alt Hacker NewsI think that's been the most baffling thing about the rise of MAGA.
It was a global order built by the US to place the US in positions of power and privilege in every way imaginable.
And the MAGA group looked at it and said "we are being taken advantage of! We have to spend a rounding error worth of money on food aid and Voice of America?! I don't want soft power, I want rock hard power!!!"
They looked at a game with unfair rules that were written by them to benefit them and said "this is unfair.... to me!" Then went about dismantling nearly a century of work that unfairly stacked the deck in America's favor.
The US-Israel-Iran War is an interesting inflection point. They pulled out of every soft-power play, putting every chip in on hard-power military strength and now they are getting wrecked by cheap drones and Iran just being willing to stick it out and not fold. Venezuela will probably go down as the point in which they believed their world view was winning, no need for any diplomacy, just go in and abduct the president and take the oil. Iran showed them the limits of that kind of thinking, if they were more introspective they could learn from it.
The outcome in Iran was obvious to anyone paying attention. We knew Iran would close the strait, but we also haven't truly won a guerrilla war yet. Vietnam went poorly, Afghanistan went poorly, we've only historically done well in the more economically-defined traditional wars where there's an obvious target to fling a billion dollars worth of arms at.
Iran isn't stupid, they know there's not much point in building massive arms factories to make complicated weapons. The factories will just get bombed, and the weapons will probably still be inferior. They can just sort of stand there, though. We don't have the appetite for a boots on the ground invasion, and even then they can just kind of wait til we leave and go right back to it. We don't really have a winning hand here without resorting to war crimes, and the costs of that vastly outweigh any successes. We'd be international pariahs to a degree that I don't think most Americans realize is possible.