When you call me ignorant, and then do so again, is it projection or a desperate attempt to distract from the movement of goalposts? The way to refute a simple statement like "not one accomplished a military objective that benefited the average American" would be to provide a single example of such an accomplished military objective. Try harder!
TFA claims explicitly, in the title, to be about "winning". I observe that the Pentagon doesn't have a recent track record of doing that. ITT that observation has been answered by novel definitions, references to WWII, appeals to sovereignty, and now you have appealed to anti-authoritarianism. Hold on to your history book, because our record in USA doesn't look too good on that either.
Here is a short list of authoritarian dictators whom USA supported for years: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, Mohammed bin Salman, Ibn Saud and the half-dozen other Saudi "kings", Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Hosni Mubarak, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sarit Thanarat, Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, Juan José Estrada, Manuel Noriega, Anastasio Somoza García, Luis Somoza Debayle, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Carlos Castillo Armas, Fulgencio Batista, Phoumi Nosavan, Hugo Banzer, Jorge Rafael Videla, Hissène Habré, Ferdinand Marcos, etc, etc, etc. As before, I have left out many. Tens of millions of innocent people died due to USA support for these authoritarian dictators, not to mention the hundreds of millions more who lived in fear and penury.
There is not a chance in hell that support for any of those awful men contributed in the least to USA not being shelled over any period of history. That has been guaranteed by our two giant oceans and two fairly large vassal neighbors. The more straws you attempt to grasp, the clearer the picture of USA militarism becomes.
I stipulate that USA navy defends shipping, except of course in those fairly frequent events in which battleships mistakenly run into shipping vessels while tooling around in the dark.
Yes, I fully understand that the US supported a long list of tinpot dictators in the pursuit of larger geopolitical goals, AND that life was not good under those dictators, AND that in some cases, nominally democratic leaders were undermined in favor of those tinpot dictators.
I'm making no "appeal to anti-authoritarianism", I'm simply restating the explicit goals of US policy, right up to this week.
Supporting those tinpot dictators was specifically to prevent expansion / pursue containment of larger and even more murderous dictators.
While the rhetoric was anti-communism, the reality, especially now, is that the "--isms" were irrelevant. It is literally the Free World vs Authoritarianism.
Geopolitics is extremely ugly. People get hurt and killed, in large numbers. At least those trying to defend and expand the areas under self-determination try to minimize it.
The case you need to make is not that people suffered under the US-propped dictators, but that they would have suffered LESS under Soviet or CCP-supported dictators. Compare Mubarak supported by the US in Egypt vs Assad supported by Russia in Syria. Without some specific situation, no sane and informed person would choose to live under Assad over Mubarak. Same for Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan in Korea who you mention supported, vs Pol Pot supported by China. Rising prosperity and protection from NK, vs abject poverty and killings of millions.
To say that decades of strong (and often extremely unsavory) containment policy had "not a chance in hell" of preventing attacks on US soil is to ignore that the US won the Cuban missile crisis, preventing nuclear missiles from being stationed minutes from our shores.
It is also to ignore what is happening in Ukraine this minute. Russian govt officials have in the past months clearly stated that not only do they think Ukraine has no right to exist, but neither do any of the previous Soviet sphere-of-influence states, out at least to Berlin. They will NOT stop unless they are stopped, and we are the only nation on the planet who can organize stopping it.
All of it was one flavor or another of bad. But a lot LESS bad than if it had not been done.
It is pretty clear that you are so focused on your litany of bad trees, that you are unwilling or unable to see the forest.
And back to TFA and the topic of "winning":
The fact of the matter is that if any person wants to live a self-determined life, and under a self-determined government, they must be better armed, prepared, and allied than the bullies or authoritarians who would otherwise take their lunch or their territory.
This basic fact was for decades ignored under what I call The Great Experiment, which was the idea that open trade & information flow would bring free markets and open democracy to the unfree world.
It failed. Completely and miserably. It only empowered the dictators.
Under that illusion, and as a result of lessons learned from press coverage of the Vietnam war, political will to fight wars as anything more than holding actions has been almost nonexistent. So, most actions did nothing more than hold, neither proving nor disproving the ability to "win".
Even in Gulf War #1, where the 5th largest military was wiped out in weeks, the US held back for a number of reasons.
