The goal was a Sunni Islamist caliphate stretching from Libya to Turkey. UBL wanted the decadent influence of the west to decline to the point where the teachings of Hassan Al Banna and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab could establish a durable nation where the correct practice of Islam could flourish. The lesson Islamists took from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that plucky freedom fighters can vanquish immoral foreign empires if they believe it hard enough. UBL in particular saw the lack of appetite the Soviets had for a protracted war while also lacking the perspective to regard the role of greater geopolitics - he saw the helicopters go down and he saw the Stingers but didn't see the half billion dollar a year budget or Pentagon-level planning and logistical support. He saw the dispirited Soviet troops but he didn't see Chernobyl or the black marketization of Peristroika. Osama bin Laden took the milquetoast American responses to the Khobar Towers and USS Cole as a green light for a large scale domestic attack within US borders. it was the dumbest fucking move in terrorism since the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It led to the perpetual occupation of Iraq, it led to twenty years of occupation in Afghanistan, it led to a changed dynamic with the Saudi royal family, it led to Houthi uprisings. It's fair to say that ISIS was UBL's goal but "NO NOT THAT WAY!!!!" in that ISIS was primarily decadent Europeans LARPing in the desert rather than enlightened Islamic scholars assembling an enlightened nation-state. ISIS also managed to rally the entire goddamn world against them by leaning on the piracy rather than the religious teachings. You wanna know what happened to ISIS between 2004 and 2011? It was UBL's missives-from-the-cave that kept 'em down. Everything UBL mumbled into a camcorder was anti-ISIS. Fast forward a few months past Abbotabad and we're breaking walls. It's fair to say that the one single event that allowed the rise of MBS was the death of Osama bin Laden. Prior to UBL's death, American foreign policy required a nominally agnostic, nominally tame power structure within Saudi Arabia. After UBL's death American Foreign policy was able to adapt to a nominally fundamentalist, nominally disruptive power structure within Saudi Arabia. It was Osama bin Laden, after all, who objected to American bases in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War... and it was MBS who allowed direct El Al flights between Riyadh and Tel Aviv. Osama bin Laden wanted the whole of South Asia to look like Talib Afghanistan. That's why al Qaeda capped Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before the twin towers. Fast forward twenty five years and the ruler of Saudi Arabia is WhatsApp buddies with Jared Kushner. Women can nominally drive. They're building ski resorts and billions have been spent importing European culture. We all lost on September 11? But Osama bin Laden lost big. Things went exactly the opposite of how he thought they would. He was able staunch the bleeding while he was alive? But the minute he could no longer control the narrative, all hope of a Caliphate was fucking gone. As far as "decline of the American Empire" I don't know if you've noticed but the only credible militaries in the world anymore are Ukraine and the Americans. Yeah Trump is a dumb fuck arranging Yemeni strikes over Signal but in Civ VI this is what you call "total cultural victory." That's an American jet, with an American soundtrack, aping an American cultural reference while saber-rattling against Americans. The co-opting is complete.But UBL got what he wanted right? The goal was the decline of the American Empire, and he managed it?
What hardware are they building tho The Chinese have two carriers. One of them used to be Soviet. Soviet carriers are a fucking joke. The Chinese actually bought two but one of them was so clapped out that they turned it into a theme park. The British have two aircraft carriers. The United States has eleven air craft carriers. The Chinese have a fuckton of ferries. The plan, ostensibly, is to load up a bunch of tanks'n'shit and then spend an hour under sail while the Taiwanese do fuckall, apparently. It's one thing to step under a guard post and drive towards Kyiv. It's quite another to attempt the capture of a deep-water island 50 nautical miles offshore. The Chinese have a bunch of jets. They have zero experience dog fighting. They have zero experience with ground suppression. They have zero experience with any sort of combat. The last (and first!) air-to-air combat kill by the Chinese was accidental. They tried in 1959 but got handed their ass by - wait for it - Taiwan. The Chinese have a giant conscript military. Who throw rocks at India. You wanna see the last military engagement China threw down on? They got their asses handed to them by Vietnam. Like... six years after the Americans left. Now - Donald Trump could maybe be talked into walking away from Taiwan. I could see that. But against any real opposition? There's this idea that big government make-work projects are effective in battle just because they're covered in guns. We were quaking in our boots against the Soviets because they had so much fuckin' hardware. The fact of the matter is, the Russians have never not had a bigger army, navy or air force than us and they're over there feeding conscripts to drones at a thousand casualties a day. North Korea has a bigger navy than the USA and you're just now finding that out. "Taiwan is Chinese" is a big pillar of Chinese domestic politics. "Our adversaries are always scary and overwhelming" is a big pillar of American domestic politics. I could be wrong on this! They might have been building NATO II over there for the past 20 years. But if so, no one is buying their shit. By the numbers, China is the "fourth largest exporter of military arms in the world." But that puts them behind the USA (43%), France (11%) and the UK (11%) with a whopping 6% of the international arms trade. Two thirds of that goes to Pakistan, by the way. The other third, effectively, goes to Myanmar and Bangladesh. We built up this whole mythology about how yeah, the export-grade shit the Soviets were slinging all over the world was hot garbage, but that's because they were keeping their truly impressive stuff at home! Fast-forward to any actual conflict between Russian and American hardware and training and it is a knife through butter. And yes, I know we're talking about the Taiwanese. If the US and NATO decided to drop Taiwanese protection the Chinese would probably go for it. But it would be a clusterfuck.