the cold war ended because the people there saw the western standard of living as much as it it ended because of nukes and tough speeches. basically, they saw blue jeans and rock and roll here, and then started seeing the suck that they had to deal with on a daily basis. eventually, enough was enough.
That is correct. Changing a culture in order to effect positive change in hostile areas can be done, but takes time.
Now, what would have happened if we had decided to enact your preferred foreign policy circa 1946?
complete bull****. we can't occupy the entire Middle East for 70 years, especially when the neoconservatives who want us to do so are unwilling to pay more in taxes.
You are arguing against a Strawman. No one has suggested that we occupy the entire Middle East for 70 years. What I pointed out to you was that the US policy of fostering stability in the Middle East has caused it to become more stable, and that when we decided to leave it to solve itself, it became much
less stable. You can rant all you like, it does not change that basic reality, which any responsible policy maker needs to accept.
they have to deal with their own region and figure out a path forward. they aren't lifting a finger to help us with the **** that is going on in Mexico and the narco states in central America.
This is also not an answer. Not least because those states do not have the projection capability to significantly effect positive change in those areas. Thanks to our new brilliant "meh, we'll let them figure out a path forward" strategy, Saudi Arabia is dealing with resurgent ISIL on her northern border and Huthis and AQAP on her southern border.
Deliberately creating the conditions for a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia remains abysmally idiotic. It's not so much cutting off your nose to spite your face as it is blasting your face with a shotgun to spite your face.
we are not the world's pro bono police force.
We are, actually.
when we withdraw, regional hegemons will be forced to deal with their own problems, or they will have to deal with the consequences.
Yeah? And what do you think those will be? What regional power out there do you think is going to say "Hey, you know what, I'm a nationalistic and possibly a nutjob Islamist psycho, but what I really want to do is expend lots of time, effort, and resources in making sure that the world is safe for the global supply chains that benefit the United States."? Who is the secret Liberal out there? Iran? China? Russia? Saudi Arabia?
Because if we can identify a regional hegemon dedicated to liberal governance, we can absolutely draw down in that region. We expend very few resources protecting Belgium and France from Germany.
should we occupy these countries, too? how do you propose to pay for that?
Again, you are creating a strawman. No one has suggested the occupation of Libya or Syria. But US power exists on a spectrum and there is a wide variety of tools available for projecting stability.
it is their region, and it is their regional instability.
yeah, but their region includes major chokepoints for the global supply chain and oil that the rest of the worlds' economy needs not to crash. From a purely Realist Interest-Based viewpoint, we wouldn't care if it was (for example) interior Africa. If CAR is in crises (and it is), that mostly just effects CAR. If Saudi Arabia and Iran go to war, this nice pretty first-world lifestyle you've got built up is in danger. Hope you like farming.
We have a country to rebuild right here, and we have a lot of people who need jobs.
Yup. How, again, does producing a global economic meltdown by removing the Security Guarantee that underpins the current global economic order help those people?
on the other side, we have a significant part of the population which is unwilling to pay the extra taxes needed to fund perpetual war, and they are the ones promoting this failed policy.
The policy hasn't failed - in fact it is the policy you are proposing that has failed. Take a look at Iraq in 2009 and take a look at it today. The difference is that this president did what you are suggesting.
we funded and trained the Vietnamese during "Vietnamization." result : the communists prevailed.
So the people we trained
lost, and we didn't have to fight them again 20 years later, making this
not an example
we placed a puppet regime in Iran. result : the Iranian revolution
This is incorrect. The Shah was already in power in Iran. All we did was lend him support in
countering a coup by a Prime Minister with a messianic complex.
we helped the Mujaheddin in a proxy war with the Soviets. result : Al Qaeda
This is also not an example. The people we funded largely were tribal forces that became (to the extent that they retained power) local warlords. The Arabs who came to fight went into Afghanistan north of our efforts, through Haqqani territory out of Miram Shah. Al-Qa'ida was not fully formed after the Afghanistan war, but rather after the 1991 Desert Storm campaign, when Saudi Arabia turned down Bin Laden's offer to defend Saudi territory, choosing instead to go with the Americans.
We chose Iraq in the Iran / Iraq war. result : we had to fight Iraq in the 1990s and in the 2000s.
We wanted both sides to lose in the Iraq/Iran war. And this is also not an example of "us training friendly factions who we then have to fight", as we did not train the Iraqi military during that conflict.
So.... it looks like no, you can't come up with any
actual examples of:
"we've tried to trying to train "friendly" factions, who we end up having to fight twenty years later".
yeah, and the Soviet Union was destroyed in part because they tried to occupy Afghanistan.
Yup, and before that we worked with them in order to defeat Hitler. Because letting the less evil be the enemy of the Perfect is an immature response of the ears-in-the-finger-I-can't-hear-you variety, and wise policy makers avoid it.
Obama has been frustratingly neoconservative when it comes to the Middle East.
:lamo Obama has done everything he
could to reduce US presence in the Middle East. He pulled us out of Iraq as fast as he could and bragged about it. He got dragged into Libya and then insisted on "leading from Behind" and refusing to try to influence events afterwards. When the Iranian Green Revolution kicked off and student protesters were being dragged into the black vans to disappear into the torture prisons they chanted "Obama you are with us or you are with them" and we put out a statement saying both sides should resolve their differences peacefully. Syria has been a chaotic hellhole for
years and we are only
just now doing the bare minimum - not to
actually effect change on the ground, but to get the Washington Chattering Class off the President's back. The idea that this President has adopted neoconservative assumptions in his foreign policy is completely without foundation.
though he campaigned on ending the wars, he has not done so, as it is politically inconvenient.
Do you need me to link approximately six dozen examples of Obama bragging about ending the war in Iraq and declaring our withdrawal from Afghanistan?