Banana Republic. Cuba. Let's not pretend the world superpowers don't all do this stuff to advance their position. Russia does it to advance it's national position. China does it to advance it's national position. US does it to advance their corporate position (largely tied to national position, just a vaguely alternative setup of the same stuff).

Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.

I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.

We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".

Whereas the USA just invades [wherever] and says "its because you're not democratic/have too many terrorists/whatever".

This is not what happened at all.

In eastern Ukraine and Crimea, that is almost exactly what happened.

It's honestly not even close. Have you read about the events in detail? I too was under that impression until looking more into it. Are you aware of the unknown sniper agitators?

Looks like our Russian friends strongly disagree with you.

When was the last time the US invaded a "neighboring" country?

The USA has a policy of not invading local countries, because they're too close to home. So, its mostly power projection "fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them .. here".

Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.

I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.

EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.

The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.

The wars the US has involved itself in post-WW2 have almost always been wars with the aim of:

1. Preventing the spread of Soviet backed Authoritarian Communism.

2. Removing brutal dictators from power.

Both noble and justifiable goals.

Can you define "almost" more clearly ?

I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.

e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...

Panama (1989) was an invasion with troops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...

Yes, almost 30 years ago the US invaded Panama to depose a dictator who had turned Panama into an international money laundering and drug smuggling center.

Well, you did ask...

.. and more to the point, it didn't work. Panama is still a festering cesspool of money laundering and drug trafficking.

Its just that, the USA has its hand in the pie now. And that is the true reason for that heinous war.

Operation Just Cause (we felt like it)

Usually it's a salvation to be occupied by US compared to Russia - they just kill, steal and trash territory making it doomed (Transnistria, Osetia, Ukraine teritories, Kuril islands) - a true Mordor.

So .. where is all that good ol' American-supported living in .. Libya?

Syria?

Iraq?

Afghanistan?

Cambodia?

Pakistan?

Yemen?

Nigeria?

Japan

Germany

South Korea

Every Western nation supported by the Marshall plan

You're right, but it goes both ways and not 100% one way or the other

Yeah, the USA did do some good for the world. 80 years ago.

But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.

I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.

The problem is, we wanted to do Iraq and Afghanistan and get out. If we had done a Marshall Plan in Iraq, we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade, but it would have been stable when we left.

The problem is, you thought it was acceptable to be there in the first place.

Fuck, its 2017, are we really still explaining this? Of course we are. We must.

> we would have had maybe 100,000 troops there for a decade

The US has had north of 100k troops in Iraq for 7 years, then about 50k for 3 more years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007#/...

The U.S. doesn't leave. Pretty much any where we send troops, we tend to set up bases there and remain indefinitely.

Just look at Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, ...