Hacker News Reader

Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

We need to stop doing wars when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to the United States itself, full stop. No "threat to our national interests", no "threat to strategic allies in the region", none of it. We make the world worse and we make the United States worse, and we abandon any moral high ground we may still possess.

View on HN

We need to stop doing wars where we cannot clearly envision the end state and have a clear plan for getting there. The U.S. has engaged in far too many conflicts where we simply didn't like what some country was doing and so we removed the government. Almost universally though, we did not know how to, or were unwilling to install a stable replacement government or governments.

"We need to stop refactoring apps when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to users."

* years later *

"What do you mean 'technical debt'?"

Right. I don't really stomach how long we've been in the Middle East and I don't like the idea of those with incentives to go to war prolonging and pushing war. But geopolitics is very messy. Instability in a region can encourage other leaders to take advantage and cause even more geopolitical upheaval.

Instability can cause upheaval, sure — but are we preventing instability or upheaval? It seems to me that we are prolonging instability and promoting extremism and terrorism by blundering in with our military. Is the Middle East, for example, any less unstable than it was three decades ago?

> are we preventing instability or upheaval?

Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, without read/write access to a multiverse.

Is the Middle East more or less stable than three decades ago is hard to assess on its own, let alone "what would it have been with/without adding x".

> Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing,

The other problem is that while people talk about caring about this, none of the actors who pretend to actually have this as their primary goal, its just an excuse used when advantage, not stability, is being sought.

"Geopolitics is messy" is a wonderful way to justify any atrocity. Where is the accountability?

Bad analogy for countless reasons, including an absences of version control when a commit is to blow something up.

Most analogies are imperfect.

The point: there's substantial risk to waiting for an indirect, non-imminent threat to become a direct, imminent one. Addressing it is frequently easier and cheaper in the early stages.

Isolationism was easier when adversaries took weeks/months/years to get to you.

US can delegate it to the regional powers or power brokers. US needs to make its Asia pivot now, you cannot waste military resources in a desolate land and stretch your self.

Getting out of Afghanistan will make the big powers .. China, Russia et al. to pay attention now that Americans are no longer bogged down.

20 years is enough - I do not even know how many trillions are wasted. Do you know the GDP of Afghanistan, it is less than USD50 Billion.

Pay-off the warlords put some mercenaries in Kabul, ask Indians and Russians to fund opposition to Taliban because it is their strategic headache.

Give Turkey some security role because they seem to have good terms with Pakistan, so that Kabul is out of Taliban control or some kind of compromise.

Not putting troops is not isolationism.. you apply other levers of your power.

As my friends have told me, there are policy papers sitting in staff offices in DC/Virginia that say pretty much exactly what you’ve stated here.

Would you have opposed interfering in Europe during WW2?

Do you generally oppose any kind of alliance, like NATO?

In general, yes to both questions. There's a point where a large-scale conflict becomes a direct threat to the United States, and WWII might have been that by 1941, but I would at least initially have opposed interfering.

The majority in the US opposed entering the war until Pearl Harbor, even though the administration of the time strongly wanted to.

I think there is a big difference between the powers that committed those atrociticies. Japan was behind Pearl Harbor wheareas a scraggly fundamentalist group in the middle east was behind 9/11 attacks. The former was a full blown exercise of military power and neutralization of some half of our naval fleet in the Pacific. The latter was a targetted terrorist attack largely organized by one main guy. We got the guy, and we could have probably gotten him without 20 years of war.

Probably Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.

> Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted.

Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them.

> Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.

And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.

Not your parent comment, but the U.S didn't enter WW2 until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, immediately after which Germany declared war on U.S. Right?

It's not entirely fair to blame Japan for its attack, as there was a lot of signaling by Washington that taking the strategic base at Hawaii would not be opposed. We might not have been attacked if we hadn't invited it, and there's reason to believe that implicit invitation was extended intending to give the U.S. an excuse to enter the war.

The “she was asking for it” excuse? Really?

So Iraq didn't ask for it with WMD? Afghanistan didn't ask for it with harboring Taliban?

"Asking for it" is an acceptable excuse for a war internationally.

> So Iraq didn't ask for it with WMD?

Did we finally find some?

> Afghanistan didn't ask for it with harboring Taliban?

The idea that responding to 9/11 is similar to some supposed "we thought you'd be cool with us taking Hawaii" in 1941 is a bit baffling.

Notwithstanding some historians' claims that interventionists in the Roosevelt administration slyly baited Japan into attacking first, there is zero historical evidence that Japan would otherwise have avoided attacking us.

The escalating embargo and blockade of Japan meant their industrial output was facing collapse within months. The attack was a desperate attempt to protect their invasion of the resource-rich East Indies. They literally had no choice, and this is exactly the argument that won Tojo permission to go forward with the attack.

Plus, the spirit of the Japanese nation was very much in favor of total conquest. Hakko Ichiu was sort of the Japanese version of America's Manifest Destiny, except they explicitly applied it to everything from Russia to Australia and Burma to Alaska.

Those points are all excellent.

The planner of 9/11 was in Afghanistan and actually carried out an attack on the U.S. Presumably the parent comment didn't think he was a direct threat worth invading over.

One might make a similar argument about Europe during WW2 (I am not, but that's why I'm asking the question).

The population of many European countries overwhelmingly desperately wanted the US to intervene during WW2. This is not at all the case at all in Vietnam, Irak or Afghanistan

History proves you are absolutely wrong.

Since WWII the world sees unprecedented peace and prosperity, all thanks to the USA being the world police. Just the freedom of navigation of merchant ships, afforded by the oversight of the US navy, is a huge enabler for world trade.

I hope US continues on its course for the next century instead of creating a power vacuum which the Chinese would be happy to fill.

Sure, tell me more about how the Afghanistan and Irak war helped make the world a better place

The person doing nothing never errs.

I did not say all US intervention was good, but that as a whole, Pax Americana has been great to us. The Chinese or Russian alternatives are not very enticing.

But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet.

And the “just let countries live their life peacefully” alternative is actually much more enticing than “force capitalism and democracy on countries that don’t care, by killing hundreds of thousands and ruining lives so they end up hating it for generations” reality that we live in.

Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, maybe learn from your mistakes at some point and acknowledge this strategy is not the best?

> But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet.

Tell that to Taiwan and Ukraine. Or go back and tell it to the entire eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Tibet etc.

I also guess most Cubans today would have wished Sovjet didn't interfere back in the day.

America and the west generally is prone to mindless self-flaggelation.

Taiwan and Ukraine are neighbors of China and Russia respectively. Also, I didn’t talk about the Soviet Union which disappeared 30years ago. But about Russia, who does not spend trillions in wars halfway round the globe.

Imagine China having occupied (and largely destroyed) 2 separate European countries for the past 15years. Or Russia having occupied two separate Latin American countries for the past 15years. Clearly the level of interventionism of the US is unmatched.

Upvoted. Still, one major difference: US always left.

Taiwan can forget about their freedom forever if China occupies it. Eastern Europe only got out because USSR collapsed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com