and the US is for the most part pretty careful about escalation management.
How’s that?
The US is always at war in at least one place somewhere on earth, and has learned from painful experience how easy it is to ratchet a conflict up into a bigger deal than it needed to be and how difficult to ratchet it back down, so they pay close attention now to when they’re crossing certain lines especially when nuclear weapons are involved.
Put it another way, all the nations of the world all go to the same bar, and a lot of them have guns and split personalities, and they spend every night playing cards and cheating and there’s always at least one fist fight, and somehow it’s been about 75 years since anybody got shot.
On the other hand, weapon manufacturers are always looking to expand their markets, and they have the money to buy out lobby governments, so the question is more about where is the balance between what would a “sane” government want, and what conflicts could weapon peddlers make them instigate in order to maximize profits.
Like: would Israel want to buy some more stuff from the US? Would they give the US a discount on some Iron Dome in exchange? Could Biden reinstate sales to the UAE? Exactly how many nukes might be involved, and how would that impact everyone’s interests in the region? (for example: what will be the oil prices tomorrow?)
Yeah. And the whole thrust of that whole document is, more or less, how can we use violence anywhere in the world to achieve our goals while making sure it won’t get out of control or come into a realm where it might come back and impact our happy, well-fed families.
I wasn’t saying any of this whole thing as a good thing necessarily; just giving the description: This is how the US tends to behave.
