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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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However, the more sensible view is that there are cases where a lack of US intervention will still result in a shitshow, but nonetheless likely to be a less bad shitshow on the whole, e.g. the Vietnam War or the Iraq War.

It's not at all clear that the shitshow sans the US would be actually less. I mean, sure, not opposing the USSR (and China) communist takeover over the globe would be cheaper near-term. But do you think USSR taking over the whole Asia, South America and Africa would be less of the shit show than now? Of course, all these commit regimes would come crashing down as they did in Eastern Europe, but with the West looking the other way and pretending the commies don't exist or don't matter - could it have happened 50 years later? Could it cause much more blood (remember Budapest 1956 and Prague 1968?) and death? I think pre-supposing the answer to that is the same fallacy as saying "US meddling is the root of all evil", only in different words.

With Iraq, again looking into it in context, no US meddling means Iraq taking over Kuwait, and then expanding its operations further, and likely getting into a hot war with Israel using whatever WMDs they had. I'm not sure that'd be less of a shitshow, especially given that Israel does have nukes, and doesn't have any strategic depth, which means if seriously threatened... use your imagination. Not saying Iraq would be strong enough to get as far as to threaten Israel's existence as such - but if they get lucky and get this far, who'd stop things going there? Remember, US is not meddling anymore, which means they would neither prevent any shit from happening by force nor by promise of their protection (or its withdrawal). The world of "not meddling" would be much more dangerous and shaky, I am afraid. When there's no police, there would be shootouts. I suspect that'd be much bigger shitshow.

Yes, I agree that it's a matter of degree and context. For example, South Korea in 1950 had more strategic value than Vietnam, because it would have meant the loss of a buffer between the USSR/China and Japan. Similarly, there was meddling in Iraq (sanctions, defending Kuwait etc.) that had a lot more expected value than the 2003 invasion.

However, regardless of whether these interventions were right, I simply wanted to clarify that non-interventionism is not necessarily a "panacea" view.