Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Your comment is bad enough (and already against the site guidelines) as a generic tangent and as flamebait. Tossing Molotov cocktails ("imperialist bully") into the thread is downright destructive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously in other places recently too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977). No more of this please. Regardless of how wrong or badly-behaved other people (be they HN users, celebrity CEOs, or imperialist bullies) are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Other people doing bad things is a poor non-excuse for setting this place on fire.

This is not nationalistic at all. I'd say it about any country exhibiting this type of behavior.

If you throw pejoratives at $country, that's going to lead to a nationalistic flamewar. It is not complicated.

No more flamewar comments of any kind, please. It's not what this site is for.

> imperialist bully

As far as empires go, America is nothing compared to the larger players.

But also consider that global geopolitics is inherently an anarchy. The guy with the biggest stick makes the rules. Between America and the next 3 largest contenders for biggest stick... I'll take America, the alternatives are far worse. And I'm a Russian by birth. Want to talk about actual bullying? Check out CCP blackmailing people overseas for political speech, by threatening their families in the mainland.

We're in the middle of the most globally peaceful period in recorded history since 'imperialist pig' USA came to power. The alternatives don't include 'no world leader', they are only choices of a different world leader. If you really want the US to fall from the world stage, I suggest you start learning Chinese or Russian; you're going to need it.

I'm not sure it's all good news. There was no perfect route out of this where everyone won. Hopefully it ends up being the least bad decision but I'm really worried about individuals that were working against the taliban and with the united states and I'm even more worried about girls not being able to go to school.

I don't see how there could possibly be peace when the last US soldier leaves. The country still has a long hard road of war in front of them. It will be a massive power vacuum that the taliban and most likely others will try to fill.

This is only the beginning.. almost all school girls https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/blast-near-afghan...

That's a very one sided take on it. The US has also been playing global peacekeeper for the last century. While also intervening all over and playing imperialist games against the USSR, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, among others.

It's not been all good or all bad, and I flat out reject any one sided critiques of it.

This is just blatantly false. Most countries were not at war for most of their existence. Even Europe pre-WW1 wasn't at war during most of its time. There was a war going on most of the time yes but they were much more limited in scope until the Seven Day's War.

Most of these conflicts implicate only one or two countries. Europe is big, especially in historic times, there were dozens of states. It's simply not true that most countries were at war most of the times.

And even then there is a lot more to the world than Europe, which admittedly was quite warlike at times.

Please stop posting flamewar comments. Not cool.

As if there aren't terrorist cells in any of these countries or they aren't supporting UN actions.

I don't think Pakistan is very interested in not getting the billions of dollars in aid every year.

Keep the aid, send the soldiers home.

The military or the people?

History suggests no intervention doesn't go well. Threading a needle based on the situation is necessary

Can you provide some examples? Are Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos better off because of US interventionism in the 70's?

You can't walk around Cambodia without seeing a bunch of legless people who stepped on landmines. Huge swathes of land is unusable because the country has the most unexploded ordinance on Earth from a war that never existed on the books and certainly not in the minds of the public.

The sheer arrogance of enforcing your morals and telling people what is best for themselves with the barrel of a gun. None of this stuff is about democracy or western values, it's all about money and power.

It was never about democracy really, it was all about containing Soviet influence and the spread of communism. Which had little to do with democracy directly and a lot to do with drawing battle lines and trying to keep the other side from gaining too much power.

In hindsight it is easy to say it was pointless, because the USSR imploded. However, at the time with the USSR looking strong and expanding influence rapidly internationally, that was not at all clear.

And I imagine you don't think it would have been best to allow the USSR to gain a strategic advantage over the West.

I would urge you to read Legacy of Ashes, if you haven't, to get a sense of just how poor US intelligence on the USSR was at the time, and how that impacted policy. One gets the sense that the vast majority of these secret or undeclared wars were driven by a few die hard anti communists who manipulated or manufactured evidence to support their crusade - and to a large extent the USSR "looked strong" largely because it suited them for it to look strong, not because it really was.

Whether that's true or not, the way they were spreading communism throughout Asia and Africa was alarming. The US policy of containment was definitely not the right one in hindsight, but it's very difficult to make the case that it was clearly the wrong thing to do at the time - and decisions are not not made with the benefit of hindsight, nor is it fair to judge them that way.

It's very common to say later, that decision I made was a mistake, but if I was in that same situation with the knowledge I had at the time, I'd still make the mistake.

And yet Wahhabism is being blatantly pushed across the globe by the Saudis with not a word from the US or it's allies?

I like to hope they are actually doing something in the shadows to stop the spread of such extreme ideologies but there's a part of me that thinks the Western world has no problem with it occurring. Just another war and another enemy to fight down the track.

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

Can you be any more vague? I can't even formulate a proper response to this.