But we must distinguish between political will and military capability. Just because a military hasn't been given permission to go all-out, doesn't mean it cannot.
You may not have noticed the confrontation in Syria last year when Russian-backed Wagner (iirc) did something stupid that called for a US response. The result was they had a lot of body bags and dead equipment, and zero US/coalition casualties. No the US Mil isn't perfect, and as with any huge organization, a myriad flaws can be found.
but looking more broadly, I'd notice that there are many of those types of incidents, and considering that every other military does whatever it can to avoid a direct confrontation with the US, I'd have to put my bet on the US Mil still being the most lethal - and able to "win" any confrontation.
What evidence is there where the US Mil has been actually outclassed by any other mil?
> Supporting those tinpot dictators was specifically to prevent expansion / pursue containment of larger and even more murderous dictators.
Conjecture and domino theory at best.
Many of the post WWII proto democratic governments in their infancy overthrown by CIA machinations had candidates that were no more socialist than, say, Australia.
Many wanted to throw off the yoke of pre WWII colonial rule by the French, the English, the Dutch, et. and establish their own governments for their own people without any obligation to the traditional order.
This was anthemic to both the US and post WWII UK governments who wanted Western hegonomy and in some cases stranglehold control over strategic Cold War resources.
The theory touted about was that if we (the US) don't stomp these independant governments before they grow, they'll end up freely and democratically trading with (say) Russia and China.
Ergo, we stage coup's and install monsters that take a cut from our resource companies.
Yes, there was some of that, but the overarching issue was NOT that they might trade with China or Russia, but would become effective outposts of them. See Cuba, which was not only literally happy to host Russian nuclear arms, but Castro even said that they should nuke us anyway.
Or, more recently, Venezuela. Hugo Chavez was (ostensibly) democratically elected, as was Maduro. The result is anything but democratic rule or prosperity for its people. Same for Orban in Hungary, or Putin, or literally even Hitler. Democracies often convert to autocracies. There's a well-worn playbook for it.
We should also look at the results. Zero of these tinpot dictators supported by the US were annexed by the US or any of the 'Free World' powers. The people under those regimes inevitably advanced towards self-governance and prosperity.
Would South Koreans really have been better off under the rule of the Un family vs Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan? North Koreans are literally dying in the streets of starvation, while just south of the DMZ, here is plenty.
Were the Iranians, especially women, better off under the Ayotollahs than under the Shah?
Are the Cubans really better off under the Castro regime than before?
Of course we can compare the world to some ideal and say "everything is sh#t". We must compare it to the real alternatives available.
I'm NOT saying everything was good, and some was very bad, but that does not make the US the worst of all possible worlds. That's reserved for the megadeath leaders like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pot, Un, etc... If they are not fought at every turn, they WILL take over. As we can see in Ukraine, as well as Tibet, the Uhguirs (sp?), and China's explicit claims on Taiwan. They'll always fabricate some excuse for their next claim.
TFA claims explicitly, in the title, to be about "winning". I observe that the Pentagon doesn't have a recent track record of doing that. ITT that observation has been answered by novel definitions, references to WWII, appeals to sovereignty, and now you have appealed to anti-authoritarianism. Hold on to your history book, because our record in USA doesn't look too good on that either.
Here is a short list of authoritarian dictators whom USA supported for years: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, Mohammed bin Salman, Ibn Saud and the half-dozen other Saudi "kings", Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Hosni Mubarak, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Mobutu Sese Seko, Sarit Thanarat, Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, Juan José Estrada, Manuel Noriega, Anastasio Somoza García, Luis Somoza Debayle, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Carlos Castillo Armas, Fulgencio Batista, Phoumi Nosavan, Hugo Banzer, Jorge Rafael Videla, Hissène Habré, Ferdinand Marcos, etc, etc, etc. As before, I have left out many. Tens of millions of innocent people died due to USA support for these authoritarian dictators, not to mention the hundreds of millions more who lived in fear and penury.
There is not a chance in hell that support for any of those awful men contributed in the least to USA not being shelled over any period of history. That has been guaranteed by our two giant oceans and two fairly large vassal neighbors. The more straws you attempt to grasp, the clearer the picture of USA militarism becomes.
I stipulate that USA navy defends shipping, except of course in those fairly frequent events in which battleships mistakenly run into shipping vessels while tooling around in the dark.