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Imperialist war projects end up causing chaos. Chaos opens up for refugees and migrants. The war to bring feminism to Afghanistan 10x the world's heroin production. US meddling in LATAM has caused millions of refugees to pour into the US and has helped drug smuggling.
All war projects end up causing chaos; war is chaos. Look, your original argument was that removing a leader was meaningless. I don't think that's correct. If the US had committed to merely removing AQ leadership during the GWOT there would have been less chaos. But by your telling that would have been meaningless. Which justifies the massive war project that was the Global War on Terror, since merely removing UBL and other AQ leaders wouldn't have accomplished anything. But now (in your telling) we're Kafka-trapped, since a massive war project to hunt down and eliminate terrorists would have created more chaos instead of stability. So the proper response to hostile, violent, or illegal acts against your nation-state or populace, apparently, is to do nothing.
Forgive me for wondering if you didn't get it exactly backwards. You'll notice that Afghanistan was moved on about 3 seconds after the Taliban banned heroin; heroin production massively soared under Coalition occupation, and then after the US finally left Afghanistan heroin suddenly dried up in North America and subsequently was banned (again) by the Taliban, cratering production. Very mysterious - it's almost as if between 2001 and 2021 whoever was interested in keeping the heroin supply going developed a superior alternative.
If the US hadn't been meddling in the middle east there wouldn't have been a GWOT to start with. If the US hadn't let people who live in a cave in Afghanistan into flight school it would never have happened.
Killing Bin Ladin would not have changed much in Afghanistan. Spending 20 years trying to spread DEI to Afghan villagers didn't help either. The US should focus on the US, not regime change.
“If the US hadn’t been meddling in the ME”
Maybe we could have figured out another energy source earlier but that was prime oil-age economics. You can throw shade now because Americans no longer remember how our economy would shutdown from an oil crisis. Today we could close to fully transaction to Tesla’s and nuclear, but I don’t think we had the tech stack back then. Energy crisis do tend to solve themselves so maybe we could have build an alt tech stack after a decade of crisis.
China is built on middle eastern oil. They didn't destroy Iraq by bombing it, instead they gave billions in foreign aid and helped them build infrastructure. Has a decade of bombing Yemen made American ships safer?
The US wasted trillions in Afghanistan and China is building mines by making good deals.
I never defended Afghanistan. I didn’t even defend Iraq (which we won at huge costs).
I simply said we were involved in ME because we had to be. The GWOT started because of Arabs. 15 out of 19 hijackers were Saudi. 2 others were UAB. Those are oil countries. I said we’ve always needed oil. Tactics and strategy after 9/11 are a different discussion. But I will stress we always had very real American interest in oil.
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Sure, maybe. It doesn't follow from that that you can just let people blow stuff up and shrug your shoulders.
The US is and has always been, at least in part, a maritime merchant republic. All such nations throughout history were inevitably getting embroiled in affairs abroad because their domestic politics rely on trade and trade relies on stable, non-hostile trading partners and open sea lanes. This is why the Monroe doctrine exists and why the US got involved in the Middle East almost instantly upon becoming a nation.
You could wish for some alternative version of the United States that was not this way, but you would be disappointed. "That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
This is by no means me endorsing or supporting any given US military action. In fact I am broadly critical of US military interventions! But the idea that a merchant maritime republic wouldn't regularly be performing military actions overseas, including regime change in extreme cases, is a fantasy.
China does more overseas trade than the US. They are the biggest trading partner with almost every country in the middle east. They didn't have to waste trillions fighting forever wars there to dominate trade.
The US spent two trillion in Iraq for China to be Iraqs biggest oil buyer. Venezuela was not a threat to American martime trade.
Well, first off, I don't think this is true (by value). Secondly, we didn't have to waste trillions fighting forever wars over there to dominate trade either. Thirdly, China is actually expanding its military footprint in the Middle East, inclusive of building at least one military base there and performing anti-piracy patrols, so I think it's decidedly too soon to tell if they can avoid getting dragged into a military operation there.
I am not arguing that it was. I am arguing that merchant maritime republics regularly perform military actions overseas (securing maritime trade being one of the reasons said republics do that, but not the only reason). China (which, on top of the military actions I mentioned above, regularly both uses force and conducts military operations short of war in its maritime near-environs) is a good example that proves my point.
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