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Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that opposite argument works given the current geopolitical situation which has nothing to do with the US being aggressive. Russia would have very likely completed its conquest of Ukraine by now and moved on to the Baltic states (NATO relies on US military spending to compensate for lack of spending of other NATO members). Taiwan would belong to China yesterday, along with the rest of the Indo-Pacific.

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The EU and European countries in general have in total provided more aid to Ukraine than the US, it's just divided across multiple countries, not that it's a competition. I'm not sure a military budget 200 billion vs 600 billion is going to make such huge a difference if the goal of your military is actually defence instead of force projection, it's not like they're giving Ukraine the fancy pants expensive stuff and both the US and Europe probably both ran out of (or significantly depleted at least) their stocks of regular old dumb artillery ammunition, rocket launchers, etc, and that stuff is what's used and actually useful.

It's disingenuous to ignore the effect the aggression of the cold war and its aftermath had on the current Russian situation.

With Taiwan, it's a delicate situation and I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on it.

But I notice you conveniently left out all the times the US just did interventionism because it was convenient. Iraq? Most recently Venezuela? If we go back long enough, how about literally all of South America?

What military interventionism in Venezuela? The US applied sanctions when Maduro started suppressing democracy, sure, but that's not the same thing as airstrikes or invading. This sounds like goalpost moving, since we were talking specifically about military force.

The US has a shit history of intervening in Latin America from the 20th century, no argument there, but it's been several decades now at least since the US overthrow a democracy in that region.

The US backed Guaido's illegitimate claim to Venezuelan presidency as recently as 2022.

You're right that it wasn't outright military interventionism. In my mind, there's little difference between supporting a coup covertly through the CIA, by providing weapons and training, and invading a country. Maybe we disagree there.

> between supporting a coup covertly through the CIA, by providing weapons and training,

Oh, and where did this happen?

Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolívia, Cuba off the top of my head. Feel free to look up a complete list if you want to.

Please don't move the goalposts, we were talking about Venezuela.

Where did this happen recently for Venezuela?

> but it's been several decades now at least since the US overthrow a democracy in that region.

Isn't because it takes several decades for the secret documents being declassified? Of course the official discourse of USA is that they did nothing. However, we have several accusations of interference in Latin America in a lot of soft coups and more direct attacks like in Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (a coup in 2002 and a mercenary attack in 2020).

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