The US doesn’t do diplomacy. Instead we send in the gunboats or, to be precise, the aircraft-carrier-battle-groups.

Like everything else these days the price of a modern aircraft carrier is astronomical. America’s latest carrier class, the Gerald R. Ford, costs $13 billion per unit. And so far, the entire Ford program has cost taxpayers $120 billion.

Due to the cost of the Ford-class carriers and the rest of America’s gold-plated weapon systems this imperial behavior has reached its pull-by-date. Advances in missile and drone technology allow a poor country like Yemen to essentially close the Red Sea to Israeli bound traffic. Conflict is, at the base level, about bang-for-the-buck, and when adversaries like the Houthis can fire hypersonic missiles and suicide drones that cost a fraction of expensive American carriers, the sort of gunboat force projection is a thing of the past.

Another reason is due to our Middle East proxy–Israel. The balance of forces in the world is shifting in favor of the Axis of Resistance as the entire Global South is appalled by this genocide and appalled by the American empire’s collusion in that genocide.  

And we’re also seeing that due to the stupidity of the managers of the U.S. empire, which of course is dominated by Zionists, that the war in Ukraine is actually playing out in favor of Palestine. As they attack Russia with long-range weapons, Russia is going to be offering similar long-range weapons to other forces, including presumably the Axis of Resistance. And there have been some reports along those lines. The Houthis, who are happily messing with Israel-related Red Sea shipping and even US naval vessels, have proven that insurgents, armed with drones and missiles can deny the effective use of carrier-battle-groups.

But, of course, the Pentagon hasn’t gotten the memo, or if they did they are resistant to change because the US military/industrial/complex (MIC) doesn’t do defense they do corporate enrichment and stock buybacks.

What’s ironic is that advances in missile technology is nothing new. By the 1980’s Soviet missile development had changed the calculus of Cold War conflict. US naval doctrine mandated carrier-battle-groups staying well away from Europe in the event of conflict due to the lethality of Soviet anti-shipping missiles.

And here we are, back to the essential conflict between neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The American (MIC) was originally conceived as a make-work program to prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression after WWII ended. However, beginning in the 1980s, private equity was used by MIC insiders to buy Federal assets for pennies on the dollar and load them up with debt to resell them to the public in order to enrich insiders. Wages were cut and production processes ‘streamlined’ in the companies bought by private equity, thereby erasing the public benefit of the MIC, such as it was. Neoliberal myopia went so far as to outsource military production to China, (go figure). And now, the same neocon politicians and intellectuals who thought outsourcing a great idea are today declaring China to be enemy number one.

And now the chicken have come home to roost. A new report warns that the United States is incapable of producing essential, high-tech weapons without continuing support from China: “If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.“

The problem for gunboat diplomacy is that it’s impossible to manage an empire with neoliberalism as your operating system.

Update: Heterodox economist Michael Hudson writes–“Wars could only be financed by running into debt, because populations would not support wars if they had to pay immediately the taxes needed to defray their full costs on a pay-as-you-go basis. But the commercial consequences of war debts would burden the economy and slow its economic growth, ultimately driving the nation bankrupt.”

Sound familiar?