Everyone understands the opportunity costs of war. But few tend to grasp the potential strategic costs of a war that doesn’t go as expected:
The US-Israeli war against Iran has handed China a strategic opening to chip away at US influence on every major front, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a classified intelligence analysis. Two US officials familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the document was produced by the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. It is said to focus on four main dimensions: Diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.
Fortunately, the US military has so far avoided a complete catastrophe on the scale of the Athenian Sicilian expedition, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to experience serious negative consequences from having its ability to meaningfully project power around the globe exposed as a negligible threat.
Once the economy is hollowed out, the ability to fight wars is necessarily degraded. The USA is no longer the most powerful military on the planet, whether you are inclined to believe it or not, the US military is now third in terms of its ability to actually fight a war over a period of months, after the Chinese and Russian militaries.
US President Donald Trump’s China visit was an attempt to “save face” and seek relief after the Iran war destabilized the global economy, geopolitical analyst Danny Haiphong has told RT. According to Haiphong, the US is now in a “far weaker position” than China and is seeking closer ties with Beijing to stabilize its economy and global standing.