resources are poured into building or rebuilding it into a self-sufficient nation, autonomy is gradually restored as we feel confident our ideology has taken sufficient hold
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if there was a reasonable objective and sensible steps taken toward accomplishing it then you can debate if working toward such an end is right or wrong
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what we have now is a bunch of policy dipshits and politicians with no personal stake pushing forward the whole enterprise because of feelings, electability, whatever
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the whole thing ends up being an accounting trick where we go overseas and kill a million people as an excuse to shunt money to favored contractors
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maybe I just get too attached to history-as-narrative, it's not like any of the other great powers in their twilight were paragons of efficiency or sensibility
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Naive to assume it serves no purpose. Justifies the expansion of entrenched unelected power, and propagates American hegemony.
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spending a trillion dollars to knock over a third-world shithole and then hang around in it for a decade accomplishing nothing isn't exactly propagating hegemony
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Don't disagree with that statement based on the results it creates, but this notion of international liberalism goes all the way back to anti-Federalist pleas for American intervention in the French Revolution.
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Liberalism is literally a religion that is pursued fanatically and with suicidal abandon.
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but if we really wanted to convert people to our religion by the sword we could be *doing* that
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put together the liberal democracy catechism, teach it to the entire country for years, anyone who doesn't respect the begotten not made natural rights etc gets burned at the stake
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But this tactic betrays liberalism. People have to WANT it, and the American mistake is assuming people do.
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Key thing about hegemony, at least as Baudrillard seemed to describe it -- was that the agents who seemingly had power served the idea rather than inflicted it. They weren't the architects anymore, just the subjects dispossessed by their own mismanagement.
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it's as purposeful as the other ones you just mentioned, DoD is the engine of the american economy and the primary welfare mechanism. the purpose is to maintain a stable bureaucratic structure to employ as many people as possible
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that's why the defense primes have a facility in every congressional district, why there are requirements for spreading contracts around through things like SBIR, why there are buy american requirements and ITAR trade restrictions
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the mistake is calling it foreign or defense policy (it's not actually a mistake it's a workaround that lets everyone involved think they're contributing to something)
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Great thread. A lot of the reactions seem to conflate morality and effectiveness. Ignoring the dimension of effectiveness turns every debate into an identity game: imperialists vs bleeding hearts
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An incredibly soft, squeamish, indecisive, oblique and fretful nation ripe for clobbering
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