We've got plenty of oil, and far too much heroin already. We should switch to nuclear for power generation, use our own petroleum for plastic and rubber and whatnot. Worst case scenario, we can do Canada a favor by killing them all, and take their oil instead. The Wars for Oil shit is just a cope, lefties pretend that the Middle East is the only oil rich region because then they can still bitch about the wars without having to mention Israel. It's always been wars for Israel.
It is not about oil for us, it is about controlling oil for everyone else to sustain our consumer economy and financial system.
Even if it means sending young American men to get maimed and killed in the sandbox? Even if it means spending money we don't have, driving up our national debt and ensuring that current and future Americans pay for the burden of what is "rightfully" America's? America has undergone a steady decline over the past few decades and last time I checked gas is more expensive now than it was 20 years ago, aside from the MIC the average American has not reaped the benefits at all regarding these interventions and all you don't need to look far to see the reality of how bad things have gotten here especially regarding the economy and immigration. You can have an Empire or a ethnically contiguous nation but you can't have both.
Yes, even if it means using our army and navy for the shit they signed up for. There has never been a period of time where we weren't sending people to die for the country.
And it has not actually undergone a steady decline, America is plainly wealthier and more powerful than it has been in the past. Its relative power share has shrank, because we cannot prevent everyone from getting wealthier and more powerful forever. However we are still number one in pretty much everything except for industrial slavery, which China leads in. You are buying into anti-American hype because we've had some foreign policy problems.
The benefits of these interventions and control over this shit is our ability to borrow, our ability to support and sustain a consumer economy, and keeping our rivals poorer and weaker than us.
You're right, America has had its unipolar moment ever since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. America has used its unprecedented power and influence to go sauntering around trying to "fix" these violent savages in the Middle East by committing itself to endless regime change and interventionism based on totally made up reasons in order to fulfill strategic goals that aren't even clear in the first place. We invaded Iraq in order to overthrow Saddam Hussein because he allegedly had WMDs but all these years later we still haven't found them, and they've become a literal joke to the point that even Bush Jr. laughs about it on camera. This was after we propped up Saddam with several billion dollars worth of foreign aid so he could go fuck with the Iranians only to have the war end in a stalemate. America's policy in the middle east is totally contradictory and absurd to the point of absolute parody.
Its policy is, as I outline, denying others access if we can't have it.
Our policies have lead to failure and tragedy.
You are focusing on ephemeral things--what politicians say to achieve strategic goals, and not what the goals were. We did kill Saddam because he was a mad dog and an embarrassing and unstable holdover of our Cold War middle east policy, which involved the same tard wrangling and violence, with most of the same character.
But American interest in the Middle East is a continuous thing--America has been involved in the Middle East since Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to Tripoli. It is, as I said, strategically essential to control this region, and if you look at our policy in the Cold War, you'll see immense continuity. It has nothing to do with the unipolar arrangement of world power. In fact America suffered greatly for losing influence in the Middle East during the OPEC embargo. Gas prices spiked, inflation spiked, no one was happy. It wasn't Carter being a commie. He worked like a nigger to keep America rich and powerful but not all plans are destined to succeed.
A smolder? Nigger you must be kidding me. America's interventions in the Middle East have done nothing but pour gasoline on the dumpster fire. Turning up the heat in the sandbox in an attempt to "contain" the dumpster fire creates more long term chaos that ends up biting us in the ass. Part of the reason for the rise of ISIS is precisely because America toppled Saddam's regime and engaged in a policy of de-Baathification. These people who were kicked out of power and driven to the fringes of society regrouped and were the first to join ISIS during its rampage in Iraq & Syria. America fully supported the Mujahideen of Afghanistan only to have them turn on us after the Soviet-Afghan war was over and start to redirect their hate towards us. Hell, you could even go as far as to say that Muslim terrorist groups are America's own golem that turned on us.
I believe you have an error in perspective, and see the current problems as being larger and bigger than they are, and as costs for America that are worse than they are. America was growing in population, power, and prestige among rich non-resentful nigger-tier countries during this entire time of troubles in the mideast. As in, among people who don't automatically hate America for being better, like Russia, China, Iran.
Surely peace isn't possible in West Asia today (or in the foreseeable future), but managed conflict is. This means that, like in the rest of politics, yesterday's enemy was the day before's friend, and there's a good chance they're tomorrow's friend. So what if ISIS came? Iraq was a misadventure--but the costs to Americans were extraordinarily low. We fucked ISIS up, basically right after they showed up. It was over a decade ago now, by the way. Examine the situation currently. We fought alongside our enemies, Russia and Iran, because there is a level of competition and violence that is acceptable, and there is a level that is completely unacceptable. The current level of violence is again, barely simmering compared to what it could be.
America is not currently meaningfully occupying any region in the Middle East outside of our bases, and intervening sporadically in some ongoing civil wars which are far lower intensity and lower in significance than commentators are really acknowledging. America intervened quite forcefully and effectively when a bunch of unacceptable savages showed up, and has shown remarkable restraint and a lighter touch than you'd think since Bush 2 in managing the problems there. A very small force basically denied Assad access to oil and gas and turned it into a brittle narcostate that collapsed when the moment was opportune for Turkey. The Arab Spring went off fairly well, leading to the catastrophe in Syria and Yemen, but giving us a state we wanted in Egypt and a helping get us a probably-not-insane Saudi leader.
