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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.




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