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The role they exist to perform is maintaining the American empire and hegemony, and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year. 'Keeping Americ

• installiskeycon 22d ago
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• ElProlactin 22d ago
  > ...and they've done a pretty good job of that up until ~this year. Not really. When you look back, seeing how things turned out, history looks different than it almost certainly felt to most people at the time. It took 250-300 years for the Roman Empire to collapse. You could make a pretty strong argument that the US has been in decline for decades, and that cracks in Pax Americana were already forming during the Vietnam War era.
• gumby 22d ago
  > 'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires... Even though I agree with you that the US shouldn’t have been executing the foreign policy it did, especially in Western Asia, I’m going to push back on your statement. Since the 1920s, oil has been the #1 input to any industrialized economy, and since the 1960s, any economy. And since crude oil is the #1 commodity product (despite coming in different grades), it’s in not just the US’s interest but almost everybody’s interest to have a stable supply since a disruption anywhere causes pricing turmoil everywhere (as seen in the current situation). Without that, you disrupt food, healthcare, and production of almost any goods. So yes, it’s a form of self-interested safety. Naturally even when you consider this as the policy driver, plenty of people will misunderstand, sometimes willfully, and use the machine for other purposes. More importantly, though energy will remain the pre-eminent input to all economies,it no longer need be petrochemical. The US seems to be ignoring this, to its long (and short) term detriment.
  • pfannkuchen 22d ago
    So if USA hadn’t interfered in the middle east or supported Israel, ever, the oil supply coming from the Middle East would be significantly less stable? How…?
  • vkou 22d ago
    If energy security were that high a priority, the US would have been rushing head-first, instead of dragging its feet, in a transition off fossil fuels and onto renewables and energy independence. It's quite clearly not.
  • peebee67 21d ago
    That's a really solid set of counterpoints to which I'd respond that the foreign policy has not merely been to maintain supply of oil, but to do so at discount prices and prevent other powers from developing it. This has demonstrably not improved stable access to oil and necessarily requires bringing an increasing fraction of the world to ruin and relative turmoil. In short, it's bad long-term strategy because it's not sustainable. Meanwhile, they've notably resisted efforts to diversify access to alternative sources of energy that'd reduce that reliance on oil.
• CMay 22d ago
  You have huge gaps in your understanding of history.