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"Pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems, irresponsible to say the least. Certainly surrending the whole country of Afghanistan back to the Taliban would be an incredible blemish, and no citizen of another nation would ever risk their lives to help a nation who so callously discarded those who did the same."

That's the logic I'm sure the US had during the Vietnam War, and it proved to be flawed then. Especially interesting given that less than 50 years later we are improving our diplomatic and even military relationship with Vietnam due to our mutual adversary: China.

"I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities."

Curious how Assad gets lumped in with those. In 2010 Syria had one of the highest levels of development in the region (much like Qaddafi's Libya). I've been following the Syrian Civil War from a number of sources since its inception. The level of brutality he employs is pretty moderate for the region, magnitudes lower than ISIS/Taliban (with their mass executions, beheadings, enslavement and rape, etc...) or Saddam Hussein (https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ ). As for where do we go from here, you first need to understand the larger strategic implications of WHAT/WHY the US does what it does. For that, see my other response in this thread.

> what do we do now? ... We could unilaterally pull out our forces

Well, you don't have any power to actually decide any of those things. So, first you need to get that power. After that I'm sure you'll figure out what to do with all that war machine surveillance police state and how to turn it into something humane. But for now all the "we" talk is just giving in to and spreading government propaganda.

I'm not in the US and I can't help but be astounded as to how little debate there is on the effectiveness of the war machine. I'm not pro war but I can see how just up and leaving Afghanistan would be extremely problematic. However, it seems to me Americans are ok with the apparent lack of results in these wars. I'm not an expert but it seems both pointless and ineffective in any front.

It's politically unpopular to vote against defense spending or to decrease defense spending, also military service is fetishized to a high degree. It's generally a winning political strategy to put forward nationalism as patriotism. There is so much defense spending it's like welfare spread out to all the states in the form of defense manufacturing, and we have military bases in economically otherwise not very useful areas. This entrenched political base has proved to be impossible to reform due to the outsized political influence of those rural, thinly populated areas in the Congress and presidential elections.

> There is so much defense spending it's like welfare spread out to all the states in the form of defense manufacturing, and we have military bases in economically otherwise not very useful areas.

This is the huge elephant in the room.

The USA needs a large jobs program and a massive amount of education funding, especially for rural youth who do not either study a trade or go to college immediately after high school.

Providing these things directly with no strings -- or even as compensation for civilian service -- is wildly unpopular. The military is an absolutely massive back-door social program.

It is a crazy contradiction. And as long as there's someone to blame for the lack of results it's an excuse to keep persisting.

The low number of U.S. causalities keep outrage to a minimum. Lots of people probably don't even know someone who's been wounded in combat, let alone killed.

The monetary cost is just invisible, it's not like a lot of citizens are really tracking the budget. Those who don't, but claim to care about the national debt will usually go after social programs first because the idea of welfare queens and people they just don't like using social programs is magnified into a serious huge problem that if we could just solve that we could afford everything else easily...

It's the equivalent of screaming about someone dropping a penny but lighting a %100 bill on fire to get everyone's attention for the tirade.

And while many U.S. citizens know the U.S. has a large and powerful military I don't think they really have the idea of the scale it really is compared to the rest of the world. At which point I like to point out that there's 20 active aircraft carriers in the world, the U.S. operates 10. We also operate 10 escort carriers that are smaller, but still larger than half the other aircraft carriers operated by other countries. Just as a single example. And it's not like we've just run amok only with aircraft carriers.

This seems misguided to me.

For one, even if you take the 6tn total cost for these two wars you're talking about 330bn a year for 17 years. A staggering sum to be certain, but the USG's expenditures measure in the trillions annually.

For another, our immense military has almost certainly prevented regional conflicts (say Saudi Arabia vs Iran, China vs the rest of the South Pacific) and has allowed other nations to bring up their economies without having to worry about military spending (Japan, Germany).

The net positives from a more peaceful world are very hard to measure but a lot of it is having such a large dog in the fight.

More equality of armies means more regional conflicts.

Finally as a measure of GDP US military expenditures are still less than several countries.

You can point to our many follies because of course you can, that's simple and easy, and I'm not trying to defend them. But to say we've run amok would imply that they've done no good and I don't believe that to be the case.

Like it or not under US hegemony the world's been safer and more prosperous than its ever been and a tremendous number of people have been lifted out of poverty globally.

Is that all because of US hegemony? Maybe not but I'd be hard pressed to see a clear argument for why the world's defining super power would not have had some measurable role in the fulfillment of those measures.

It doesn't cost us anything that we're aware of. The money cost is borrowed. The moral cost is ignored. It's a nation of spectators distracted with the entertainment du jour, not citizens. Most Americans demand a right to not be bothered with this citizenry stuff, that in fact we are not accountable to the atrocities of our own leaders if we don't vote. Literally, "I didn't vote for any of this therefore I'm not at all responsible."

If we were to have war taxes, directly paying for active wars, I think it would be quite a different story. But Americans who vote have gotten exactly what they asked for (in the aggregate): wars they do not have to pay for, wars they do not have to volunteer to fight. It's hired out to others, with borrowed money, doesn't affect me.

Understand, this is perhaps a bizarre defense of the stereotypically ignorant average American, that American foreign policy does not directly affect Americans. The U.S. government has a longer reach and effect globally, than domestically. And most Americans don't know what that looks like.

Throwing out one strategy for Afghanistan - leave it for Russia and Iran and Pakistan to be in charge. They are all actively working against us there via proxy and right next door. Otherwise we are never leaving.

Hussein was terrible but we bungled the rebuilding of Iraq when we had total control and created the environment that made ISIS possible - we broke it, we owned it and we still fracked it up and have ended up giving Iran an almost client state right next door.

The borders of both Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be both artificial constructs that are proving impossible for us to build a nation around, the Iraqi Kurd's have done a much better job administering themselves and deserve the opportunity (the problem there is a.) local oil and Iraq's central government b.) Turkey a NATO ally opposing any Kurdish national state).

Here’s the blueprint for Erik Prince’s $5 billion plan to privatize the Afghanistan war https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/09/05/...

That is a decently likely outcome. For-profit privatized outsourced permanent war, paid for presumably by exploiting the mineral wealth of Afghanistan.

The way forwards has to be a transition from an international order based on power to one based on justice and human rights. This used to be the plan - erode enemies of America by turning them into peaceful stable democracies. And it worked in Europe, Japan and South Korea.

However it got corrupted by America's preference for capitalist unfree societies over socialist or other democratic societies; everything from the bombing of Cambodia to the murder of Allende. It's also been undermined by a failure to recognise equal rights and freedoms for communities within America.

A good place to start would be to ratify the convention on Rights of the Child and re-join the International Criminal Court. The US is basically the single outlier on these and there's no good reason not to.

At least with respect to South Korea, your history is wrong. The US endorced a "capitalist unfree dictatorship" until 1988. The military rule of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan are strikingly similar to Pinochet's in Chile (which I bring up because you mention Allende), including throwing political opponents out of airplanes.