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aeim 4 days ago

[flagged]

grues-dinner 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The "American Dream" has always been a mixture of a thought-terminating cliché and mass delusion. No matter how much ink is spilled over it or how many hands are wrung about the death of it, you'll never actually get two Americans to agree on what it is, past a nebulous something about "freedom".

It was just easy to not worry too much about that it when sitting pretty on 10 million square km of super-defensible natural resources while the rest of the world burned itself down twice over entrenched legacy bullshit. But now there's been time to brew up just as much domestic legacy bullshit and geopolitics and the media environment doesn't yet support a unifying us-vs-them narrative (by God they're trying) to cut through it.

PaulDavisThe1st 4 days ago | parent [-]

> 10 million square km of super-defensible

With a 2000 mile southern border that is extraordinarily hard to defend, and a somewhat longer northern border that we've never actually had to think about defending.

grues-dinner 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

No, they're borders that would be extraordinarily hard to defend, but conveniently it's not been relevant for about 200 years. Defense is about more than having enough machine guns on the border.

In the case of the southern neighbor and their neighbors, one might wonder if it's a complete coincidence that the collective Latin American shit hasn't been together enough to be a credible threat since that time they actually were and were eventually repulsed.

Diplomatic and, let us say, "special" methods of making neighbors safe to be nearby is one of the key advantages that made American soil defensible in a way that, say, early 1900s French soil wasn't.

The only credible way that border has been for the American century, or will be for the foreseeable future, a military danger would be if another superpower cut a deal to stage there, and that would be both incredibly obvious and would represent the world's longest and most vulnerable supply lines in the history of armed conflict.

The closest anyone ever got was missiles in Cuba, and it was so utterly disconcerting that there even was a threat in the same hemisphere that the world nearly ended.

You could also say that this only applies to conventional military threats, and there are other problems now. That is perhaps why things are beginning to feel different and sitting between two oceans and two pacified buffer zones isn't proving enough to engender national feeling, rightly or wrongly, of being large and in charge.

arethuza 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The US War Plan Red from the 1920s covers a war between the US and the British Empire and includes quite a lot about Canada!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

euroderf 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> a somewhat longer northern border that we've never actually had to think about defending.

Well, not since they (as lackeys of the Brits) burned down Buffalo.

financetechbro 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like American culture has anyways been elusive and dynamic

scooke 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you American, in America?