerable. CON: "Iraq under Saddam was no freedom safe haven. Human right abuses to the point of using WMDs, Iraq lost multiple wars ect, the people living there isn't as patriotic as say... A nation that is known as the land of the free, home of the brave, mightiest nation in the world ect." PRO:"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it." -G. B. Shaw CON: You talk like America doesn't adapt and just stays the same. PRO: In fact, I"d go so far as to say that the US is one of the most adaptive societies in human history. However, the US has also always maintained a countervailing conservatism destructive to adaptivity that seems to be enjoying a period of ascendancy in politics. The federal govt. invests today half the share of GDP in research and development that it did in 1988. [2] The 2012 Program for International student assessment ranked the US 36th in mathematics, 28th in science while China continued to boast first place in both. [3]. NASA"s 2015 budget is half of what we spent (adjusted $) 50 years ago. [4]. Many nations are ahead of the US when it comes to adapting to renewable energy and autonomous vehicles. The US may have contributed more than any other nation to the development of the Internet, but now lags behind 30 other nations in internet speed. [5]. There are good reasons to suspect that the US is losing technological advantage. CON: "Prove that tactics of asymmetric warefare can bring the United States under the flag of its invader." PRO: Con knows that there"s no proof of future events but we can learn from history: the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire, the Irish War for Independence, even the American Revolution are examples of Davids defeating Goliaths. CON: "You are also talking present, before you were talking about the past and talking future scenarios against the United States " PRO: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana CON: "and don't think that technology won't bring forth cheaper methods of extracting oil" PRO: Saudi Arabia announced this week a 15 year plan for divorcing its economy from oil dependency. [6] If even the Saudis can recognize that oil is a dead end, why can't the US? The first 3 months of 2016 each broke the record for warmest month on record: worse than a dead end, oil is a death trap. [7] CON: "The United States will also be the largest producer of oil by the end of the decade." PRO: While the rest of the world invests in a more sustainable energy infrastructure. This is precisely the type of folly that might expose the US to catastrophe. When oil is gone in 50 years, [8] will the US be ready? Seriously?... ""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." CON: "Sharing a land border leaves the risk of invasion no matter ones size." PRO: Agreed. And the US shares the longest land borders if any nation on earth. [9] Checkmate. CON: "Also seem to forget that America wasn't conquered though." PRO: Native Americans were conquered by European invaders. Oceans and vast geography were helpful, but ultimately non-decisive in that contest. CON: "No one can prove or disprove [there are no immortal nation-states]." PRO: With the oldest continuously empowered constitution, the US might reasonably claim to be the oldest current nation-state but at 226 years, our govt is younger by an order of magnitude than than the lifespan of the Roman Empire or the reign of the pharaohs. The lifespan of societies are shortening, not lengthening, as history progresses. CON: "America's adaptation to the what is known as nuclear triad prevented the Soviets from attempting any such aggression towards the United States or its European allies [and much bombast re: US vs. USSR]. PRO: Let"s agree that US Foreign Policy proved superior in the 20th century contest between those two nations. The question is whether successes in the last century necessarily immunize the US from potential failure in the current century. I see no reason to make that assumption. CON:"To end on Trump"" PRO: Let"s hope America doesn"t. CONCLUSION I suspect that Con is only interested in the question of conquest framed as "if country x invaded our shores today, could x successfully establish a permanent holding?" Not a particularly likely scenario, but also entirely unknowable without hypothetical context. To my mind, the question is more like "given that the US currently possesses the greatest destructive power any nation has ever held, is it nevertheless possible for such a country to be conquered?" I think the answer is yes. Empires, superpowers, dominant armies have been conquered before and will be conquered again. But such failures are never accounted to a single act, some irresistible attack. Rather, conquest is one possible end after a combination of forces, internal and external have weakened great power. If the question were "will China overpower the US tomorrow?" the answer would be probably not. But the question is could the US ever be overpowered and the answer largely depends on decisions the US makes today. When Gibbon described "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," he didn"t begin with Alaric crossing the Rhine and end with Hadrian"s ashes scattered in the Tiber because those events were almost incidental to the conquest of Rome. The story of Rome"s conquest was rooted in 400 years of war and civil war, plague and drought, bad generals and mad emperors. If not the Visigoths, then the Vandals might have finished the job. The question of conquest was not about barbarian might, but the failure of Rome to perceive and counter the threat. Is the US today similarly susceptible to a failure to perceive and counter threats? I think the answer is yes and for proof we need look no further than Con"s popular and conventional argument, some variation of which was probably oft recited by senators in the forum- " We are stronger than all others, we have never been conquered, therefore we are unconquerable." In such satisfaction lurks catastrophe. Thanks again to Con for an interesting debate. Please vote in the affirmative- the US can be conquered. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org... [2]http://www.aaas.org... [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org... [4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org... [5]http://www.geekwire.com... [6]http://m.csmonitor.com... [7]https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov... [8]http://www.usatoday.com... [9] http://10mosttoday.com...