Ehh Good Enough

It goes back way further, but I'm not putting that much work into this so Imma start with Sparta. The warrior culture that said shit like "Sparta needs no walls" and "Spartans, what is your profession?!" fought Thebes three times, and three times they got absolutely humiliated by a bunch of guys who would rather just be gay poets together.

Everyone remembers them responding to a threat with "If." No one remembers they immediately got their asses kicked. Everyone remembers Thermopylae, no one remembers they got steamrolled after that, and it was actually a bunch of Athenian philosophers who sent the mighty Persian empire with "so many archers we were fighting in the shade" home with their tail between their legs.

Then Rome thought they were gonna eat everybody's lunch, and a bunch of Celtic farmers kicked their shit in so hard twice that the entire empire literally collapsed because they didn't have enough soldiers left to defend it.

Then the Spanish Conquistadors conquisted exactly nothing because they thought they were great warriors, and 100% of their successes were actually because they were disgusting and disease ridden and so used to making each other sick that they died less from smallpox than the people they were invading who bathed regularly and were (in the case of the Mexica) mostly at that point in history just a bunch of bureaucrats who still repeatedly beat their asses despite having weapons made of wood and stone.

Then the Nazi "master race" as previously established got absolutely owned by British bureaucracy, American teenagers who lied about their age to skip high school classes and shoot Nazis, French exotic dancers and secretaries, and a group of Dutch school girls.

Now the Russian war machine is donating their tanks to Ukrainian farmers and getting curb stomped by knitting circles because (Yakov Smirnoff voice) In soviet Russia, occupied country conquers you.

And the largest and most well funded military force in all of human history recently signed what amounted to a surrender agreement with a country that hasn't been a world power pretty much since they got their asses kicked by Athenian philosophers.

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."