If Mexico had wanted to, could it have been a military power to give the US pause, after it lost the Mexican-American War? It does have a large population and lots of oil.
If Mexico had wanted to, could it have been a military power to give the US pause, after it lost the Mexican-American War?
They want to
Bro, they couldn't have been BEFORE they lost. They were losing to fricking indians. Granted the Apache and Comanche were badass indians, but still. No, the closest Mexico got being a serious military power is having their descendants in the USMC.
>They were losing to fricking indians
And getting casually blown the frick out by the French for acting like morons and robbing merchants
None of the countries in Mesoamerica were ever going to be shit.
South America on the other hand has multiple states that could become superpowers if they wanted to but they flopped hard. Brazil and Argentina had access to everything and still shat the bed. Brazil still has access to everything and all types of natural resources—and the Amazon rain forest which has massive scientific use—but they're still shitting the bed.
pic related
The problem with South America is that a lot of states were agrarian, you had poor infrastructure for roads, multiple corruption from generations of landowners, and most importantly Dictatorial Presidencies KEPT POPPING UP.
You cannot address point 1 without getting rid of point 3 and replacing it with something better, but that can only happen when point 2 is established, and it's hard to do any of that when point 4 keeps fricking happening because landowners and frickers with Ego keep starting shit.
Pinochet fixed a lot of that by making a lot of land and natural resources totally state controlled despite being a hard core pro market guy for most stuff.
>The problem with South America is that a lot of states were agrarian
An primary economy is the result of low population density and/or low education level, those two are the real problems. The real world isn't a videogame in which you can click a button and choose how to develop your economy, in reality the way a national economy shapes up is the result of tons of different variables which can't be changed immediately.
Man, the 1970s when Brazil was talking building nukes and IRBMs. What happened to those guys?
>Man, the 1970s when Brazil was talking building nukes and IRBMs. What happened to those guys?
all of the Americas below the US were just such absolute political shitholes that none of them really stood a chance
every time one was on the rise some authoritarian moron seized power and ruined everything
No, Mexican industrialization occured mostly in the 20th century, without it they haven't a hope in the world. Also Mexico would have been btfo from Naval incursions, see the early 1900s invasion of Vera Cruz
CIABlack folk need their drug money to fund their illegal wars/clandestine activities (some of which have involved innocent American citizens!) and they and corrupt Mexican officials intentionally stymie Mexico to prevent them from becoming a peer rival. To a lesser extent this also occurs with Canada although European and Anglo/Frog politics also play a roll.
Plus 80iq Coca Cola/Tecate guzzling inbred wife beating hispanics gotta Hispanic, the drug war was designed to fail and the normalgays ate it up and neocohens and israelite neolibs need their slave labor to undercut American wages because the true world superpower the NWO is ALSO styming/destabilizing America in turn
Ironically the brutality of the Aztecs was not mere savagery but a elaborate social control mechanism by a sadistic psychedelic consuming Preist class that mirrors many of the traits the elites have today
>>>/x/
This didn't happen but it should.
mexico was barely nation back in the day
this kinda happened but you are wrong about canibalism being wrong
>CIABlack folk need their drug money to fund their illegal wars/clandestine activities (some of which have involved innocent American citizens!) and they and corrupt Mexican officials intentionally stymie Mexico to prevent them from becoming a peer rival. To a lesser extent this also occurs with Canada although European and Anglo/Frog politics also play a roll.
yeah i totally agr...
>Plus 80iq Coca Cola/Tecate guzzling inbred wife beating hispanics gotta Hispanic, the drug war was designed to fail and the normalgays ate it up and neocohens and israelite neolibs need their slave labor to undercut American wages because the true world superpower the NWO is ALSO styming/destabilizing America in turn
well okay thats also an opinion.
Holy crap, is this an actual journalist or researcher on their first day here?
they get a blank check from Congress, they dont need drug money
They lacked talent in domination. They couldn't dominate the land, they couldn't dominate the Indians, they couldn't dominate the sea. They couldn't even fight Texas. What hope did they have against proto-CIA infiltration, much less an standing American army.
