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I don’t know, I think the risks of global totalitarian government are way, way higher if China becomes the premier global power.
I’ll just go ahead and stake out the position which is that the US actually does respect the rights of its citizens more than basically any country in the world (maybe Switzerland or the Nordics are better?) and certainly more than china or any of their allies. In addition to that the us really does try and encourage its allies to democratize. Places like South Korea, are imperfect, but far better than what they were earlier in my lifetime. The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way, but imo that should be viewed as more of an exception than a rule.
I also believe that the us national security / intelligence apparatus is mostly well intentioned / a good thing. Are they perfect, no, but it seems like they are pretty good at answering the elected president’s political appointees.
Most germanic european countries are very conformist societies where state force is used against those who buck the trend. They're just not enforcing the values that people who complain about 'conformity' tend to dislike, they're enforcing a different set.
If there's a country where the average person has more freedom than the US, it's probably some Latin American country where the government has to pick and choose what it uses its state capacity on.
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Even Iraq is probably better off than it was under Saddam. Certainly better off than it would have been under his sons. Afghanistan not so much.
How so? Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.
It's hard to find an equivalent country to look at path of development, Syria is obvious but Syria wouldn't look like it does today absent the Iraq war. Probably Iran is the downside estimate assuming poor governance and continued isolation, and Iran is about as well off as Iraq without the atrocities.
Why not? Are we supposed to assume that the Americans were the predominant factor of the Arab Spring, and that no such equivalent could or would have happened absent the US invasion of Iraq?
The reason Iraq had less Iranian influence circa 2000 under Saddam was because Iran under Saddam was a roughly 1/3rd Sunni religious minority suppression state artificially holding down the 2/3rd Shia majority. That 1/3rd is a larger fraction than the Syrian state, which was roughly 3/4th Sunni and 1/4th everything else, but it was still a distinct religious minority with deep, deep sectarian grievances that were not only perpetuated, but grown, by the dictatorship's sectarian tendencies and subversion of civil society dynamics that might have created a bond. We know what was liable to happen when the suppression apparatus faltered, which is to say sectarian revenge, and we know this was liable to happen both if the state was compromised by an external invasion (US invasion of Iraq), or by a popular uprising supported by neighbors (Syrian civil war).
Saddam's Iraq was a country surrounded by neighbors who would happily have fueled a Syrian-scale-plus civil war if Saddam faced an Arab Spring-esque Shia uprising. This includes many of the the real-history states who supported the civil war that followed the American invasion, including- or especially- Iran. As much as Americans like to think they dominate other people's considerations, Iran's proxy-and-WMD pursuit up to 2003 were always first and foremost for use against Iraq, and the Iranian Revolutionaries long saw themselves as the eventual liberators / protectors of the regional Shia. Nor would many of Iraq's neighbors- who saw Iraq as a main security threat- have hesitated to drag it down a peg and build their own influence.
Unless you posit that Iran and Iraq, two arch-enemies who not only aimed but used WMD programs against eachother, were on the outbreak of a kumbiyah moment had the US not invaded Iraq, Iraq was a tender box primed for a half million (or far more) casualties if / when the Saddam regime hit a popular uprising. Iran had been preparing to support Shia groups for decades, and would not have stood by quietly.
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