Exactly. I think Noam Chomsky said something along these lines: I cannot think of a case where a nation intervened in or influenced another country in a purely disinterested humanitarian fashion.

That doesn't mean national interests cannot coincide with good outcomes, though.

Kosovo? The US didn't seem to have much in the way of interests there.

Kosovo was a part of Serbia, a Russian-backed client state. You would never see the US advocate for the people's right for self-determination for Palestine or Scotland.

Yes. But I don't think that giving more power to the US Empire will be better for human rights long term. The US and it's client states also kill millions of people for profit.

Do.. you have a citation for that?

Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, 90% civilian death rate from drone strikes? Yemen and supporting the Saudis who are much worse than anything you think of in terms of the CCP? Coups in Iran, Latin America, elsewhere? For profit prisons denying people basic rights and what's basically slave labor, police killing unarmed citizens, horrific COVID response that's guaranteed to have led to preventable deaths?

US prison system, law enforcement system. BLM movement. We do systematically repress them to lower classes, and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system), and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).

> US prison system

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766

> law enforcement system. BLM movement

(I assume you mean what BLM is protesting and not that BLM is killing people)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

> We do systematically repress them to lower classes

If you are systematically repressing people, please stop. I'm not, so I'm not sure where this "we" is coming from.

> and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system)

You are more likely to die by car accident, heart attack, suicide or coronavirus than cop. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the system.

> and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).

I encourage you to fight poverty and the best way to do it is through donating to meaningful charities. That doesn't seem unique to the US though.

Have we already forgotten the Iraq War? Syria? Lybia? Vietnam? All of these wars based on lies that covered for profits and killed millions?

Exactly. US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. But the defeat of Nazi German and Imperialist Japan had huge, favorable results for human rights.

>US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights.

Reasons? There were no reasons, the US entered WWII when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor!

And then Germany declared war on the US.

Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.

> Back then the politics were a lot less polarized

I count 4 political assassinations in the years around WWII[^1]

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_...

> had sane domestic policy under FDR,

Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps?

> That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.

WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was from the US side. The Soviet side had such things as massive artillery barages of cities, no step back rule where people with machine guns shot their own soldiers for not advancing fast enough.

You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy.

FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive.

Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist.

Crazy watching this unfold.

Less polarized? Huey Long got shot for FDR to get in, and actual socialism was a thing in the United States. Assassination attempts were regularly made against union busters.

What I meant was that there was a better sense of what left or right actually means on an international scale.

Nowdays centre-right presidents like Barack Obama or Biden get called socialist, somebody on the international centre left like Sanders is apparently a communist and Chomsky is an out of his mind, left of Mao crazy person. Pink haired college kids are apparently a serious threat and there's a "culture war" or something.

It seems fairly abnormal, especially considering Medicare for All is apparently still crazy, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic the U.S. is currently doing terrible at.

I don't think polarized is necessarily the right word for it, it just seems like American politics has jeered strongly to the right, dragging the people who dislike it into liberalism to seem reasonable.