alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
I would say USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has done good work overseas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...
Like all large organizations and projects they are not absolutely perfect or ethical, as you can see in the Concerns and criticism section towards the bottom of the Wikipedia page. Still, I think they made some contribution to humanity. I have seen articles saying the withdrawal of funding has definitely hurt communities USAID had been helping.
I know the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) do (or did) disease prevention work outside the US. There are other examples like these. I don’t know if the government did more good than bad, but they certainly have done some good that is not just designed to benefit American big capitalists.
Actually I mentioned "pretense" in the sense of US pretending to be the good guy.