What do y'all say to those that suggest that America's military is oversized, overbearing, imperialistic, etc.? Playing devil's advocate, if I were to say that America has no justification being involved in at least half of the overseas conflicts we are involved in, what would you respond with? Why do we need to spend so much more on our military than any other country in the world? Just curious as to see everyone's ideas.

If there ever was a reason to spend the money, watch the work of the those sick ISIS *******s. This is really the time when it is better to kill them there instead of fighting them here.

I would respond that we are not imperialistic, or if we are, we really suck at it. When we intervene, we typically quickly pack our bags and leave before we should, claiming no territory, resources or reparations. On a related note, a couple of years ago the Iraqi prime Minister met with Karzai from Afghanistan and told him that the issue with the U.S. was not that they were going to occupy Afghanistan long term. The issue was the U.S. would leave quicker than they should and that Karzai should be careful about making noises that he wanted the U.S. to leave....because they would ...and pronto.

To the question of do we intervene too much around the world I would say yes to some extent. I believe the vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union gave us a free hand to intervene just about anywhere we cared to. During the cold war, the U.S. always had to take into consideration spheres of influence etc. For instance, sadly we didn't intervene in either the Hungarian revolution in 1956 or the Prague Spring in 1968 as they were in the Soviet orbit and in their back yard. There are other examples where we had to hold our fire. The Pueblo incident with Best Korea in 1968 was clearly an act of war, yet we did nothing.

The Iraq invasion is a good example of over reaching. One can argue until you are blue whether it was legally justified to invade Iraq. There is enough smoke (and fire really) that they were in violation of UN resolutions and thus subject to harsh measures such as use of force. But this begs the deeper question of "Just because we can invade....should we invade?" I think history will say we should not have.

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The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win. -Robert Heinlein

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...it is better to kill them [ISIS]there instead of fighting them here.

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You hear this idea a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it.

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...it is better to kill them [ISIS]there instead of fighting them here.

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You hear this idea a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it.

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In many instances where this is used, I would agree that its hard to buy, but hearing reports every few weeks of Americans who have joined ISIS or plotting to join ISIS, I think it really would become us fighting them here. Maybe not in such traditionally invasive fashion, but in a way that ISIS at home would increase their influence more and more if we stand by and do nothing.

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...it is better to kill them [ISIS]there instead of fighting them here.

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You hear this idea a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it.

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All I have to say to that is World Trade Center (numerous times) and the Pentegon. ISIS and Al Quiade --- no difference.

Buy it now?

In re fighting them at home, we absolutely would be seeing more domestic issues if we reduced our interventions. Most of the sources claiming this are hyper biased, have an agenda, misinformed, or some combination there in. However it is still true.

Now a number of our current enemies are "terrorists of convenience." They are from Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, ect... & would not leave their middle eastern comfort zone to attack us here. Unfortunately enough are not "terrorists of convenience" that absent closer targets they would hit the U.S. proper. More w/out our significant interventions they would have vastly more freedom to do so & many governments currently quietly cooperating would not if they did not fear US reprisals. Specifically they actively hunt terrorists in their nation & allow us to as well because they fear the consequences of allowing terrorism to ferment. Finally by drawing all of them in to an easier conflict in their backyard it has given us great opportunities to eliminate them in Iraq & Afghanistan before they graduated to attacking us here.

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...it is better to kill them [ISIS]there instead of fighting them here.

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You hear this idea a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it.

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All I have to say to that is World Trade Center (numerous times) and the Pentegon. ISIS and Al Quiade --- no difference.

Buy it now?

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That is a fair point. I respect this opinion, although I don't fully endorse it. I think the "fight them there or fight them here" line is often a false dichotomy.

We lost far more American lives in our response to 9/11 than we did on the original attack. I'd guess the costs of the two wars that followed far exceeded the economic hit from 9/11 itself. Then there's the thousands of horribly wounded American service members, contractors, NGO members, etc.

Bin Laden's clearly stated objective on 9/11 was to drag us into a prolonged fight in a far off country that wouldn't advance our interests. We gave him just what he wanted.

OEF & OIF made us lots of enemies in the region. Even now, the rank and file Afghan doesn't know anything about 9/11 - but they know about their countrymen killed my American air strikes.

I'm no pacifist. America had the moral right to open a can on the Taliban for harboring al Quaeda. Ultimately though, it's tricky to predict the cost, scope, and long term effects of "fighting them over there."

I'm not saying we should be less involved in the Middle East, or that OEF was a mistake. These are thoroughly complicated issues with complex answers that don't lend themselves to pithy responses like "if you're not with us you're against us," "we should just stay out of the Middle East," "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," etc.

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I'm not saying we should be less involved in the Middle East, or that OEF was a mistake. These are thoroughly complicated issues with complex answers that don't lend themselves to pithy responses like "if you're not with us you're against us," "we should just stay out of the Middle East," "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," etc.

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Highly recc'd statement. Foreign affairs are way more complicated than the Murica F*** Yeah! And the "we have no business interfering around the world" poles of political thought. This stuff really is complex.

