What country (or countries) is a DIRECT threat to the United States?

We are our own worst enemy. Our arrogance and political polarization will bring us to our knees.

The WTO, a completely unelected body of global corporatists to whom we yield our sovereignty by treaty (thanks Clinton, NOT!) in disputes where some foreign company loses profit due to our laws – like laws requiring safe work conditions or clean food or saving the wetlands.

The incredibly secretive Trans Pacific Partnership being negotiated and formed as secretly as they can get away with. It’s like the WTO on steroids with compromises to workers’ rights and safety and more yielding to unelected body of global corporatists. The treaty commission is so secretive that U.S. members of the foreign relations committee have been denied draft copies of the treaty while fortune 500 corporations are welcome at the table.

Countries no longer cut it as a threat to the U.S.. It’s the “Free Trade” crowd who are eating our constitutional lunch.

Direct threat? None.

Indirect threat? Take your pick. Anyone from Canada to Saudi Arabia to England to Israel.

Each has their own individual grudge, as do 155 additional countries.

Although I do not foresee any large attack on the US, the countries who pose the greatest international competition are China and Russia.

Of course, like @elbanditoroso mentioned, global politics really is “every country for itself.” Every country is a competitor, fighting to be on top.

U.S.A.

Besides what @dabbler said, literally no country is a threat. Believeing any country is close to taking us down is one the dumbest, propaganda-ridden thoughts a person could have. It’s worse than thinking the government is going to take away your guns.

Not a one.

Porkistan. Fat cats being able to buy lifetime commitments from lawmakers, who pledge to ignore the common good and instead vote always in the interest of the one issuing the bribes. For instance, it just came to light that the fossil fuel kings, the Koch Brothers, have turned some of their $80 billion fortune toward buying pledges from congress to never vote to curb greenhouse gas emissions unless they include tax breaks of equal magnitude. Since public action to curb greenhouse gasses would cost, concomitantly cutting revenue makes doing anything meaningful to reverse global warming impossible. Which of course means Koch Industries can keep on growing till the rising temperatures utterly destroy modern society and bring their US market dominance to an end.

I agree with opinions above that currently, no one nation state poses an existential threat to the US, but our own high-handed behavior ignoring the needs of everyone but our own plutocrats could weld together a coalition of nations that would decide they had to stop us from harming them.

Anybody who could and is likely to put a sufficiently powerful nuclear weapon high over Kansas. The blast wouldn’t do much, nor the fallout, but the EMP would fry most un-hardened electronics and knock out an awful lot of power. That’s phones, computers, cars, power stations… it would be rather like The Day The Earth Stood Still, only nothing turns on again. Telecommunications infrastructure would be gone, as would much of our transportation infrastructure. People would be dying, en masse of things like starvation and exposure, if they survived the food riots.
Now, it is my understanding that military hardware is shielded against EMPs, but I don’t think that there would be enough aid to go around – to say nothing of the way that all of the roads will be congested with dead cars.

The ones with oil and won’t hand it over.

After the last news about spying EU-Bureaus: The EU? (just kidding…)

I hate that people talk about the world as a competition and the countries as its participants.

Mexico is slowly taking over. Viva la rasa!!!

Goldman-Sachs
Monsanto
Tories

@reijinni An American who, during the period of the American Revolution, favored the British side, also called Loyalist? I’m afraid that conflict is kinda over.

Iran
North Korea
China
Pakistan

Look around you right now. What do you see? Where did it come from? China.
Every day they get deeper into your pants but you don’t notice it. The typical trade imbalance with China is $2000 per year for every man, woman, and child in the US. That $40 per week heading over there is putting Americans out of work and devaluating our currency.
When they know we are at the point where we cannot recover they will call in the money we owe. It will not be pretty.

Canada can cut off the water to the states.

In a sense your country has been brought to it’s knees by the corporations that have been exploiting the American people for the last 30 or so years. These groups operate with virtual impunity… My take is that your government is firmly in their back pocket. Along with most other countries.

The only current direct threats come from militant Islamism (by carrying out acts of terrorism in the US) and North Korea (launching a missile at the US).

@Jerad_Plimco Welcome to Fluther, and you are so right. That is the existential threat not just to the USA but to life as we have known it.