You realize what has happened in the last four years, right? Four peace accords in the Middle East. ISIS has been destroyed. The US has basically pulled out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The Kurds and Turks aren't killing each other any longer. AND the US hasn't started another war - something that hasn't happened in decades as in going back to WWII.
The Kurds and Turks are for sure still killing each other, and Turkey is expanding further into Kurd-controlled areas in Iraq & Syria. And Afghanistan is and has been a failure; the Taliban have been regaining land and power, and further US withdrawal from Afghanistan will set it back to 2000 ( the war and misery would be for nothing ). One of the primary missions in Syria was to oust Al Assad, but he is still in power and controls near-entire Syria. Iraq is still a war hotbed, and it seems like more entities are joining the fight to control it. Then there is also all the proxy wars, for example, Yemen.
The peace accords are for sure good for the region and are setting it on a brighter path. But the US deserves no credit for withdrawing or starting new wars.
And none of this is to dismiss or "whatabout" China's horrible actions but lets not lie to ourselves about the actions of US and allies - We have committed plenty of evil.
Should the US not starting a new war and finally pulling out of a region it wasn't supposed to be in in the first place really be something to applaud?
Those are heartening to see from up here in the cheap seats, but from the outside this by no means looks like a new direction that the political class have gotten behind. The majority of actors in the US who benefited from the Bush-Clinton consensus are still in place and don't look like they intend to take the changes lying down.
I think we'll all breath a sigh of relief if the US still has a pacifist foreign policy in 2029, but until then I'm waiting for an 'empire strikes back' moment.
It is not at all whataboutism if the existance and behavior of other actors in the system influence each other, and removing one actor has a big negative effect on the whole system.
It is not at all whataboutism to say that we must tackle problems holistically.
If we're going to talk about orders of magnitude, nothing remotely compares to killed civilians in the middle east. But I'm not going to advocate removing only the party responsible for that event, while preserving the other. We're much better off if they can keep each other in check.
> nothing remotely compares to killed civilians in the middle east
The US didn't kill millions of civilians in the Middle East as you've been attempting to claim. It did attempt to prevent the Iraq civil war however, an inevitable result of the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. I'm curious if your premise is that Saddam, or his family, was going to rule as a dictator forever - denying all human rights to the Iraqi people - so as to prevent that civil war from ever happening.
And if you really want to talk orders of magnitude: Mao genocided 45 million people in just four years from 1958 to 1962.
Washington Post: "Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world"
Brought about by an unprovoked invasion, in violation of international law.
> Mao genocided 45 million people in just four years from 1958 to 1962.
Mao seriously mismanaged the economy, leading to famine. Life expectancy also increased from 40 years at the time of the revolution to 60 years at the time of his death. A lot of Chinese people have mixed feelings about him.
The US is supplying weapons to Saudi-Arabia which they use to fight in Yemen. The US has helped replace democratic governments to military / authoritarian regimes in Latin America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...), leading to countless deaths and the very same refugee crisis that Trump is so worried about.
The US does NOT have the moral high ground here. At least acknowledge that the US sucks. China sucks too. Everybody sucks.
> and which has killed millions of civilians in the middle east
The US didn't kill millions of people in the Middle East. In fact it lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars trying to keep the Iraqis from killing eachother. The US stepped inbetween two warring factions that have been killing eachother for hundreds of years and tried to stop it.
> and which is sterilizing women in border camps
The US doesn't have border camps, it has detention facilities for illegal immigrants, which most every nation with a border possesses. Trying illegally sneaking into Canada (or Australia, or most any nice country), you will be detained at a facility until they can remove you from their country for violating their immigration laws.
The US Government doesn't force sterilize women at the border or at non-existent border camps.
There is one specific doctor - Mahendra Amin - at one facility that has performed eight surgeries over three years, with wide debate still on-going as to whether all or none of those surgeries were requested. From that basis you're attempting to proclaim the US Government is broadly doing something, which is obviously exceptionally misleading.
> The US didn't kill millions of people in the Middle East. In fact it lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars trying to keep the Iraqis from killing eachother. The US stepped inbetween two warring factions that have been killing eachother for hundreds of years and tried to stop it.
This must be one of the most apologist takes I have ever read. Deeply disturbing that people can actually convince themselves this for something that's relatively recent.
> sent the army to suppress protesters against racism
Trump did not send the army. He sent federal law enforcement agencies to defend federal property against rioters when local governments failed to do so.
> sterilizing women in border camps
The allegations of forced hysterectomies were not supported by the evidence, which is why the story dropped out of the news so quickly.
