No. That is excessively cynical. Even GW Bush and the neocons really thought toppling Hussein would benefit Iraqis more than just Americans. That invasion turned out to be a complete disaster that probably benefited Islamist radicals more than anybody else. But it's a mistake to think that the neocons didn't believe their own bullshit. The top leadership really believed they could turn Iraq into a liberal democracy at gunpoint.

America has always been at its best when it lives up to its ideals, and at its worst when it discards those ideals. America has often been in the wrong, but on balance, the world has been better off for having a great champion of liberal democracy.

With Trump, it's not a question of believing things that are right or wrong. For the post-truth mindset, right and wrong don't matter. Democracy doesn't matter. There is only power. The second Trump presidency is the first time in modern history that America is no longer a great nation.

> My takeaway is that all previous U.S. administrations had pretense of morality and rules in both international and domestic politics

This is a perspective that continues to boggle my mind.

Every record of the United States acting internationally has been either:

Explicitly horrific (Invasion of Grenada, Vietnam, Firebombing then nuking Tokyo, Iraq etc…)

Attempts to Subvert or ignore international law (IPCC, ICC, UN…)

Or benefits some major industrial corporation (NAFTA, WTO etc…)

Please point to any type of transcendent “morality or rules” that isn’t just straight up large scale international realpolitik and propaganda around maintaining global capitalism on behalf of American based owners.

No the irony is that Trump lied about the oil - heavy sour Venezuelan oil is mostly useless to the US because we are awash in our own. He did it to experiment with “regime change light”