Another important issue here is that 'evil' and 'good' are very much subjective notions. Most people, including some of the most 'evil' throughout history, were

Another important issue here is that 'evil' and 'good' are very much subjective notions. Most people, including some of the most 'evil' throughout history, were the benevolent heroes of the world from their perspective who, in turn, were doing what was necessary to purge the world of 'evil' and bring in what they'd see as a utopia. You don't even need to resort to extreme examples that I think go without saying. Things such as China today are a perfect 'moderate' example. Their government, and most people, value a system that 'we' generally consider to be wrong. By contrast they consider our system wrong. Both sides have valid arguments for and against each system. Yet this lack of clarity notwithstanding, both sides would also happily have the entire world embrace their personal interpretation of what ought be done, given the opportunity. The primary reason that this does not happen in modern times anymore is not because we've become somehow better, more ethical, or inherently more peaceful. In large part it's quite the opposite - we just became too capable of killing one another. Unrestrained war between nuclear nations is a non-starter simply because a single nuclear weapon would be enough to catastrophically damage a country. The nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands. By the 1960s Russia had already tested 'Tsar Bomba' [1], a nuke that was on the order of 5,000 times more powerful. And that was testing done at half power simply because full power posed too great a risk of nuclear fallout as well as being impossible to detonate without killing the pilots. Just to emphasize, that was tech developed nearly 60 years ago. We haven't just been twiddling our thumbs since. Compare our actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We destroyed the Afghanistan government and engaged in a lengthy occupation that continues, to a lesser degree, to this very day. This was done because we suspected they might be harboring Bin Laden. They were not. By contrast when we had such suspicions in Pakistan we staged fake vaccinations drives [2] to engage in a mass DNA collection to try to pinpoint Bin Laden's location by collecting DNA of his children. Once his location was confirmed, and he was housed right next to a government training academy, we did a rapid pin-point in and out strike completed in a matter of hours, completely pulled out, and then continued to pay billions to Pakistan in aid. Pakistan has nukes, Afghanistan does not. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Connection_to_the_Assassination_of_Osama_Bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Conn...