Twinjibber77Ignorance is bliss. I'm not trying to justify the insane budget, but Iran, China, NK and Russia are legitimate threats to the US/North America.
And I also agree with the other comments above about the US' further destabilization of the middle east.
BST_PoliceIf you wanna talk about strength, China + NK + Russia are stronger/bigger and China is even more advanced in some circumstances. We are not the strongest military anymore, but we still got the name. I am an overconfident American who thinks we would still find a way to prevail in a major war, but it would not be an anal fucking as you mention.
The idea that North Korea would be an aggressor is ludicrous. It's clear that everything that they do is posturing at this point; their military is strong for their population size, sure, but the pattern of flexing their nuclear capabilities in an attempt to start negotiations to reduce economic sanctions is consistent. Russia's GDP is less than 1/10 of the US's (1.6 trillion vs 19.4 trillion), and while the percentage of that that they spend on the military is slightly higher than the US (3.9% vs 3.2%), it's still not even close in terms of actual expenditure. China also has both a lower GDP (12.24 trillion) and lower percentage spent on the military (1.9%), than the US, so there's nothing there to back up your assertions. Similarly to North Korea, Iran is a boogeyman whose rhetoric is completely empty regarding war with us - its GDP is 1/44 of the US and its military spending is 2.7 % of that. You could make a case that Russia and China combined might be a military threat, but their relationship hasn't been very strong since the Sino/Soviet split, and the fact that Russia is a capitalist hellscape ruled by open kleptocrats and China is at least ostensibly socialist, combined with how intertwined the US and Chinese economies are and how literally indebted the US is to China, make any such argument entirely theoretical. Iran and North Korea could only be considered a threat if you think they'd start a nuclear war (although Iran doesn't even have the capability to do so at this point, but just about all evidence paints them as relatively rational self-interested actors on the international stage, so there's really no reason to consider them one.
Long story short, nobody else comes fucking close to spending as much on the military as the US, and if you seriously think Iran or North Korea is a threat to us, you've been consuming way too much propaganda.
