True they just invade their neighboring countries and say the people living in those places wanted them to help
Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.
I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.
We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".
Really, this is a fundamental issue to understand. USA is not a peace-bringing nation - it is a war-projection nation. In the same way that one can use fire to fight fires, the USA thinks its war-making is actually bringing peace to the world.
I know - it doesn't make any sense. But, the military-industrial complex which runs the USA doesn't care if you think it makes sense. It only cares about dropping bombs, clearing the shelves of inventory with short half lives, and replacing it with new inventory.
EDIT: the claim that USA's wars are "just, righteous wars" is highly specious and, frankly, risible. The USA has toppled more democratically elected officials than any other nation in the history of mankind. I urge you to consider the hubris of the statement: "the USA only fights good wars", because there is fiction, and there is fact.
The fact is, a lot of people in democratic societies around the world feel that the USA hasn't fought a good war since WW2, and in fact that the opposite is true: the USA fights to put its own dictators into power. Even a casual investigation of this fact yields more than enough evidence to support the statement: the USA is up to no good.
1. Preventing the spread of Soviet backed Authoritarian Communism.
2. Removing brutal dictators from power.
Both noble and justifiable goals.
I'm not going to judge the people that did it, bceause it was another time, but I hope the US public opinion has evolved so that some of US antics in that period could not happen now.
e.g.: involvement in the fall of Mossadegh, support to the Pinochet regime, support to the Shaddam regime, including the sale of chemical weapons during the Iran-Irak war, support to the contras...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
Its just that, the USA has its hand in the pie now. And that is the true reason for that heinous war.
Syria?
Iraq?
Afghanistan?
Cambodia?
Pakistan?
Yemen?
Nigeria?
Germany
South Korea
Every Western nation supported by the Marshall plan
You're right, but it goes both ways and not 100% one way or the other
But what it is doing today is a terrible, atrocious tragedy, and its far beyond the point where the means justify the ends.
I mean that as someone who follows closely the cost of American warfare, and as someone who refuses to ignore the human tragedy it is bringing to current generations of people who really, really do not deserve to have had their infrastructure utterly destroyed, their lives ruined, their children left in rubble, on a daily basis, because some smart American decided it had to be so.
Fuck, its 2017, are we really still explaining this? Of course we are. We must.
The US has had north of 100k troops in Iraq for 7 years, then about 50k for 3 more years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_troop_surge_of_2007#/...
Just look at Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, ...