The U.S. hasn't faced a foreign military threat like that in more than 100 years. This country is no longer a sovereign nation but is instead an empire -- which means "total war" doesn't work anymore. You can't go to some corner of the globe and reduce it to a smoking ruins if your goal is to impose the U.S. dollar on them and make them trading partners.
“The U.S. hasn’t faced a foreign military threat like that in more than 100 years. This country is no longer a sovereign nation but is instead an empire — which means “total war” doesn’t work anymore”
Yet anything less becomes a quagmire. So either we totally abstain from any police actions at el, or we go in with total commitment. Now I will admit that Total Commitment/Total War is not the answer either. Are we to remain an Empire? Is it in our national interest to be an Empire? If being an Empire means being continuously trashed and involvement into nefarious police actions which have no resolution, then perhaps we should just look to ourselves. We should look to the Quarry from which we were dug, and to the Rock from which we were cleft (nationally, of course). Is that sustainable?
Empires (from what I’ve noticed recently), seem to be wide open to former subjects of the empire migrating and causing a stir of a type of desirable soup.