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In my opinion your defense of US is completely unacceptable and wrong but i don't want to start a discussion about that: i want you to consider that in general, it's better to spend energy, focus, money and any other constructive effort in creating something that helps people instead of something that kills people, even if you consider those people bad ones.

It's better to spend efforts in education and culture instead of spending more on police defense. It's better to spend efforts in negotiations and ways to sign peace treaties instead of making wars. It's better to spend efforts in making chirurgical items instead of spending efforts in making weapons.

you kinda need some people to be making missiles in order for everyone else to have the luxury of being able to spend their efforts on education and culture. do you know of any countries without missiles? exactly.

Why is that? Has the US ever been seriously threatened on its terrority?

These missiles are there to protect the economic hegemony.

Yes, during the Pearl Harbor attack. This was 75-80 years ago, on the time scale of civilizations, quite a short time. Not to mention that the US is within range of the ICBMs of various authoritarian regimes.

oi... WW2 is not that far away.... japan attacked us soil.

Also, WW1, the US stayed away as much as it could, the eventually had to intervene as its ships started sinking

The point of having lots of weapons, is not to have to use them, but be credible threat to not have the other side dare to use their weapons on you.

Russia/Putin and China are developing hypersonic nuclear missiles. What is the US going to do about it? Sing, kumbaya and pray for world peace.... ?

I mean, arguably Hawaii at the time was US soil in a looser sense of the word. It only became a state in 1959. It had/has a significant Japanese population, and presumably Japan saw invasion there (wrongly, for sure) as some kind of anti-colonial action.

Wasn’t Hawaii And Alaska independent from the US until after ww2?

Not defending isolationism, but wasn’t the last invasion of the US around 1812?

> Wasn’t Hawaii And Alaska independent from the US until after ww2?

No, both were US territories.

They weren't states, but they weren't independent, either.

If everyone that is good had this mindset then the world would be ruled by the most vicious and authoritarian. The axis powers would've won WW2. Clearly some people need to work on weapons and history has shown that it can deliver net good in the world (allies victory in WW2 for example). A dose of pragmatism is sorely needed.

Hitler started WW2 because he thought the other countries wouldn't fight or were incapable of fighting. His comment about invading the Soviet Union: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

The way to make peace is to make sure it is not worthwhile for someone else to attack you.

Hitler success among germans is due to the high burden WWI winners imposed on germany. Other countries may have relieved pressure on germany and maybe Hitler may have been stopped before he became something among germans.

Don't give people a reason to litigate and they won't fight.

Try to consider that countries where there is a common level of wealth and welfare, have lower rates of criminality (i.e. Norway).

Have you ever thought how much money has been spent in "defense" (ironically any country had and has a "defense" ministry, even those countries who attack) during human history? Can you imagine what could have been done if that money had gone into peace research?

I know that when a war has been started then you have to fight but you can try to prevent it. So instead of working on missiles control system it's better if you work on diplomacy and software that provides wealth and knowledge to the people.

Remember: this world could be heaven if we want it to be. Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.

i am not sure why this comment is downvoted.

Its a historical fact upon signing Treaty of Versailles a fuse for WW2 was lit.

WW2 was matter of when and not if (well war in Europe that would have colonies involved dragging them into war making it world war)

> you have to fight but you can try to prevent it

It's prevented if you're stronger than the other guy. I can't think of a single example in history of a country starting a war against a much more powerful opponent that was willing to use that power.

Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because they thought the US would be unwilling to fight a Pacific war with them. Hitler declared war on the US believing the US wouldn't fight. The Confederacy didn't believe the Union would fight, or if they did, was a match for the Confederacy.

> Do what you want to do to make it heaven or hell.

The US is a heaven by pretty much any historical measure. Military spending is 3-4% of GDP, a small price to pay to prevent war.

>I can't think of a single example in history of a country starting a war against a much more powerful opponent that was willing to use that power.

The Taliban supporting Sept. 11th attacks is an example, although you can argue that it doesn't count because many did not view their government as "legitimate". There's at least some who believe drawing major powers into protracted wars is exactly the point of the offensive.

The Taliban misjudged the US, not thinking the US would fight.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Bin Laden’s strategy was to bait the US into protracted wars that would lead to economic stress and eventually cause the US to leave the Islamic world.

https://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape/

Hitler started that way cause he wanted more space for Germans and also world domination.

Eventually, Hitler happened to lose that war with even negotiation being impossible. Generally, Hitler said something is pretty bad argument for anything, as that man said a lot of bullshit in his life.

This is true, I hope you support the U.S. withdrawal from NATO as well.

As i have cousins that are survivor of genocide and ethnic cleansing, which the US prevented in the late 90s by the use of such weapons, i completely disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War

But to each their own.

American weapons are currently being supplied to a genocidal war effort in Yemen and supplying weapons to Turkey which is continuing their genocidal efforts against the Kurdish people.

I'm trying to focus on active genocide campaigns that the US is supporting with weapons, not the two genocides that were instigated in part by Facebook. Let me know if I'm missing any.

I don't necessarily disagree with your points, though I might debate most of them. #2 however strikes me as pretty darn optimistic. Recent history suggests that the US doesn't have much hesitation about using their weapons.