If they got their shit together, yes.
Are they going to? No.
Mexico is owned by American and Chinese conglomerates. And it's entirely history is corruption. It is too far gone.
>Mexico is owned by American and Chinese conglomerates
Chinese are very minor players in Mexico. Mexicans are just openly racist towards Chinese and they don't really offer anything over just working with Americans, Japanese, Koreans, Euros.
They shoulda taken Zimmerman up on his offer
Yes but it would be harder. Mexico has weird geography that makes it more difficult to project power from, at first glance it has the pacific and the gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic surrounding it just like the U.S but a vast majority of it's population lives in the central plateau away from the coasts and at much higher elevation, in fact a majority of Mexican trade is done via roads that run through central Mexico so they've never been particularly inclined to build a strong navy. Depending on your concept of a major power the lack of easy access to naval power projection hurts their potential a lot. Overall though, if they really tried and wanted to and invested the last 50 years into it absolutely yes Mexico could be pretty damn strong - given major changes and suppression/destruction of cartels and corruption, then investment into naval and coastal infrastructure (to me major power includes power projection). They would of course still probably struggle a bit with naval power but their economy is very diverse and they maintain a good manufacturing sector. I think if this route was chosen you'd seen a Mexican MIC likely similar to turkey which would be cool cause I think weapons named after Aztec shit is fricking cool.
If Mexico wanted to successfully defend against the hypothetical U.S. invasion I would say a hybrid of the North Korea/Taiwan model is the only viable option realistically. In a perfect scenario with their economy 5 or 6 times bigger and massive funding to the military I just don't see Mexico up for a head on land war against the US. However a large ballistic missile arsenal and capable air force would be enough to likely force the "pause" you mentioned OP. However realistically if Mexico did get much stronger I would hope the U.S. would just support them and gain a new NATO member.
We have a lot of treatis with the USA so our govermet officials thor away any inclination to that at their convenience.
Maybe in the future as the globalization pattern dissolves Mx can reach taht level of autonomy but a war with US is improblable unless a major resource war beguins; like in 50 if the thinks are not fixed in the next 4-6 in USA, really guys; you live in a Feudal Oligarchy wich bleeds the region out
If you replaced the population with Germans, they'd make threatening weaponry, disciplined troops, resilient infrastructure, and probably boom their already large population with some sort of scheme where your home loans are forgiven after 4 kids. They'd be a military power to give the US pause within a generation after the Mexican-American War.
The best Mexican soldiers during the Mexican-American War were Irish immigrants, so their might be some truth to that. The only people Latinx are capable of beating are other Latinx (and the French).
>Latinx
homosexual
But anon, a big chunk of Mexicans are germanic. Where do you think the tuba music and beer comes from?
And they do make german weapons. Sort of.
Are you sure they aren't mainly a mixture of Spanish and indigenous peoples?
Mexico actually did have some innovate firearms designs in the early 20th century, like the Mendoza RM2, but they didn't have enough of that, the industry and technology, to be an opponent America would strongly prefer not to fight.
>If you replaced the populations with Germans, they would do shit that Germans don't do
The Germans have a shit tier military and they are below replacement level, reason why their politicians shill for endless immigration.
In all seriousness if mexico was serious they could probably be similar to an argentina or chile, upper end of third world but would obviously have no chance in a real war against any advanced nation
>In all seriousness if mexico was serious they could probably be similar to an argentina or chile, upper end of third world but would obviously have no chance in a real war against any advanced nation
Mexico has been better than Argentina for a few years now.
Culturally too different. Mexicans aren't labor averse, and honestly they're not that stupid either. But they come from a conquistador mercenary culture. America's success comes in large part to its puritan religious history and enlightenment foundational government. It fundamentally shaped the countries values, including doing a pretty good job at minimizing corruption. Mexicans would need a significant reshaping and they probably could become a first rate power. But it's practically a multi-state government as is with the level of cartel control in the country.
>Culturally too different. Mexicans aren't labor averse, and honestly they're not that stupid either. But they come from a conquistador mercenary culture. America's success comes in large part to its puritan religious history and enlightenment foundational government.
