The USA built up the Soviet Union, with help of the U.S. State Department approved technology transfers.
Was gonna give you a link but it looks like the good copies of the whole set got wiped from The Internet Archives.
Too bad the first book was genuinely hilarious, full of stories of western businessmen trying to teach the Russians and put their industry in order, only to get kicked off a train in Siberia without even a shirt on their backs.

We literally gave Russia the bomb

This post was edited by PapaPsych on Apr 29 2025 09:42pm

Could we crush them all? Yes.
Could we improve the fate of all the people living in these nations with our hot steaming loads of freedom? Nope
Would it serve our geopolitical interests and strategy? Nope

That's the short sighted part of interventionalism. We can play team america world police and go fuck some shit up and kill the "bad guys" and then discover the taliban warlords we left in charge are child rapists who turn women into slaves. We can denounce Assad for crushing opposition with an iron fist and then whoops the power vacuum we leave in his wake is filled by islamist terrorists.

An expansionist imperial state is how empires overextend themselves and fall, and its happened countless times throughout history. Nations that remained restrained to their own borders and protected themselves have been more stable long term. Hell the Japanese survived thousands of years of continuity and were still conquering their neighbors without ever aspiring to world domination, just their regional interests. The romans, the british, the mongols, the russians, the chinese, the spanish, the various caliphates and ottomans. Even when they only conquered rivals to serve themselves it still fell apart long term. Here we are talking about a mantle of responsibility to help other nations at our own expense, which is blatantly unsustainable long term.

Mate...the Japanese didn't conquer anything for a thousand years. The do have conflicts with the Koreans though.

The only time in ancient History up till now where they managed to go on a godly rampage was WW2 because they were the only ones in East Asia to be forced to open up and the Meiji Emperor decided to modernize into a constitutional monarchy which within a span of 40 to 50 years they are on par with most Western Nations.

The problem for China is that numbers only mean something if they're able to stabilize a front, because of the principle of force multiplication by technology. The invention and proliferation of the machine gun made numbers irrelevant if a front can't be stabilized. In the early stages of WWII, Germany's continental enemies had superior numbers (France was the superior military force on paper), but it didn't mean anything because Germany crushed their fronts with the superior technology and military doctrine of blitzkrieg. Then a bunch of methed out 18 year old Germans overran the country in a matter of days. America also uses this military doctrine (they stole all information, doctrine, and technology from Germany) rebranded as Shock and Awe.

Numbers of course do mean something if a front can be stabilized, showcased in the present Ukraine-Russia war. In WWII, Joseph Stalin was a military genius who wisely engaged the Germans at point blank range in Stalingrad to nullify a severe artillery and air power disadvantage. I'm not sure many military geniuses exist in China, maybe they do, but they've had no real wars to experimentally evaluate military doctrine.

China can throw alot of bodies but that only matters if they can stabilize a front - what's more likely is any Chinese front is trivially routed while the soldiers flee in confusion.

You're not considering colonization. There exists a very large amount of sexless, unmarried men in America - which is a massive demand for war brides.

Expansion is funded by the natural resources of the conquered land. The Fur Trade powered the expansion of Canada into the Arctic and westward. Similarly, the Fur Trade powered the expansion of Russia across Siberia.

And we would of course improve the conquered people's standard of living. If you're living in America, you and me are living proof of this. Our ancestors expanded into this land, conquered it. And now on this land we aren't tribal nomadic savages, we're civilized and wealthy peoples.

Your thesis exists on the assumption that we would go in, kill, and leave. This is, obviously, retarded. Culture, law, and settlement must be established.

The legacy of the Umayyad, Spanish, and British Empires exists today. Hello all of MENA, South America, and the Western World.

This post was edited by El1te on Apr 29 2025 10:19pm

I don't mean a front in the sense you might have misunderstood.
I m talking about lobbing Nukes at one another.

So your nukes will take out 700 to 900 million Chinese and theirs might take out 400 to 500 million combined. And the Russians, Indians haven't even enter the game.

I mean if we're talking about nukes then China has even less of a chance. America and Russia have an unchallenged monopoly on nuclear weapons

We are living in an almost entirely contiguous nation with a generally homogenous identity until the most recent few decades of globlization. Manifest destiny was the taking of the American continent from sea to sea, not the projection of power to foreign nations with existing populations for us to rule over. We didn't have a real conflict of living alongside natives, because our natives were sparsely populated and dying out. We didn't subjugate a large population and institute our culture, law and settlement like was done in Africa, and how did it turn out? how did any colonial rule turn out? We live in the legacy of fallen empires. Emphasis on the part where they fell.

Overextension is the loss of power. That's true in boxing and its true in geopolitics. Even the Chinese building silk roads today aren't necessarily setting themselves up for world domination in the coming century, when they could just as easily watch their grip on the world fall apart and their country balkanize. Long term stability comes from a national identity.

But the Russians will not take on the American side. They have tried for 20 years to play nice and be part of the West. And it failed. Blame the Neo Cons and dems for that.

If a nuke war happens the Russians either stay neutral or they will lob you as well, if the Chinese goes down they are next on the menu sooner than later.

What defines a "fallen" Empire?

I would argue we are still living in the Roman Empire today. We speak a language of which the root is Latin and the law is Roman. The whole world speaks English, the language of the British Empire, itself a derivation of the Roman Empire through the Norman Conquest. The people we view as "others" can be characterized as the Russian and Umayyad Empires, the Russian which is the lesser "other" and itself derived from Rome and also the "exotic orientals" who are chronologically and practically the least understood from the 'Roman' perspective. Other ethnicities including many of those orientals have assimilated into our de facto Anglo Empire.

These root characteristics are directly derived from the expansion of various Empires in the past. It's not a fundamentally bad thing to expand, the caveat is that it must be done with great prudence.

This post was edited by El1te on Apr 29 2025 10:45pm