There Are Many Things Worse Than American Power
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> […] the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
* https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos#The_Melian_Dial...
Unless the weak have someone strong guarding their back.
Said power could be wielded better and more efficiently. The American people would benefit, as would those parts of the world impacted directly. Indirect benefits follow.
Lesser evil is much better than worse evil though
"Better" in the sense of a false choice; namely that power being brought to bear. There is a case for that.
There is also a case for use of that power being unnecessary.
Our leaders have done the unnecessary a lot.
That is often left out of these discussions, and that trends toward bad and worse than need be.
Finally, a lot of what gets done is in violation of International law and when or if done by less powerful nations would be punished.
Completely unacceptable behavior, frankly.
But hey, the bread and circuses, laden with trinkets and baubles are nice, so...
Yeah. The piece is an insult.
Your point falls flat, not because we do need to be able to deal with a scenario like that.
However, we also need to quit creating extremist groups, who use weapons we will often sell them to use!
Case in point is a number of governments we did not like, and to help them out of power, we armed their extreme factions, and guess who ends up bigger, often in power after the carnage? Yeah.
At this point, there are generations of people who do not like us that much. Iraq was a war for choice over oil, just as one easy example.
And sanctions!
Helping those undesirable governments out of power by starving their people does tend to make those people enemies.
My point here is we are creating potentials that we then need to defend against! That's in addition to the ones we would see anyway.
Like I said, the piece is an insult.