Containing America: The Brutality Threshold
Strategy
America is one of two nations that can destroy civilization with its substantial nuclear arsenal. America has the world’s most powerful air force and navy. It has the army with the greatest arsenal of firepower. America is the only political community that can project power anywhere in the world. America dominates the Global Commons, sea, air, and space. America accounts for a fourth of global economic activity. It has a population of 300 million.
If you wanted to contain this colossus, how would you do it?
One strategy of containment is a variant of one the Soviet Union may have only semi-consciously followed. This strategy involves:
- Spreading infantry weapons and light explosives into every corner of the globe.
- Spreading training on how to use the weapons with basic infantry tactics.
This strategy has the following goals:
- Make intervention in any area sufficiently painful that it deters the United States, with its low threshold for pain, from intervening.
- If the United States does intervene, make the process as painful as possible and extract the maximum blood price in order to reinforce the historical low threshold.
- Make the ability to resist sufficiently high to deter the United States with its low pain threshold but sufficiently low that a power following Hama rules can overcome it if they so choose. A nation who can cross the brutality threshold at will, something the United States cannot sustain, will have an advantage.
- Be low cost.
- Avoid direct confrontation with the United States.
- Hedge in the United States until its internal contradictions topple it from its position.
