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And that's for no reason other than because it's inconvenient to your argument.
You either haven't internalized that there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy, or you have and you're lying.
The Islamic State was literally created by specific decisions the Americans made in Gulf 2 and Syria. If they didn't have this silly belief that the middle east can be democratic and US aligned, none of this would have happened.
Korea had to be fought, but the US stalled as soon as China got involved.
This most of all is a complete failure of American diplomacy. They controlled Iraq militarily and we're kicked out of institutions they themselves created.
All in all, if there's strategic competence at play here, I don't see it.
As for the claim that Europe is a better ally now than before the war, it is the most ridiculous of all. The US had to shoot German industry in the kneecap to ensure its loyalty and France, Britain and Germany are experiencing levels of political instability unheard of since the 50s right now because of it. Not to mention they now have insignificant military capacity and would be unable to help even if they are utterly loyal to NATO.
Yes I believe either your eyes are closed or you're a sophist.
Or that your categorization scheme is structurally unsound and anachronistically selective.
Or you failed the lesson on spectrums. The expression that war is the extension of politics by other means is that they are related and interconnecting, not that they are the same thing with no meaningful differences in their conduct or in the decisions or decision makers that are involved in them.
Whether you believe there is no meaningful difference between war and diplomacy or not, there are very substantial differences in who leads the efforts organized under them and who is lead of who at any given time and what their intent for them is, and this is without circumstances changing in the passage of time.
'None of this matters because different people should have made different circumstances in a different decade' is an evasion, not an answer.
The Obama-era elites were not the elites who could choose Gulf 2, nor were they even the same nationality of elites who chose to make southeastern Syria an insurgency supply line. They weren't even the decisive elites for supporting anti-Assad rebels in Syria, which was practically a regional orgy of interventions.
And?
Setting aside that the Korea War did not have to be fought, you have yet to make the case that the US being stalled by China in Korea is a inferior strategic output than the choices and consequences that would have been required to push the Chinese military out of North Korea into China by an expeditionary military force of a power still recovering from WW2 over-extension and needing to prepare for a potential European conflict- a preference that can claim historical validation because the US demonstratably did not get so bogged down in an Asia conflict that it was unable to maintain deterence or its alliance networks in Europe.
Which goes back to categorically excluding successes. The US stalling as soon as China got involved is presented as a failure, rather than US policy makers making an appropriate decision in the face of a Chinese intervention on the appropriate scope of the war and war goals to pursue.
I was actually referring to the Iran-Iraq War, not the post-war, but I concede I forgot the time clarification and muddled the topic.
Sure- because you gerrymander categories to dismiss successes and then conflate decisions and consequences decades apart to disqualify decisions without regarding their own circumstances and purposes.
This is a particularly inept series of characterizations. The US did not shoot the German industry in the knee cap, the current dominant causes of European instability (migration, demographic age-out, post-financial crisis stagnation, Covid aftershocks, rise of the far right) well predate the war in Ukraine, as did their military insignificance in a China scenario.
Whatever makes you feel self-assured, I suppose.
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