ok I'll bite. How many tens (of millions)? Can any country purge ten million own citizens to improve their global reach? Is it like a warcraft movie spell?

I think djohnston's point was that China's global reach started expanding after they stopped killing tens of millions of their own citizens, which was around the time Mao died.

Well the USSR used over 30 million people as slave labor in their gulags, which were mostly involved in construction works and natural resources extraction.

That can certainly advance things.

> ...too busy purging tens of millions of their own citizens to develop the global reach...

I think you misread 'to' in this sentence to mean 'in order to'. The intent by the parent comment was 'too busy...instead of develop[ing] the global reach'

I'm not defending Mao or Stalin. I'm critiquing utopian thinking, including that of Mao and Stalin. Communists pursued a utopia, and neoconservatives are pursuing their own utopia modelled on Chicago school economics and liberal democracy.

We should pursue a non-interventionist foreign policy and not force our way of life, which itself is a compromise between different groups, onto other countries. Other countries need to come to a different modus vivendi compromise between themselves and with us, and have as much right to sovereignty as we do.