The heat as it were is quite well managed. You must notice that there is no general war, and basically no declared war between actual states and very few regular armies in the field in spite of the broad and oft-stated desire of the Arabs to wage unlimited holy war. The wars have been limited to a few countries at a time at most. Most of the conflict in the Mideast is civil wars. This is most of the conflict in the world today, and has been for quite some time. It's the best result you could imagine given that you cannot keep men from killing each other for control of territory, since the alternative of interstate war is so much worse and difficult to control with arms shipments and financial levers. Borders outside of the basket case of Syria are fairly stable, no one has the will or ability or interest to invade each other right now. ISIS ended up being a blip in history.
It seems you are thinking of any conflict or any violence as being unacceptable, particularly should it it involve American soldiers. I believe you know that's not possible. I think of states at full scale war with each other (not picking the bones of Syria) as unacceptable, or of things like ISIS as unacceptable. America's policy since Bush 2 obviously has been to manage the conflict, which is unavoidable, but manageable. We try to pick a winner, arm them, and if necessary bomb their opposition. Syria was a massive policy failure, but also plainly not a problem with an easy solution. Whatever happens there is a record of imperial trial and error. America's successes in the region are pretty good. The Ottomans and the British and the French never did much better.
Again, it's completely unrealistic to try and address the Muslim problem by killing them all. You're talking about 2.05 billion Muslims all around the world, many of whom are firmly embedded in Western countries.
I apologize, I overstated what I meant for effect. Again, I apologize, I misrepresented myself and my views. I don't actually believe genocide solves any problems, though it is at times to me personally desirable. I advocate just for the mass scale killing of problem assholes like ISIS and working with the less problematic assholes like everyone else, since genocide can't be achieved, nor is it a rational political goal.
I don't want Americans to die fighting to contain and control a region of the world that has been volatile for centuries. Those are my "predilections and fascinations" you absolute fucking retard. I'm sick of seeing my countrymen and my friends die for this fruitless, endless errand in the Middle East.
What are armies for in your view? To stand at the border and be impressive? Do the little dances like at India and Pakistan? Plant trees in bullshit anti-desertification campaigns like China? Steal shit and die to FPV drone strikes like in Russia? They're there to fight and die at the bidding of the state. Large parts of our army are purely expeditionary forces. Ever hear of tripwire forces? Soldiers go on what are effectively suicide missions all the time. Our strategic posture has basically never been purely defensive. It's retarded to think there's no benefits from maintaining control of the Suez, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the world oil market. Your predilections and fascination are parochial. They're good reasons for why democracy is not practiced at the level of international politics. States that succeed will throw people into meatgrinders when they need to. But thank God you're American! America has a much higher respect for the lives of her soldiers, by the way, than any other state in history, and a much higher success rate than you give it credit for. Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing compared to the slaughter in Ukraine, particularly when looked at annually. It's a scandal when our trucks weren't armored for mines, and it was a major fucking spending and political project to overcome it. In Russia I've been told you have to buy your own body armor. Look at our MREs and equipment and casualty rates in war compared to China's or Russia's, we spend and spend to show our respect and commitment for the sacrifices that soldiers volunteer to make. We believe in airpower for this reason. We've led the way in unmanned and remote control weapons, precision and standoff weapons. Here's a simple truth: soldiers make their lives expendable when they signed up. That's what soldiering is. They run often mundane but often violent errands for the state, like keeping control of the seas and world energy markets. You want to call surrender realpolitik because your mental projections of costs are unacceptable to you. They aren't to the state. The costs America bears are paltry, just psychologically burdensome to you. Soldiering is what it always has been, a way to get paid for risking your neck. No one in America gets forced into the killing fields anymore. We don't, knock on wood, have compulsory military service. They chose it. Be mad at McNamara and Johnson.
Your delusions of empire are laughable and if you were so knowledgeable as you say of world history you'd know that all empires come to an end. You'd know that pride comes before the fall and that refusing to extricate ourselves from this absolute mess will only end up hurting us in the long run.
There's no going back from the past century. America's been an empire. I am not delusional. America is an empire. It is hard to dispute this, though our form of empire is more enlightened, grounded in liberalism, and not (necessarily) interested in expanding its direct administrative borders. It's an empire of institutions, the navy, finance, trade, and balance of power. And it is imperative America remain a powerful global empire, if only for the sake of peace in America. What was visited on the USSR will happen to us if people turn on the great vision of America's empire.
Empires last centuries to thousands of years. And of course everything ends, but this is no justification to try and end things now, particularly when things are on balance pretty great. People are working, country is rich, Internet's getting faster, computers are cool, luxuries are affordable, it's not so hard to make money, peace is the norm in the world, goods and services are generally quite abundant. Injustice is uncommon, and our government is hardly more or less evil than it was 10, 20, 50, or a hundred years ago.
Willing the American empire to die is willing death to the state we live in now, I do not think a full global retrenchment is wise in any sense, and disengaging from the Middle East would be that. Look at our allies there--fragile dictatorships and monarchies propped up mostly by us, with a few basketcases like Iran and Syria and parts of Iraq. It sucks we broke some of it, but the rest of the states there are the dam keeping the flood from the rest of the world.
Things can get much much worse if the world cop retires because he's psychologically exhausted from endless media cycles of "EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE." You're letting headlines and personal ties abuse your reason. That everything-is-on-fire shit is not the present, but a prediction of the future if we stop now. Retrenchment would lead to a collapse in America's power, wealth, and stability, it could lead to that USSR moment, ending in truly pointless civil wars, decades of poverty and social suicide for your countrymen. The present dispensation is better for you than you could hope for, and better for Americans than what you could dream up. Regular people didn't sign up and swear an oath to fight and die when told to. Soldiers did. Retrenchment would be a catastrophe.