Honestly this. Reading about the history of colonial Latin America and I imagine it's what would happen if you let PMCs run a country with only minimal or ineffective supervision from their national government. Can't really blame hispanics for being descended from the 16th Century equivalent of Wagnerites.
It's a learning lesson for the modern age. Society starts from the ground up. If you have broken roots you end up with shitty malformed trees. It doesn't matter how good the seed stock is.
I mean, it's possible to overhaul broken societies, but you often need some kind of external threat or stimulus to get that process going. If Latin America was ripped apart by huge continental wars like Europe, then there would have been a massive impetus for states to improve and root out some of the vested interests that make achieving national goals difficult. But since Latin America is in the most geographically secure part of the world, they're just allowed to stumble along in mediocrity, whereas in Europe, they would have been ripped apart by say, France or Germany.
Pretty accurate take. Large parts of Mexico are already better than much of the US but the country is extremely uneven in development and economic worth depending on what region.
>Large parts of Mexico are already better than much of the US
Lol, lmao even must be why I see so many fricking Texans swimming a river to get over there. Mexico is a shithole because it's full of Mexicans. They leave and bring the shithole with them. There is no fixing Mexico because its full of Mexicans
Poor boomers unironicay do go to Mexico for the free healthcare and cheaper costs of living.
Mexican here.
The answer Is no.
Before the Mexican Revolution there was not a "Mexican Army" there were instead a bunch of small armies and they were kind of independent from the federal goverment.
So, It was kind of hard to group all the mexican soldiers under one flag.
No, Mexico’s population was stagnant for over a century till they had a birth explosion in the 1950’s and on. They were struggling to break 20 mil when the US was already reaching 200 million, there’s no timeline where they can even hope to match just Texas let alone the US following the war. For Mexico to have been anything resembling a regional power and beyond, they would have needed to hold onto central America, the northern land, and succeed with their invasion of Cuba. This would have given them the tax base and population needed to have any hope of preventing war with the Americans. Winning would still be a pipe dream due to just how much more populous the US was to Mexico
This.
morons just forget how important population has always been, and continues to be, at determining the international relevance and power of a nation.
There are rich and developed nations with a small population size, but they are not internationally relevant.
The most powerful countries on Earth either currently have massive populations, or historically had them (eg.: France and the UK).
Mexico is never ever going to raise it's hand against the US, contrary to what /misc/cel chinlets say. Mexico even gave their enriched plutonium reserves to the US government to show how committed they are to muh no nooks.
>Mexico even gave their enriched plutonium reserves to the US government to show how committed they are to muh no nooks.
No, they simply said they would and have been dragging their feet because they don't actually want to give them up. They're also supposed to get new nuclear power plants in the next few years too. However the only LATAM country that will ever likely develop nukes is Brazil.
>In April 2010, the Mexican government reportedly reached an agreement to turn over its highly enriched uranium to the United States.[3][4] The US would help convert highly enriched uranium stored at Mexican research facilities into a less enriched form unsuitable for weapons, thus eliminating all highly enriched uranium in Mexico.[9] Later in March 2012 Rachel Maddow reported that all highly enriched uranium had been removed from Mexico.[10][11
Mexico only gave up their highly enriched weapons grade stuff. They still have normal enriched uranium to run their civilian reactors and haven't given that up. Supposedly because they thought the Russian company they were signed on to work with, Rosatom was acting in bad faith. Now they sure as shit aren't going to be handing anything over to Russians. Mexico only has one tiny research enrichment apparatus so even if they wanted to they could only produced enough highly enriched uranium in Mexico to build a weapon like every few years. The whole thing is a moot point anyway because Mexico has never had any claimed intention to build nuclear weapons. They just like maintaining some token nuclear industry so they can say they have it. And yes, fricking Mexico thought, Russia was too incompetent and untrustworthy to handle their nuclear materials.
>And yes, fricking Mexico thought, Russia was too incompetent and untrustworthy to handle their nuclear materials.
Mexico is better than Russia. Russian Federation is not the USSR.
