[flagged]
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, the US did do some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
I don’t think the Iraq war was to establish democracy, it was to get rid of a dictator hostile to the US at a time when after 9/11, the US decided to it would not tolerate further aggressions. But a byproduct of that policy has been the establishment of a democracy and historically the US considered that democracies as natural allies and therefore the more the better.
If you want to do good, fine, but make sure you are smart about it and actually achieve that aim. The US has shown that its not good at this, regardless of intentions, they should just refrain from action until they get their shit together.
Yes FIFA as in the football/soccer league.
there is a third option.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
Ok. Then the question is "If the US really goes full isolationsist and packs it home, who takes the power vaccum?"
> China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil
I didn't say that "China handling it" is about invading anything. I also didn't say anything that the US is justified in invading Venezuela. I am just wondering that if those saying "the US shouldn't do anything" understand that someone will do something, even if this something is stupid, counterproductive or plain evil.
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
The US also destroyed the country in the process and caused more deaths than Saddam.