alt Hacker News>NATO exists because the US won't allow any other global hegemon to exist.
The obvious non-US potential hegemon was China, yet we normalized trade with them, which greatly helped their economy grow.
The new one is India. We've been buddying up to them a fair amount as well.
The US also played a role in the creation of the EU, arguably a more potent rival hegemon than any individual European state: https://archive.is/VC2zV
>Has quite a lot of good also come out of that? To the Europeans, yes. But it's not like the US is doing it from the bottom of their hearts.
I don't believe that is true. As I stated elsewhere in this thread, even during the Biden administration, right after Biden sent billions to Ukraine, the US was barely net-positive in approval rating for many European countries:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...
If a lot of good came out of the relationship from Europe's perspective, you would expect them to approve of the US. And yet they don't.
So we can conclude that US presence is a negative for Europe, and it would be best for Europe if US troops and security guarantees were withdrawn. Unsurprisingly, many Europeans have requested this course of action.
>And it's not like the US ever intervened in the Middle East for anything other than oil, historically.
The Gulf War was rather similar to the Ukraine invasion in the sense of a powerful country (Iraq) invading a weaker neighbor (Kuwait). But you probably think we only aided Ukraine for minerals-related reasons anyways, eh? That's why Europe is aiding Ukraine right now, correct?
>make use of the Kurds as local fighting forces
So the Kurds and Islamic State are fighting. The US steps in to help the Kurds. At that point we become "warmongers" who are "making use of" the Kurds. It would've been better to stay complicit. After all, the only reason anyone would ever oppose IS is due to oil, right? So that must've been our motivation.
Time to stop the warmongering.
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> So the Kurds and Islamic State are fighting. The US steps in to help the Kurds. At that point we become "warmongers" who are "making use of" the Kurds.
You left the part where the US sponsored extremist groups in Syria, but of course you did.
You know, your anger makes sense if you selectively leave out large part of the involvement of your own government in various conflicts.
> The obvious non-US potential hegemon was China, yet we normalized trade with them, which greatly helped their economy grow.
Of course you present it as a one way street. Nah, you normalized with China to counter balance the Soviets and after that fell your companies benefited, since it is much cheaper to produce in China.
China just wasn't standing by and it also got something out of that relationship (know how) - the US only wanted it as a cheap sweatshop factory, so as soon as they became a real competitor to the US, the US started with sanctions, tariffs etc.
Having failed in China, the US now wants Latin America to stay behind in development terms, just useful enough to outsource to, but not enough to compete.