Is America Good?

I'm feeling verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic:


The presidential candidates are going to focus on foreign policy for the upcoming debates, putting the topic in the front of many American's minds.

Do you believe that, in aggregate, America is currently a positive or a negative influence on the world around it? What would you change?

Peter Grimm said:

What would you change?

Click to expand...

i'd change our energy model and our presence on the world stage. it's my opinion that our role in the world should be a more humanitarian one. i would also fix a lot of things back home before we do much more globally.

We're pretty cool.

No, but we are good at it.

Every country has it's flaws, but in my opinion, America has generally tried to minimize hers and not create TOO many in the stead.

The question I didn't really ask was - how much do you guys think America should be involved in foreign affairs? Should we be in the middle east? Should we maintain military bases abroad?

In other words, how much should America be throwing its economic and military weight around?

In my view it depends on who you talk to. If you talk to some Conservatives they will say yes and some no. The same for Liberals.

People tend to think that their particular country is good.

For me its how we are viewed from the outside in. What other nations think of us. Its sort of like if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck thing.

We do many good things and some stupid ones. We tend to believe everyone should be like us and that we are thier personal babysitter. This is a very bad idea.

There is a great line from full metal jacket "Because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out".

Then there are those here that are homiophobic and think that either everyone else is out to get us or we should curl up in a cocoon and try and get by on our own. Sorry but we've been involved in the world for too long for this to be a good idea.

Although I have my leanings I think that the jury is still out on this question.

The US is like any other country...it promotes what it sees as its "national interest," as defined by the people in positions of power. The idea that the United States is a shining beacon of freedom altruistically helping other countries, is just as erroneous as the idea that the United States is a marauding empire conquering foreign lands for their resources. The truth is that our foreign policy, like that of any other country, is silly, inconsistent, and largely driven by the idiosyncrasies of American politics rather than any principle.

For example, why is Iran our enemy, Pakistan our untrusted ally, and Saudi Arabia our good ally? After all, they're all countries that are repressive, they all have or are pursuing WMDs, and they all have the ability to kick up a major ****storm in their respective regions if they want to. Without knowing anything about American politics aside from platitudes like we want to "do good" or "promote freedom," I don't think you could easily look at those three countries and predict which would be our allies and which would be our enemies. To me, it seems like this discrepancy is driven largely by American politics: AIPAC is a large influence in American politics and they don't like Iran...therefore neither does the US government. Pakistan drives us nuts but we're stuck with them for the time being, because the president felt like he couldn't get out of Afghanistan sooner without appearing weak. And oil companies raise tons of campaign cash for politicians, and they want a stable relationship with Saudi Arabia, so that's exactly what they get. Etc, etc. There's no real method to the madness...just various quirks of American politics that dictate how we behave toward the rest of the world. The US is neither "good" nor "bad"...it's just governed by self-interested politicians.