If I understand your argument correctly, the US should abandon attempts at preventing eugenics because other countries will do it?
eugenics =/= unethical eugenics.
If you screen your embryos for downs syndrome, you are practicing eugenics.
If you screen your fetus for any genetic defects, you are practicing eugenics.
If you want smart kids and want a smart spouse, you are practicing eugenics.
It's tantamount to claiming we shouldn't do brain surgery because someone once practiced it by drilling holes in people's heads to remove demons.
Eugenics at scale seems inherently unethical to me because its purpose and effects are contradictory under any moral justifications I can think of, except that which basically say "I deserve this power because I have it."
If we can't distribute a vaccine universally and equitably, we definitely can't eugenics. It will always boil down to who has the most proximity to the resources.
On the individual level the purpose of eugenics is to make your life better. But if it's done on a societal scale, then that reason becomes increasingly meaningless. It's all too often co-opted into nationalistic, corporate, or blind structures which you might not even notice as an individual.
I hope this sort of thing will be treated like high-tech weaponry, even if not weaponized. On the individual level I want the most protection possible, but I'm not allowed to get a Sherman tank, at least not very easily.
eugenics =/= unethical eugenics
You can (for example) ban research on things might lead to the development of novel poisons. But that ban is almost sure to prevent the development of some new cancer treatments.
I mean one that would generally benefit mankind as a whole?
Research is not laboring to progressively color in a pre-defined picture, where you can just tell research scientists "don't color in the naughty bits".
The genes that impact those things aren't being restricted?
We don't know what unrelated items or generally applicable patterns we might find when we go looking into basic research.
Some forms of eugenics are routinely practised in the West already. For example, pretty much every IVF clinic out there will recommend patients to scrap embryos that are proven to be aneuploid. (So either not viable, or, in some cases, viable but with Down syndrome.) This is accepted everywhere I know and is considered a part of your reproductive rights.
How is this not "good eugenics"? How would you frame it as unethical?
E.g. giving all parents free genetic screening and genome correction for their fetuses if they wish it would be eugenics.
If so, you're practicing eugenics!
We take it for absolutely granted that people's weaknesses and handicaps get compensated with inventions all the time. Organ transplants, artificial limbs, immunotherapy for cancer.
If it turned out that intelligence tends to correlate with depression, but the depressive part could be tuned out, would it be ethical to let the individuals suffer from depression and deny them a potential cure?
As far as eugenics goes, it is already to a large degree performed by proxy: the elites intermarry. But we are not really talking eugenics here; I am almost positive that in the second half of the century, genetic and epigenetic alterations in living adult humans will be commonplace.