Commentator - great moral justification.
Service member - 20 yrs of deployments in a failed war congress couldn’t be bothered to vote on authorizing, per their constitutional mandate, since the first year of it.
Thanks for standing for the flag at football games though.
I still think the world is incredibly lucky that the US has been the dominant power for the last 80y.
Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?
I doubt there will ever be another draft in the US. As technology becomes more important the priority will be keeping the industrial base running for military R&D and weapon manufacturing, not on having millions of barely trained kids most of which you can't properly equip.
One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.
This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.
I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:
"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."
Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.
They have worse equipment and a much smaller professional army.
Of course the US has done plenty of bad stuff to plenty of people. But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake. I too think that life is valuable everywhere, and that none should be sacrificed. But the real world doesn't yet offer us these circumstances.
You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.
>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake
This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.
As much as I do not enjoy the US doing all these things, I think it’s fair to say that they’re maybe the most benevolent?
I don’t think China historically has a great track record when it comes to military intervention, but they also mostly leave people alone.
The US seems to always go in with the best of intentions only to royally fuck it up.
These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.
Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.
Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.
It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.
Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.
Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?
I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.
> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?
On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.
That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.
You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.
Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.
From Wikipedia:
"From the time of the discovery of oil in Iran, foreign powers used force and exploited the weakness of the Iranian state to coerce it into concessions which allowed foreign companies to control oil extraction"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization_of_the_Iranian...
What's the alternative? It's as good a job as any and we are all enjoying it's warmth, right now.
Humans need war. Kurt even waved off his anti-war schtick after thinking about it long enough. This was a guy who lived though the direct impact of unimaginable destruction and death brought on by war. He profited from it!
Were you friends?
... Is not antagonizing them when they were reaching out to build a partnership, which is exactly what was happening with Russia in the 90s. If you're wondering how Putin happened, that's the decade that you want to be looking at.
Instead, the US figured that since the Cold War, round I went so well, why not do it again, and oh hey, Russian revanchism is on the rise and now Ukraine is dealing with the consequences, but hey, we're giving Russia their very own second Vietnam, so I guess that's nice. Maybe not very nice in Ukraine, but they are, after all, a buffer state...
Or having a bunch of EU nations extremely vulnerable to Russian influence.
I’m very glad it’s NATO, and not the “EU Supreme Command” defending the Continent. Russia and Ukraine probably are too.
the Germans would have happily given Ukraine up (and likely Poland too) if they got a few cents off their gas bill
not even the Russian population wants to be under Russian control
It would probably suck less if it was more neutral and without the self dealing / corruption.
The "policeman of the world" thing often seems like just a fig leaf / marketing to paper over dodgy stuff. :(
It really is. The US had the advantage of coming out of World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to Europe, as well as the only active nuclear arsenal at the time, as well as every Nazi rocket engineer and Japanese bioweapons expert it could pick up. It basically made the Western world an offer it couldn't refuse - accept American hegemony, military occupation and generous loans for postwar reconstruction or flip a coin on whether Washington or Moscow nukes you into atoms in the great game of superpower chess that would define the 20th century.
It isn't hard to look at American foreign policy as being little more than a shakedown operation.
It's not our place to stop that. Our place is to defend ourselves and anyone with whom we have a formal alliance. Beyond that, we cannot and should not attempt to play world police.
Being the policeman of the world absolutely sucks. War absolutely sucks. But one of the best ways to prevent China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc from saying “might make right, let’s take this land and these resources from our neighbors, since no one can stop us” is for the US to say, “no, we will stop you and we have the will and the tools to easily do it.”