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Very true. Never thought about it that way. Often have tried to oversimplify this issue and see if in more broad terms, but really, that just can't be done. Things are too messy.

Is the military imperialistic? No, it only goes where the US government tells it to go. Is the American government imperialistic? At times, yes. If you look at the history of American foreign intervention since the revolution, particularly since the Civil War, the US has been very involved all around the world. Now not all interventions can be attributed to "imperialism" but there were periods where the US certainly worked to expand its control and influence over the local affairs of foreign countries.

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Is the military imperialistic? No, it only goes where the US government tells it to go. Is the American government imperialistic? At times, yes. If you look at the history of American foreign intervention since the revolution, particularly since the Civil War, the US has been very involved all around the world. Now not all interventions can be attributed to "imperialism" but there were periods where the US certainly worked to expand its control and influence over the local affairs of foreign countries.

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Good post, although the period where the US government was imperialistic was the period from the Mexican war through the Spanish American war and the Panama Canal, so roughly from 1840s to the early1900s. After that, not so much.

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Is the military imperialistic? No, it only goes where the US government tells it to go. Is the American government imperialistic? At times, yes. If you look at the history of American foreign intervention since the revolution, particularly since the Civil War, the US has been very involved all around the world. Now not all interventions can be attributed to "imperialism" but there were periods where the US certainly worked to expand its control and influence over the local affairs of foreign countries.

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Good post, although the period where the US government was imperialistic was the period from the Mexican war through the Spanish American war and the Panama Canal, so roughly from 1840s to the early1900s. After that, not so much.

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After the Spanish American War a mostly isolationist foreign policy was implemented, explaining late entry into WWI and WWII. Then probably around Vietnam-present era our foreign policy could again be described as interventionist. But does interventionist equal imperialistic? I would argue not. Depends on what you consider justified intervention versus not just intervention.

I agree that it depends on how you define imperialism, but American FP during the Cold War involved some pretty suspect interventions. When the reasons for intervention include American economic interests I tend to see that as imperialism.

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I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and weve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in

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- Colin Powell

Colin Powell Nailed it. Nice quote.

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I agree that it depends on how you define imperialism, but American FP during the Cold War involved some pretty suspect interventions. When the reasons for intervention include American economic interests I tend to see that as imperialism.

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Good point. One of the more interesting philosophical discussions about the U.S. intervening around the world is in respect to "Generals fighting the last war". I don't meant that literally, but more-so in a "political establishment/foreign policy fighting the last war."

The lesson that U.S. policy makers learned from WWI and WWII is that if we are isolationist then we let bad regimes metastasize into full blown threats to world peace and freedom. One could argue that we overplayed that hand from time to time from 1945 through the 2000s. Whether CIA actions like regime changes in Iran (1953) Chile (1973) South Vietnam (1963) or military interventions like Vietnam, Panama and Iraq.

The problem is (and why it is fun to debate it) is that it is impossible to know what would have happened without the political or military interventions. So it is easy to say for instance "yeah, overturning a democratic election in 1953 in Iran was a mistake because they now hate us forever." On the other hand, it is impossible to say what the alternative would have been though. In this one example it could have been better... or much worse:

Alternative #1: Mossadeq just nationalizes the oil industry and remains more or less neutral in the cold war. The U.S. has friendly relations with Iran thereafter. So Much Better!
Alternative #2: Mossadeq allies with the Soviet Union and allows them to build a Soviet Naval port in the Persian Gulf. He was a socialist so there was suspicion he wouldn't stay neutral. So much Worse!

I will say that in the larger view, our backing our allies in Nato against the threat of communism was spot on and ultimately successful. And interestingly, it took no direct military intervention to do so. It did involves the U.S. providing a standing army of 200K plus solders in western Europe for 40+ years as well as a nuclear deterrent to shield them.

Yep, counterfactual history can be a lot of fun. Good point about fighting the last war in regards to FP. Interventions had worked fairly well in the past and with the threat of the Soviet Union, a lot of the action seemed reasonable at the time. Now with the advantage of hindsight a number of them look pretty bad (although the Bay of Pigs looked bad at the time too...).

I think what is most striking is the degree of ignorance (combined with a certain level of arrogance) about the political situation on the ground in a number of these cases. The support of the Diem regime in South Vietnam is a great example. A Catholic politician who was a member of the class who had benefited most from colonization in a Buddhist country that had been fighting for independence for decades!

Alternative #1: Allow democratic elections in 1956 as stipulated by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Ho Chi Minh wins and Vietnam is unified under communism. Ho Chi Minh runs a fairly quiet communist Vietnam that is closer to China than the Soviet Union but not part of either's sphere of influence. Much like Tito's Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam is of no concern to the US. Pretty Good.

Alternative #2: Allow democratic elections in 1956 as stipulated by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Ho Chi Minh wins and Vietnam is unified under communism. Vietnam becomes part of an aggressively expanding communist bloc lead by China. Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand fall to communism and the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan are threatened as Eisenhower's Domino Theory appears to come true. Very Bad.