>Haven’t we learned our lesson about being dragged into wars that are not our own?
“War is the health of the State.”
Randolph Bourne.
He wrote that during WWI.
> The MIC has learned the lesson that even proxy wars can be quite profitable.
Well, we learned in the lead-up to WWII that ignoring other's wars and pretending it will just go away got us bit in the bum at Pearl Harbor.
We tend now to think US victory was inevitable, but forget that we were damn lucky the carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and that Heisenberg flubbed his reactor experiments.
The Atlantic and Pacific are a lot smaller in practical terms than they ever have been.
The US is in an unparalleled strategic position because we have almost every natural resource we need in North America and the tech to use it. But we have tossed a lot of that geostrategic advantage away by tying our economy far too closely to China.
The Chinese in contrast are almost exactly the opposite: they have rare earths, some coal and not much else and are strategically vulnerable because of the island chains surrounding their coast, islands we control or with which we have strong alliances. China needs control of the Pacific to protect itself but so do we. There's no way to square that circle.