It's true. Its just that the power gap that existed after the collapse of the USSR until Russia started getting its shit together and china started its meteoric rise was enormous enough so as to be incredibly difficult to actually quantify. To put this into perspective: the dessicated bleached bone corpse of the red army known as the 90s and early 00s russian army was the 2nd most powerful and the PLA, which was still stuck in 1960, was the third. There weren't a lot of players. Or really any players. America also owned yeltsin so russia wasn't gonna do shit even if it could. It was a roughly 20 year period of the world being an American sandbox. Which is why so much bullshit happened from 1991 to the mid 2010s. But still, 4th most powerful is a hell of a lot different from 44th most powerful even with the old power gap.
>the US strong-arm them constantly
That's part of it but they really well and truly actually just fucking suck, too. Though iran takes some blame here. A country cannot function without unity. Iran more or less poisoned the well by inciting the shiites to hate the sunnis way back immediately after the iranian revolution. It would come to a head in the 90s. Under earlier saddam, and before, the shiites and sunnis had unity. Now they do not. Religious sectarianism in a pluralistic country. The shiites in charge of Iraq really have no interest in anyone except shiites, which caused a lot of these Israeli astroturfed wahhabi cancers like isis and al qaeda to grow and fester.
Furthermore, I consider that Israel must be destroyed
Unlikely.
> The shiites in Iraq are fucking terrible at governing it and making it a stable, militarized, and powerful state
Because of this:
> the US strong-arm them constantly
It's true. Its just that the power gap that existed after the collapse of the USSR until Russia started getting its shit together and china started its meteoric rise was enormous enough so as to be incredibly difficult to actually quantify. To put this into perspective: the dessicated bleached bone corpse of the red army known as the 90s and early 00s russian army was the 2nd most powerful and the PLA, which was still stuck in 1960, was the third. There weren't a lot of players. Or really any players. America also owned yeltsin so russia wasn't gonna do shit even if it could. It was a roughly 20 year period of the world being an American sandbox. Which is why so much bullshit happened from 1991 to the mid 2010s. But still, 4th most powerful is a hell of a lot different from 44th most powerful even with the old power gap.
>the US strong-arm them constantly
That's part of it but they really well and truly actually just fucking suck, too. Though iran takes some blame here. A country cannot function without unity. Iran more or less poisoned the well by inciting the shiites to hate the sunnis way back immediately after the iranian revolution. It would come to a head in the 90s. Under earlier saddam, and before, the shiites and sunnis had unity. Now they do not. Religious sectarianism in a pluralistic country. The shiites in charge of Iraq really have no interest in anyone except shiites, which caused a lot of these Israeli astroturfed wahhabi cancers like isis and al qaeda to grow and fester.
Furthermore, I consider that Israel must be destroyed