This thread is simultaneously hilarious and infuriating. I'm astonished by the lengths some people will go to to justify a deeply irrational hatred of America and a love for anyone who goes against the United States, no matter how bad those people are.
I think the most hilarious part was when people were feeling sorry for the Islamic State and comparing MOAB to a nuclear weapon. The sympathy with IS shows moral bankruptcy in such an obvious way that I won't go into any details, but the comparison between MOAB and a nuke deserves some attention. MOAB is a 10-ton weapon. North Korean nukes - which are crappier than the ones Americans had 70 years ago - are 10 kilotons. North Korean nukes are literally 1,000 times more powerful than MOAB. The comparison is off by three orders of magnitude. The comparison is so far from the truth that anyone who makes it should be ignored by everyone, forever. It's borne from either fantastic ignorance or fantastic dishonesty. MOAB is a big bomb used as a propaganda tool. That is all.
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I think the most infuriating pattern ITT, both because of how common it is and how potentially misleading it is to honest people, if the inability of some posters to contemplate counterfactual conditionals. As a general rule, humans have the ability to think about how the world would be if things were different and, importantly, to think about how one change would necessitate other changes. It seems that some people, either through lack of intelligence or through some psychological need to hang onto a particular viewpoint, lack that ability. They can't think about how the world would change if America weren't a major international player.
The big mistake is to assume that if the US didn't exist or cut itself off from the world, every other country would behave the same way. If that were true, then the US could be considered the biggest threat to world peace. But it's not true. It's a million miles away from the truth. America's military supremacy affects the way other world leaders behave, and the effects of American supremacy follow the trend of other periods of hegemony. Historians talk about concepts such as the Pax Romana, the Pax Mongolica, the Pax Britannica and more recently, the Pax Americana. Periods where one nation is dominant are periods of relative peace and stability (and yes, the period of American dominance has been a period of relative peace and stability, and to deny this shows profound ignorance of all human history before 1945). That is because when one country is so obviously more powerful than everyone else, people tend to think it's a bad idea to go around starting wars. Unlike their sympathisers, the world's dictators aren't stupid. Even the North Korean government, which is crazy, is not stupid. They know that as long as the US is around, they can't just do whatever they want. Saddam learnt that lesson the hard way when he invaded Kuwait. Assad learnt that the hard way recently, after he'd started to assume that the Americans had given him the green light to do whatever he wanted. If people want to know whether the US is a threat to peace, they should consider how other nations would behave differently if they knew the US wouldn't get in their way.
How would Russia behave differently in eastern Ukraine if they knew the Americans would never get in their way? I'll give you a clue: they might move the Russian-Ukrainian border to the outskirts of Kiev. How would North Korea behave differently if they knew the US wouldn't get in their way? I'll give you a clue: Seoul, which has a population of 10 million and is likely to be where the electronics that you use to support NK are made, could be flattened within hours by North Korean heavy artillery. NK may be backwards, but you can inflict a lot of damage on cities with WW2-era weapons if you have enough of them. How would China behave differently in the South China Sea if they Americans weren't there? How would India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) get along? How long would it be before mysterious Russian separatist movements sprung up in the Baltic region? What would the situation be like between Iran and Israel? That's a really big conflict, and I'll give you a clue as to what is likely to happen: many millions of people would be killed by thermonuclear blasts on day one of the conflict, and before you start getting excited (in my experience, anti-Americanism is nearly always accompanied by antisemitism) none of those people would be Jews.
But maybe that last point was too harsh? Maybe the people who hate America's influence in the world have considered the counterfactuals, but have decided that they'd like all those conflicts to be going on? With the exception of Israel nuking Iran of the map, all of the scenarios I proposed might appeal to the kind of people who want America to stop getting in the way.
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There's a part of me that wants to see the US suddenly disappear from the world stage out of morbid curiosity. I'd like to see how long its critics take before they start repenting and begging for the US to come back. I'll wager that's they'd want America to come back as soon as combined deaths from wars in Asia and Eastern Europe pass the 10 million mark, which I imagine would take abut 6 months.
Of course, most parts of me don't want to see that. The thought of a world without the US is horrifying. The last time the US wasn't an international player was in the early 1940s, and that really isn't a world I want to go back to.
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As imperfect as the US is, and it is very imperfect, it's by far the best guarantor of peace we have today. I am absolutely positive that for every 1 person killed thanks to the US, there are at least 100 that would be killed without the US. And no, I'm not American.
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I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who hate the US are kinda like teenagers who hate their parents because they're frustrated by their inability to live without them (possibly because most people who hate America that much are teenagers). The most rabid kinds of anti-Americanism are fundamentally expressions of impotent rage at one's own lack of power.
And wow, this post went on for far too long! I'll give a cookie to anyone who takes 2 minutes out of their day to read the whole thing.
