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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

> enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted

The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.

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Regardless of any “Pax Americana”, nuclear weapons have been the greatest force for peace in history.

Before them, we had two devastating world wars in the span of about three decades, with over 100,000,000 dead total. Now we’ve gone over seven decades without another.

Let’s hope the deterrent holds through the current, ongoing, and horribly irresponsible brinksmanship.

I mean, so far. Then one day, line go up.

That loss of life is not enormous if you look at the overall graph of civilian and military war-related deaths throughout 20th and 21st century. It very obviously trended downwards, especially after the Cold War, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused a spike. Then again, communism resulted in millions more civilian deaths in the same time period. The US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason, it's as if people are entirely unaware of events like Holodomor and The Great Leap Forward.

> US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason

It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea.

Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.

Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?

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