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America changed the narrative to be the good guys. Wars are no longer result of need for exploration, previous land claims, manifest destiny or anything else. In fact wars are no longer wars, but merely establishing freedoms to the oppressed populations. Military isn't willingfully enlisting to go kill foreigners in foreign lands, they are protecting the freedom at home. Countries that are subjugated and forced to keep military bases in their borders aren't vassal states, but partners. Yet the song changes very quickly when any other country does a tiny bit of the same. I don't dislike these rulers of our times, but one should not be naive to think that it doesn't even matter what you vote for, as you say, you're just gonna be part of the same imperialist State Department roadmap.

Exactly! You are describing classical academic gepolitics as explained by the most standard US military beureucrat before rampant ideological psyops took over.

John Mearsheimer is a good example of this line of thought but he's somehow a radical these days.

The US is fighting bloody wars for resources and control like a big game of RISK, that's how historical empire has always worked and most knew this decades ago, but now theres layers and layers of bullshit on top.

Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world, not because we've protected ourselves from the bad guys and became uniquely enlightened in a world of savages, that's the winners writing the history, another historical trope that has been memoryholed.

With that defeatist attitude might as well have the USSR run the world at the end of the cold war.

Wars are horrible and they're almost always done for geopolitical power or resources, not to protect enlightened democracy or whatever.

Wars are terrible! But as soon as you have some preference for the society you want to live in (or consider better), you might need to confront issues of violence in defense. I did not find the USSR model preferable, for example.

I get what you mean and me neither but the relatively modern ideological lens, that most wars are fought for democracy, or to protect liberalism is just not true from a historical or economical standpoint.

Most US wars are fought because of realpolitics, resources, opening markets, company contracts, like a game of Civilization, empires battling empires, or plutocrats taking over markets in poorer parts of the world through brute force foreign policy, just like in the rest of history.

There is no US exceptionalism even though i love many things uniquely about your country as a whole and wouldn't live in neo USSR ( unless part of the intelligentsia, which in some parts look like parts of the american plutocracy ).

Would the world be a better place if North Korea had won? Saying it is all/mostly realpolitics etc., does not mean that the outcome was always worse than not fighting or at the very least it isn't easy to make that determination across the board (doesn't excuse bad military action, either).

Painting the picture that the alternative to hyper aggressive war machine is North Korea is a little bizarre to me to be honest.

That is not the point. Just saying the US is a hyperaggressive war machine isn't leading anywhere. Wars have consequences and if they hadn't happened we'd have had the counterfactual, which might not always be great, either.

> Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world

I dont like this take. It suggest that the sole source of US wealth is natural resource theft. It is not (sole source).

The US fucks/fucked with many countries for many reasons. Ideological - fight vs spread of communism, figting 'terror' in afganistan. Those can be also tied to interest of Military–industrial complex - war is private profit.

Other reasons is to secure the flow of resources, all coups and dictators in middle east were an attempt to stabilise oil flow. State doesnt care much how it will be done. All they care is that oil will arrive cheaply at steady rate. Private companies will help for some cut.

Saudis did what us told them, they are now building indoors ski slopes on their deserts, US doesnt care - even though wahhabism is in practice an ideological opposite of US. They hardly sound like poor oppressed people who's oil being stolen.

The US doesn't invade people for natural resources, especially oil. The US is the world's largest oil exporter.

It might have in the 70s, but that was a while ago.

Funny enough we don't get any of Iraq's oil, which is managed by a European company and sold to China.

Sure thing. They reduced Iraq to rubble for democracy

Invading Iraq was very bad but it's not rubble. It's, like, still there.

Deaths in the war were less than you'd think. GWB actually comes out net positive in his presidency because he started PEPFAR (AIDS prevention in Africa) which was really, really good and saved millions of lives.

With that type of accounting, a father of two can get away with murder since he has been a net positive to the world.

Damn it, man. I don't think I've seen worse defense in the last decade.

The Iraqis must be relieved to hear that yes, their country was destroyed but the person who started it did some random good thing in Africa.

