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Hey, we did have a "Good times, weak men" moment just recently in Afghanistan. It turns out that wealth and industry (at least in our hands) can't beat small arms and religious fervor so intense they were prepared to blow themselves up just to defeat us. Perhaps things would've been different if the PLA had gone in and shown the world what real human rights abuses look like, who knows.
There's some truth in "Good times, weak men". Take Rome. Their tenacity was absolutely legendary until it wasn't. They lost to Hannibal at Trebia, Lake Trasimene and then Cannae - 20% of male citizens dead in under two years. Rome totally rejected the possibility of defeat and fought on to ultimate victory! Later on they're surrendering and paying tribute to the Goths, the Huns, everyone and their dog. There's no Cannae spirit of victory at any costs, a single defeat is enough for them to make concessions.
That's not a particularly convincing statement, one of the benefits of "good times, hard men" is how vaguely it can be interpreted. The Japanese and Germans during WW2 suffered far harder times than the US did, what with their soldiers getting ships full of ice cream while the former were eating their shoes. The Soviets suffered plenty of "hard times", and even they gave up on fighting a mountain insurgency. The Chechens prided themselves on being "hard men" and even they got their cheeks clapped later when the Russians swallowed losses.
It is a largely useless and outright misleading frame to view the world in, even if there are examples of moral "weakness" (or at least a lack of appetite for brutality) causing defeat. And that's not even the definition of weak being used in every context, another benefit of how vague the term is in the English language is that it lets people accidentally or intentionally conflate two very separate things, cowardice and military weakness. The US managed to clap ISIS despite the latter being even more rabid than the Taliban.
The Romans famously gave up on Germania after disastrous losses at Teutoburg and well before anyone could plausibly call them weak/decadent.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the US carried out air strikes against IS but otherwise used local proxies for the actual fighting, yes? Not a great example.
What does it matter? Fighter pilots, if not drone operators, are stereotypical "hard men", and it certainly seems that the countries experiencing "good times" have an abundance of them.
Besides, there were SF sent into the region, who are undeniably so.
The fact that technology and state capacity matters more than how fierce and militaristic your average goon is, should count as another knock against Good Times, Weak Men.
As the saying goes, "You can't thicken up a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot."
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The Chechens, Afghans, Goths and so on were supposed to lose. Most of the time, big established powers are supposed to defeat smaller, poorer powers since they have all these resources and advantages. WW2 is one of those scenarios. But sometimes this doesn't happen, we have the man bites dog case where the small powers win. Or in the case of Chechnya, they won the first war, lost the second.
Explaining this kind of rarity is what the model is for, it suggests that when the big powers start losing to the small powers, the big power won't be big for too much longer. The Soviets suffered all kinds of disasters in the 1930s and 1940s and pulled through but by the 1980s the war in Afghanistan was enough to cause them political trouble! Stalin would've laughed at the idea of a mere 15-20K dead soldiers causing problems for the Soviet Union. But the USSR of Andropov and Brezhnev was not what it used to be.
I think there is a useful meaning of 'weak' that is certainly satisfied by Andropov and Chernenko. The former was very sick and died quickly. The latter was described as "an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not" when he succeeded Andropov in 1984. Or take Biden. Old and muddled. There's a certain kind of political culture that gets you young, energetic leaders, another delivers these old talkers. Scipio Africanus was 28 when he won his first campaign, Napoleon was 27 when he invaded Italy, Alexander won battles in his teens. Vigour, aggression and youth vs bureaucracy, physical weakness, senescence and passivity.
This kind of strength doesn't guarantee success - Belisarius and Aurelian didn't manage to turn things around for Rome. But something must have happened to change Rome from the supremely confident, all-conquering Republican Rome to the desperately embattled 3rd and 4th century Rome. The institutions and culture of the old days disappeared, expansion slowed and stopped. Why did they give up on annexing Germania, they'd never halted expansion before no matter the disaster?
How could ISIS even show up - wasn't the US supposed to be waging a global war on Islamic terror and securing the oily lands? It seems like a pretty serious failure in your military strength if strawman-Islamists from your own feverish propaganda materialize and take half of Iraq, only to be beaten back by Iranian proxies (who now control the territory in question). If the US were truly strong, they should have been able to stomp Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and so on, install new regimes of awed, pliant clients who send back tribute to the Metropole lest they incur Washington's wrath. Iran should be quivering in their boots, grimly defending their homeland, not advancing on all fronts.
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