Mexican and Russian IQ are similar but Mexicans are on an upward trend while Russians are on a downward.
>Mexican nukes
Would make for a cool reboot of the advanced warfighter series.
>Cartel steals nuclear material
>Russians sell them delivery mechanism as a revenge for HATO helping Ukraine
>Clandestinely nuke the golden triangle and Afghanistan to remove competition
>Turns out crooked Mexican troops were in on it and launch a coup
>Threaten to nuke anyone who intervenes
>At the end it turns out the CIA was in on it because some boomer glowies are still butthurt about Vietnam and Afghanistan
>The Mexicans that bought the missiles from Russia infected the Russian general they bought it from and he spreads his deadly infection to the entire Kremlin
>Ends with the only Mexican, US and Russian glowies in the know all dead, Mexico in a dictatorship and Russia spiraling towards civil war as we hear Putin has died of a deadly new virus
El Tom Clancía's Adbánced Juárfaitero
Hell no you can't defend a country with cheese dip and tortillas lmao
> Mesoamerica isn't the same thing as Central America
Mesoamerica ("Middle America") = Mexico + Central America.
Northern America = US + Canada.
North America proper = All of the above + the Caribbean islands + Greenland.
It's full of moronic monkeys.
>It's full of moronic monkeys.
ENOUGH. Not every thread needs to be about Russia!
No, Mesoamerica is specifically the areas with urbanized civilizations that share Mesoamerican cultural traits like pyramidal temples, sacrifice, the ball game, etc.
There's some variation in where people draw the exact boundaries, but generally speaking it's specifically the bottom half or so of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and then specific parts of Honduras, other Central American countries, which ones/where (and how far up into Northern Mexico) depending on, again, how you wanna define it. Aridoamerica is the archeology/anthropology term for Northern Mexico and SW US that had nomadic socities, and then Oasisamerica is a specific pocket inside of it that had sendtary agricultural town building ones like the Pueblo, Hohokam, etc.
"Central America" in a geographic context usually means countries south of Mexico and above South America, and in an anthropology/archeology context, the places NOT in Mesoamerica to the south of it but north of SA. "Middle America" is a geographic term that includes Mexico and all of Central America, Mesoamerica would not.
TL;DR I guess it's like how Mesopotamia and Middle East are similar terms but don't actually refer to the exact same areas because the former is a cultural/archeological term that only applies to the civilizations in a given cultural sphere
>No, Mesoamerica is specifically the areas with urbanized civilizations that share Mesoamerican cultural traits like pyramidal temples, sacrifice, the ball game, etc.
Mesoamerica as a geography refers to Mexico and Central America collectively (with the exception of Panama) but is generally used in pre-industrialization era contexts.
>"Middle America" is a geographic term that includes Mexico and all of Central America, Mesoamerica would not.
Mesoamerica literally means Middle America. You're just making up random shit lol.
>TL;DR I guess it's like how Mesopotamia and Middle East are similar terms but don't actually refer to the exact same areas because the former is a cultural/archeological term that only applies to the civilizations in a given cultural sphere
Mesopotamia is a much smaller component of the Near East or so-called Middle East. Historical Mesoamerica is pretty much all of Mexico and Central America with the exception of Panama, southern Costa Rica, and parts of northeastern Mexico.
I'm not making random shit up. Mesoamerica and Middle America are not used interchangeably despite meaning the same thing in a denotative sens; I say this as somebody who regularly reads academic papers, books, on the topic, speaks to archeologists and historians, etc
>mesoamerican states couldn't stop being hands off because they lacked the horses to consolidate and stablish the type of centralization that happened in europ
That's probably a big part of it, yeah, though I'd honestly credit the logistical issues less to lacking horses and more lacking mules and the terrain: When you don't have draft animals to pull carts or carry supplies, your armies need human porters to do it instead, who also need their OWN supplies, meaning you have a much more finiite amount of time you can spend in the field without resupplying (vs draft animals grazing) and a there's a point of diminishing returns with the size of the force you're sending out (though in practice I think Aztec armies actually were relatively large even compared to European ones: per hassig's estimations with logistics Tenochtitlan alone could send offensive armies of 40k, or 200k if pulling from other citites)
Mesoamerica is also pretty much entirely dense jungles and swamps in the lowlands, or nonstop hills and valleys in the highlands.
thank you mesoanon
Forgot to reply to this before: Always happy to help.
