I want to be clear ... we do need to solve problems, of course. "What about X" doesn't mean "we shouldn't do anything now". It means "where were you when we nee

I want to be clear ... we do need to solve problems, of course. "What about X" doesn't mean "we shouldn't do anything now". It means "where were you when we needed to do something before? Will you now turn your attention to, say Yemen, or Libya, and fix the problems there?" If the answer is no, if the person is fixated on a specific "bad actor", then you can suspect they don't really care about the specific problem they're describing (famine, oppression, etc.) but rather want to use it as an excuse to organize something powerful against the "bad actor". If people stopped identifying the populations of countries, which number in the tens or hundreds of millions, with their government, then they would see that they should be on the side of the people, and not play these games of choosing sides. Of course we do need to avoid wars, support diplomatic solutions, and stop playing games of empires promising and meddling in other countries' affairs in order to rip their populations away politically and economically from one or another "ally". There is room for multiculturalism, for democracy, some people prefer one thing, other people prefer something else. Most wars start because there is some binary choice imposed on an entire population, A or B, and some of them don't want to go along with it. Here in the USA, it could be abortion. But for example, in Ukraine, people could trade with Russia AND trade with EU, without having to choose sides. It's just that China, Russia and USA keep influencing or outright dominating politics within other countries, and have been doing it for decades. If we want to move past empires causing misery around the world with this competition, then we have to call for collaboration and expand the Geneva conventions with more human rights for populations within countries. We need to set up rule-based systems that can de-escalate conflicts, including nuclear conflicts, before they arise. Instead, we spend all our time blaming the other countries, and letting war hawks escalate. For cooler heads to prevail, they need to start systematically pushing back against escalation and imperialism, and towards de-escalation and collaboration.