Comment by megous

Right, and in theory that all sounds very thoughtful and morally calibrated—until you remember that U.S. foreign policy decision-making has roughly the transparency of a raccoon operating a shredder at midnight. There is no clear, open process where the U.S. earnestly weighs “dictator versus coup versus fraudulent election” on some ethical flowchart labeled For the Greater Good. Instead, it’s often more like: Is there oil? A lot of oil? Like, cartoonishly large amounts of oil? Because if there is, suddenly democracy becomes very important, very quickly.

And yes, we’re told—solemnly—that every intervention is about democracy, human rights, and justice, which is fascinating because those principles have an uncanny habit of aligning perfectly with strategic interests. Venezuela is a great example, where the rhetoric about freedom somehow managed to coexist with very unsubtle comments about wanting “all that oil.” At that point, the moral argument starts to feel less like a difficult philosophical dilemma and more like a PowerPoint slide hastily slapped over a resource grab labeled “Don’t Look Behind This.”

So while you’re absolutely right that the question of global policing isn’t black and white, the problem is that U.S. interventions often aren’t shades of gray either—they’re shades of green. And once that’s the pattern, claims about benevolent intent stop sounding like hard ethical reasoning and start sounding like a press release written by someone who assumes the audience has the memory of a goldfish.