If anybody wants clarification on anything I said or has Mesoamerican related (preferably military adjacent since it's /k/) questions i'm leaving the thread open
If Mexico figured how to co-opt their autistic tendencies towards mutual benefit of the US they'd become unironically a smaller US within a generation, but with China tier industry due to their lower labor costs. Mexican IQs have gone from 88 to 96 in just 20 years and are project to continue to trend upwards. Indios aren't actually dumb. Not Finn or Japanese level intellect but about as smart as western Slavs like Poles, so perfectly capable of building a competent society. Mexico sucks because the colonial era shat on anyone with integrity and an honest work ethic through the practice of making exploitation a virtue for the decaying status quo rulers. Honestly if the US backed a weird combination libertarian movement with strong mestizo nationalist undertones with safety nets the US could turn Mexico into a decent country. A lot of Mexico is actually pretty good. The whole problem of many Mexicans on the top thinking that cheating is the best policy is what fricks over the country so hard. They're like Russia but just not as bad yet, but Mexico benefits from having a giant pro western manufacturing base and that Mexicans are far more willing to just straight up murder oppressive types when they get angry. It really just boils down to whether or not they'll clamp down on their corrupt boomers.
The skull racks loaded with adolescents would beg to differ
Nah, the skull rack excavations (contrary to the misleading clickbait headlines people look at instead of the actual findings), suggest the Mexica of Tenochtitlan DIDN'T sacrifice as much people as Spanish accounts claim
At least one of the media reports on the findings say the rack in totality held around 11,700 skulls, which is also roughly the figure you get if you plug in the dimensions of the rack (34x12x5 meters) confirmed in multiple media reports on the excavations into old calculations estimating the skulls-per-cubic-meter density of racks of different sizes (from "Counting Skulls" by Montellano). I say "roughly:" because the paper states as racks get taller past a certain point, skull density goes down due to thicker support poles, and our math here doesn't account for that, but it's prob a minor effect, and may actually make the 11.7k figure an OVERestimate since the real rack's height is shorter then the ones from the paper
We also don't know exactly how many years of deposits the rack represents (media reports say it was for the reign of Ahuizotl which is 1486 to 1502, but not if it covered only part or that whole period or longer or if it was filled multiple times vs just once), and while the rack in question is the city's main skull rack, there would have been smaller ones, adjacent skull towers, etc too, so it's not the full total of all sacrifices during whatever time span it represents
Still, even if you wanna high ball it (say rack held 15k, filled up twice over time span, held only 25% of city's sacrifices), that would still only be around 7500 sacrifices a year. If you go lower, and with 11.7k, was filled once, and held half the city's sacrifices, it's around 1000 a year
Hence me saying the Mexica sacrificed 100s to 1000s a year, vs most Spanish accounts saying tens or hundreds of thousands annually (Cortes actually says 3000 and he's the only one not writing about it decades later, too).
Also see pic re: demographics of victims
>Cortes actually says 3000
By this I mean 3000 a year, not 3000 thousand/3 million, my point being that it's telling that one of only very few sources written during the actual events in Tenochtitlan vs from decades later gives a much more realistic total in line with the archeological evidence.
you can give monkeys all the resources in the world, you can't beat the white man
only the white man can beat himself
mesoamerican states couldn't stop being hands off because they lacked the horses to consolidate and stablish the type of centralization that happened in europe
shit was just too far away
didn't happened+they deserved+it's gonna happen again
mexshitco capable of being anything other than a hub of dirty brown leeches is a funny thought to me.
>b.b.but their food!!1!
mexican food is peak goyslop. nothing but corn and beans deep fried in vegatable oils. No wonder all of their women turn into disgusting pigs the second they hit the age 17 (and most of the time before then).
No.
>19th century mexico
>Military power
Black person the couldn't make cast iron for cannonballs let alone cannons