The US was actually voted top threat by a wide margin for a reason. A Pentagon study released last summer, complained that America no longer controls events around the world and stated that only military force would remedy that.
Titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World,” the study warned that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to US dominance” in a multipolar world.
The US boasts at least 800 military bases in more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories”.
It accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5 500 strategic nuclear weapons.
Last year it increased its “defense” spending, which was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s.
But China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage”, according to the study. It is “a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of US authority, reach influence and impact”.
The report argues that this attitude “endangered” the US-managed world order of US-based transnational corporations.
The US and its imperial partner, NATO, must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite security and prosperity”.
The report recommends a significant expansion of US military power and “military advantage” to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow US decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of unacceptable consequences” for those who defy US wishes.
Basically it means the right to bomb any nation “back to the Stone Age” that doesn’t agree with what President George HW Bush noted after the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.”
