I've been struggling to say this for two decades at least. But Hunter S. Thompson nailed it long ago:
"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world -- bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts."
Nothing embodies this more than the current crushing US sanctions and expropriation on Afghanistan, following 20 years of brutal military seizure and occupation which were not only wasteful and useless but unjustified and illegal.
And before this phase of crushing sanctions and theft, there was the war itself, as well as military operations and "support" still ongoing in other countries today.
Nothing enables this more than the mass blindness of US citizens to the operations and effects of the military empire they support. And that blindness mostly, or at least sufficiently, persists despite the legendary (actually only since Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969) freedom of speech and press in the USA.
Americans by and large, and amazingly, consider themselves part of a relatively moral and reformist tendency on earth, bringing Freedom and Democracy and a Rules Based Order to the world. Officials repeat these lines endlessly and without much criticism in the most pervasive media sources.
A brief examination of the recent historical evidence makes a mockery of these claims. The death, destruction, and dislocation these countries have caused is tiny compared with that caused by the USA.
Although it might not be the perfect ideal in all cases, a world in which the US never intervened in the internal affairs of other countries would be so entirely preferable to the current one as to not be worth quibbling.
Though I agree with Oliver Stone and others that the US-aided defeat of Nazi Germany was the one exceptional case where US military power abroad was proper, to have merely replaced, succeeded, and far surpassed Nazi Germany in global domination was a moral and ethical collapse of the highest order.
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