But that is specifically what I am not talking about. We were attacked by those pirates. Americans were seized. We should have intervened there.
Again, that is not what I am talking about.
I understood what you were and were not talking about.
My point was that while US responses were legitimate, each response further strengthened the idea that the US as a rising power simply cannot be a neutral power. As long as there are relationships, those relationships inevitably presents the US with situations where the US must chose a side, if not for ideological and political reasons, then simply for economic ones.
Look at the China and Africa relationship today. The Chinese government is learning the same lessons as the US did. Testimonies from NGOs and native Africans are repleted with instances where the Chinese government meddled in the internal affairs of African countries where China have long term strategic interests.
Even the movies have the correct insight where in the Avengers Civil War, the character Vision said of themselves:
Our Very Strength Incites Challenge. Challenge Incites Conflict. And Conflict Breeds Catastrophe.
Am sorry, but as an immigrant, and especially one from a country that the US have a troubled past with, it is very difficult for me to see how any American could reasonably believe the US could actually live the way the country's Founding Fathers want. I understand the reverence Americans have for these men and I share the same admiration, but Jefferson had a vision where the US was primarily an agricultural society, others expressed disdain for a standing army, institutional slavery tolerated, and many other national issues that these men did not envisioned and anticipated. They were truly geniuses in their own rights, but also in their own time.
History is a chain of causes and effects where the effects from one cause becomes the cause for the next link in the chain. Talk to any engineer or any soldier, essentially a problem solver, where he was inserted into a situation and expected to fix that situation, am sure you know we both have been in those situations many times and that often, if not usually, we do not have the luxury of 'root cause' analyses. We have to deal with the existing factors that created the situation knowing full well those 'root causes' have been too entrenched in the history of that situation.
You and I are recipients of the consequences of what past US leaders, going all the way back to the Founding Fathers, decided on the course of the country. There is no telling on what kind of conflicts could our actions create should the US were to withdraw from global affairs where each withdrawal, no matter how gradually, could be taken as an opportunity to do US and/or an ally harm.
The problem is we Americans have been conditioned to think we are the world's policeman, that we have some sort of magic "right" to tell other countries how to order themselves, which besides being immoral, would be easier to swallow except....we. keep. getting. it. wrong!
It is not so much that the US is the world's policeman because a policeman requires a standing justice system, and the global order is essentially anarchic in scope. Rather, the US is seen as a strongman that while whose decisions may not have been wise and effective, the strongman is perceived as generally benevolent. Like it or not, that is our position in the world.