The randomness is exactly why it's so good. You'd get bad wars from other presidents, but you wouldn't have gotten PEPFAR. Gives him a good value over replacement president.

The purported reason for invading Iraq wasn't to steal the oil, but to maintain the petrodollar (it's claimed that Saddam was preparing to begin trading oil in Euros).

The purported reason was WMDs wasn't it?

The actual reason was that Dick Cheney felt like it. There really isn't any kind of actual reason beyond that, and we didn't gain a single thing from the invasion.

Petrodollars (the foreign US dollar oil trade) are a leftover 1970s concept; they simply aren't important or a large part of support for the dollar's value. OPEC oil exports are about $300 billion a year, which isn't a lot.

The purported conspiracy theory reason. The official reasoning of WMDs were generally believed to be a nonsense casus belli presented as legal justification. More people thought it had something to do with 9/11 than WMDs.

In this case, much of the real purpose was laid out in articles and papers written just a few years earlier by a bunch of the same people crafting and implementing the policy. There may have been more reasons than that, but some were frankly stated in public documents.

Their publications (including an open letter addressed to Clinton) lay out a case for preventative (as distinct from preemptive—what we in fact did was preventative, with some bullshit to sell it as preemptive) war over concern that Saddam might do some of the stuff we lied about to claim he was already doing it.

Pure realpolitik damn-the-legality chess-playing stuff. He seems risky (to our interests in the region—who cares about his own people?) so we better depose him, that kind of thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American...

This is the explanation that checks out with me. Add some impulse for Bush Jr to finish what Bush Sr started and you have yourself a ridiculous waste of resources.

The US is still extracting and controlling oil resources in a foreign country via its military, just look at their current presence in North-Eastern Syria.

The US does not need to extract oil anywhere. We're an oil exporter.

One would think so, and yet, the US does exactly that in North-Eastern Syria.

Also, see the US President asking the Saudis for some extra pumping of oil last summer (summer of 2022, that is), supposedly that was meant to help with the gasoline prices in the US and hence with said President’s greater chances of electoral success.

I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.

I'm pretty sure all of EUs countries would be more democratic and sovereign "out of the herd".

but they would be much weaker. And weak countries are not capable of protecting democracy or sovereignty - prime example ukraine.

Russia is a mafia like state, no doubt but i just mentioned hundreds of coups, deaths squads, forever wars and millions dead from western powers, eternal war machines that we are supporting.

And still you'd like to focus on what Russia maybe did in some EU elections, and while i totally agree with you, the fact that it's the part you focus on just like the US media is the psyop in itself. Look over there while multiple wars are ongoing.

That the endgame for that discourse is more war in itself is brilliant, all allowed public discourse should lead to more war from the west towards a myriad of evil people all around, and no one should look into the classes that benefit from those wars.

I see what you're saying. My point (which definitely wasn't clear) is that "small" doesn't mean "ineffective". Equivalent Western operations are hampered because they have goals. Russia is just a chaos monkey - for example I'm sure they'd bung money to XR if they could, despite being a petrostate.

Yes, it's true, I care more about Russia because they've already kicked me where it hurts once. Anyway, if there was a way to inoculate against Russian psyops, wouldn't that also solve the problems you're more concerned about?

Can't be very successful if people endlessly rant against the US.

Oh those annoying endless rants, not the millions dead in wars, those who ended their lives by death squads because they wanted their own resources, they aren't that important, but those pesky rants!

There's been no stop to the US war machine, they're 100% succesfull.

Wars are terrible.

But again, this was about psy-oping the US actions, which as your post shows isn't terribly effective.

Some people just hate to hate. A lot of the world does like the US, some even go as far to exclaim love, and rightfully so.

I've had former close friends attempt to sabotage me in my early career as well, for a multitude of reasons, but the most apparent to me was jealousy. How much of the world do you think operates in a similar way? I would bet a very significant portion does, maybe even a majority if I were at my most cynical years.