Very few of the US’s weapons have been used. They have the capacity to blow up the whole world many times over, and end up attacking a minuscule portion of the population.

Compared to all the other recent and present superpowers the US has actually used their weapons the most.

The US, USSR, China, Japan, and Germany are all the superpowers from the past century, and they all got in some wars with each other, sometimes via client states. In the recent decades after Germany and Japan exited the scene, the wars have been relatively small.

Does this extend to all countries that the US sells weapons to? Are you happy about the use of US weapons by Saudi Arabia against Yemen, for example?

The U.S. selling weapons to Saudi Arabia doesn't harm U.S. interests in any way, but it's profitable and benefits the weapons industry, which is good from a self-defense perspective.

Oh, I'm fairly sure U.S. support of the Saudi royal family is already biting people in the ass... and the beginnings of the end of that support are already happening.

You don't think that's balanced by the US selling weapons to several dozen of the freest nations on the planet, liberal democracies with the best human rights records?

Do you know why the US is the world's biggest arms dealer? Mostly because all of those free, liberal democracies buy very expensive weapons from the US and have the most affluent economies (thus they can afford US aircraft that cost tens of millions of dollars).

In a typical year, 3/4 or more of all US weapons sales go to human rights protecting liberal democracies. Across five years to 2017, 18% of US weapons sales went to Saudi Arabia (12.4% went to Taiwan and Australia by comparison).

Should the US stop selling weapons to Taiwan, so China's annexation is really easy? Should the US stop selling weapons to Australia, so China can be even less worried as they try to intimidate Australia and control Asia?

Does it take all of those liberal democracies to offset Saudi Arabia, or is it one to one? How does the subjective moral scale work exactly? Does it accumulate over time, such that the US has a billion year credit for protecting and aiding Europe and Asia before and after WW2? How many credits is keeping democratic Taiwan apart from China for this long worth? Does the US get a trillion moral credits for being the only nation that is willing to stand up to China militarily re Taiwan? How about South Korea, does one South Korea for 70 years off-set one Saudi Arabia?

So many fascinating questions and that's just scratching the surface.

Actually no, that premise is completely wrong. Either you are a beacon of democracy and say you value human rights and that prevents you from supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia or you sell to whomever you like to because it's in your economic interest, but then don't pretend you're producing weapons for moral reasons.

It's worth pointing out that carpet bombing in WWII was not some accident of primitive technology and inability to perform precise targeting.

It was deliberate strategy from the UK and the USA, with the goal to demoralize and punish German & Japanese civilians. Mass civilian death and the total destruction of whole cities was the result. Napalm, for example was specifically developed to create building fires that would spread quickly and not be easily extinguished.

The sheer horror of it is not spoken much of in the west, where the crimes against humanity that Nazi Germany performed are rightly highlighted. But as a person with an ex-pat German father who grew up in the rubble, and a grandfather who helped reconstruct post-WWII Mainz, I was always made acutely aware of it.

Frankly, it makes me cringe every rememberance day when I hear my Canadian friends talk about their heroic grandparents, etc. who flew Lancaster bombers during WWII. My Opa did something far more heroic which was to spend the bulk of the war in an American POW camp, not fighting anybody -- and learning English in the process.

Carpet bombing can be seen as a rational response to the V2 rocket which was indiscriminate of it's targeting of Londoners. War is often a case of responding in kind.

If the Germans had had the capability of bombing London they would have (but couldn't thanks to radar). This was not a small conflict but an existential fight for existence between two groups of countries.

I have a hard time judging the decision to carpet bomb during WWII harshly given the circumstances. Note that both sides had nerve agents that were not deployed because neither wanted that escalation.

There are definitely events, and even wars, where the US has committed atrocities but I don't think carpet bombing during WWII is a good example of it.

Carpet bombing can be seen as a rational response to the V2 rocket which was indiscriminate of it's targeting of Londoners.

The British strategic bombing against Germany started with Operation Abigail Rachel in December 1940:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Mannheim_in_World_W...

Which itself followed the start of the London Blitz in September 1940:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz#First_phase

The first V2 attack against the UK was much later, in September 1944:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Operational_history

Germany did bomb the crap out of London and other cities - the blitz in London, destroyed Coventry, and the “Baedeker blitz” Which had limited military justification

Sorry but these efforts are completely pale in comparison to what was done to the cities of the German industrial heartland in the last year of the war. I have seen pictures of Mainz (my grandparent's home) where there's not a single building left fully standing in the entire downtown core.

That's not to say the Germans wouldn't have tried, if they could have. But they were tied up in the east doing very awful things there. The Russians unfortunately bore the brunt of total Nazi savagery.

Poland I think had even more civilian deaths per population than USSR. - 5 million from 35 million vs 7 million from 170 million.

I think it's important to remember that history gets written by the winners and that your opinion might have been very different if you would have grown up under Pinochet in Chile or the Somoza family in Nicaragua.

Moreover, while I concede that the US entering some wars has been good, that does not guarantee that it will continue like that, so if you are developing missile guiding systems you should always reflect on that they might be used for evil. You could even say that many of the Russian scientists were probably thinking they were working on defending against evil.