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Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.
Well this is pretty unpopular according to polls and I don't think they claim that democracies produce wars stands up to scrutiny. Most modern democracies are extremely peaceful. It's mostly the US and France mucking about which suggests that Empire produces wars more than democracy.
Most "modern democracies" are vassal states (allies) of the US, forbidden to fight anyone without our approval, and most of those have divested themselves of any real military capability. This was not done through democratic means. Our forefathers knew democracies had spent the last century invading each other, especially the French. When they set up the postwar system, the EU gave up its essential sovereignty in military terms to the US. So they could all be peaceful "democracies" under the aegis of US military protection. So too with Japan and South Korea. They aren't peaceful, they're disarmed. When they weren't, as in the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, they immediately fell into wars until the US asserted military supremacy over eastern europe.
Yes, being the global military guarantor of the trade routes routinely requires military action in far-flung parts of the world. Especially against regimes that have aligned themselves politically against your hegemony. This is something every superpower has to do, because that's what allows the entire global economy that has lifted our race of humanity from the endemic poverty of 99.999999% of our collective history. Some do better jobs than others. If you want to compare the US empire, compare it to the constellation of other great powers who ran it before us. Is our middle east policy really worse than France, Russia and Britain's? Was theirs worse than Spain and Portugal's? Or the Ottomans?
Actually, the Ottomans might have been the last great empire to have a better middle eastern policy, but nobody's going for the "Use Albanian slaves to crush all resistance" tactic anymore.
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