Military Decline of the West: 1
The blogosphere is populated by a range of opinions concerning the future (or lack thereof) for the “west”. However many still do not understand the basic reasons behind the decline. Some even believe that we could just go back to “earlier times”.
This series of posts will be devoted to understanding why the west is in military decline. Many people believe that the west could still win if “we are as ruthless as before”. Nothing could be farther from reality, but then again most people do not like that concept.
So here it goes:
The west has never won a lasting victory against an adversary that was not living in the stone age or prone to introduced infectious diseases.
The success of whites in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Polynesia had more to do with overwhelming stone age cultures (of varying degrees of sophistication) with gunpowder weapons and accidentally introduced diseases. The vast majority of casualties among the indigenous people of these areas were due to infectious diseases.
The west has never experienced a lasting victory in Asia or Africa, because they either faced people who were better organized or more resistant to infectious diseases. In the case of Africa, infectious diseases killed and crippled more whites than the natives ever could.
The original military expansion of the west by driven by the need to steal resources.
However, for the last hundred years, making the resources into “things” and selling them is far more profitable than stealing resources. Resources by and large are inexpensive compared to the value added products and services derived from them.
Nobody wants to wage war for reserves of gold, silver, wood, metals, grain, tea, coffee when it is cheaper to pay people to sell them to you.
Cannon fodder is getting scarce and expensive.
In previous eras, religion, poverty, nationalism, a general lack of education and communication made it easy for western countries to recruit cannon fodder. Today, it is much harder as people are less stupid, more cynical and less desperate.
The weapons of previous eras were also much more simpler, and required a smaller logistics train. High casualties were almost expected, and we did not have the communication infrastructure we have now. Weapons today are also far more expensive, specialized and require far longer logistics trains than in the past. Prolonged wars are expensive.. especially now.
Weapon technology has spread, thus destroying the west’s advantage.
Today your insurgent, warlord, rebel is very likely to have automatic weapons, RPGs, improvised mines and many non-western countries behind him. Did I mention that they have far more motivated volunteers?
It certainly does not help that they look and dress like the civilian population, and often are locals. The west cannot do what it could have got by with in the past, because there are many non-western powers behind such groups. It is just too risky in a world where you can turn the screws by disrupting oil supply, and now asian countries produce most of what the west uses. You cannot attack your major trading partners and not expect your economy to turn to crap.
Nukes.
it is hard to ‘win’ if notional victory can hurt your country as much as defeat. Even a much smaller nation with nukes can cause severe and lasting damage to the west, without using missiles.
The game is just too risky, unless they threaten to use first.
I will explore some of these issues in more detail, and a few other new ones in my next post on this topic.
India, China, Japan, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea, are all in Asia, no?
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but who is in decline, you or them?
Western civilizations heavily – and I mean heavily and totally defeated every single one of these countries and civilizations, often even when they were at technological parity and at least in one case – Japan – when they were at a technological and tactical disadvantage (Japan had better weapons than America and had all the tactical advantage when America began decisively turning the tide in the Battle of Midway).
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Who is in decline, you or them?
The West’s advantage has never been in weapons – non-Western states have always been able to acquire these weapons and almost always did so – but in discipline, esprit, shock battle, and other intangibles.
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ya, how is that working out?
The point is, my young friend, that you make some interesting points and offer some interesting analyses, but if you want to have your ideas look like anything other than sour grapes from an Asian person with an inferiority complex you have to base your arguments on FACTS not rewriting history according to your fantasies.
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Your type won’t be around as a force of any consequence. Your opinion is inconsequential.
It would be a more interesting and optimistic world if there did exist non-Western societies capable of challenging the West at its height, but to correctly understand the world we have to accept the sad reality that there really isn’t.
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It is over.. you are dying out.
Asia’s relative rise is measured against the West’s self-inflicted decline – in other words, what Asian countries are accomplishing is not raising themselves to a level much higher than the West at its peak, but rather they are achieving a very middle level of accomplishment (lets be honest, China’s accomplishment is only impressive measured against Africa or Latin America), and that, combined with the West’s suicide, is giving them relative strength.
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Who cares?
I personally could care less if the West, Asia, or Africa, if white men red men or yellow men were the leading civilization and created the most human progress, so long as there IS a civilization that will take human kind forward past what the West has achieved in the past few centuries.
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A non-white western civilization is doable.
Tragically I don’t see that – I see Asians riding on the past successes of the West and doing nothing original, indeed even failing to match the West at its peak, and the West destroying itself, and the rest of the world not counting at all.
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It does not matter! It is over for your kind.
Humankind looks like it’s in for a long period of dead routine until something new and interesting emerges.
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Who cares?
Remember this, nobody will care about you unless you make it profitable for them. But white attitudes are what will ultimately screw them…
You want respect based on your past glory and skin color. Why should I give you any?
The “west” fought the Ottoman empire.
@ Greg — Vietnamese defeated you, didn’t they
I can’t disagree with anything you responded to me with, everything you responded is more or less correct – I just wanted to set the record straight that you were wrong in your comments about Western warfare, and that it is whites who are destroying themselves rather than being overtaken in any special way by others. It is important to understand why the greatest civilization the world has ever seen is now dying, and it’s people killing themselves, rather than indulging in myths that serve only to make non-Westerners feel good about themselves.
the Dude – nope. Read history. The Vietnamese were crushed militarily. Even they admitted it. America simply decided it no longer believed in the principles it was fighting for and dropped the war.
Again, in order to understand the world we need to see what really happened, and not seek refuge in comforting myths and platitudes.