Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. They're not really a threat on their own. Their tech is ass backwards. I wouldn't even bet on most of their nuclear arsenal still working anymore. But paired with China, that could be a problem.

Our own government harms us more because the Chinese don't have the opportunity to boss us around. Yet. And our oligarchs don't need wars to stay in power. Although I agree they certainly enrich themselves off these wars, and I'm not defending it, but that's not always against the best interests of the US population either.

In Afghanistan we took their oil and we got their poppy fields. Notice the "opioid crisis" geared up when we were planning to withdraw and would lose our access to poppy fields. We had to wean Americans off opiates, again. I think it's the fourth time in our nation's history. It happened after the civil war, after WW1, WW2, and towards the end of the Afghani conflict. I'm not sure about Vietnam, I have heard anecdotally that the heroin was so pure it was easy to get off of, which seems counter-intuitive but I've heard it enough times to think there might be something to that.

I don't know if you know this, but the safer opiates are all naturally derived or only semi-synthetic. The molecules are too complex to synthesize. Sure, we can make fentanyl till the cows come home, but that stuff is easy to overdose on and it causes heart attacks.

When we were weaning people off, we had cancer patients suffering and people dying in pain. Major surgeries are still being done with nothing more than Tylenol for post Op care now. That's barbaric for a drug class that only a small percentage of people ever become addicted to.

But there's only so much raw materials out there for making the good stuff and it sure as shit ain't going to us peasants.

I've seen how China treats its own citizens and it's far worse than the US. I can only imagine how they'd abuse the shit out of the US given half the chance.