O.K. Allan.
I had to take time to process the last few posts we exchanged.Maybe we had a bit of a misunderstanding on the appeasement issue.
I agree that many choices in conflict are between bad and worse. I also suppose that U.S. military dominance creates a feeling of responsibility to act when ‘humanity’ is being violated, even when innocent blood must be shed to pursue something better than the ‘worst’ imbalance. My cynicism comes from the observation that the first U.S. priority is to be self serving or focus on preservation of our imperial power. Sometimes this priority coincides with achieving something better than the ‘worst’.Most obviously WW2. In those cases it’s easy to advertise strength and moral willingness as a means to cover up our primary self serving goals. I think We also deny that strength and moral willingness could be a component of our adversaries’ motivation. Therefore, we feel justified to clothe our self preservation in the robes of justice but clothe those who dare to be different in the black robes of terror. Sometimes our endeavors have nothing to do with how the other parties fare, but only to promote our strategic or economic benefit. Also our goverment frequently fails to interevne when there is obviously good cause for the same wrong reason of self interest and self preservation and also including appeasement of lesser dominant forces.
Ultimately I believe our imperial path is not sancrosant in any way relative to how it has been done before or how another nation might have done it in our stead or will do it in the future. My idealist problem, with this is that we pave the way for war, that might be avoidable , when we deny it.
