Let's hope not. I certainly don't think it's worth anyone I know dying to protect Lithuania from Russian aggression. But anyone in Lithuania who wants to immigrate to the US should be welcomed.

> People in the west seem to have forgotten the nature of war.

We haven't forgotten, it's kept hidden from us by officials who do drone strikes and secret raids. War should be abundantly obvious. What we are doing is more appropriately called terrorism because it's focused violence intended to instill fear in people to achieve a specific political outcome. In many cases the desired outcome is removing a leader from power so that one of the militia groups who oppose him can take power, but with little thought to the consequences.

War is obvious and any brave citizen would likely be happy to fight in an actual war that was necessary to defend his or her homeland! What we do today is simply not war, it's high tech terrorism and political meddling.

> I'm pretty sure the US killed many times more Germans and Japanese in WWII and no one accuses us of "Genocide" there...

This is a straw man. Even if we assume WW2 was perfectly justified it is perhaps arguable that the US used "just enough" force to win. But if you consider the many civilians killed in Japan both through nukes and fire bombing of the mainland, is it really fair to say that the US killing of civilians weren't war crimes? We spend extra money (smart bombs, etc.) to make our war morally clean. But we didn't do that in WW2, we killed as many civilians as we could to break the will of the Japanese to keep fighting.

That sort of moral/economic tradeoff is why we consider a $50 suicide vest morally abhorrent and a $1M smart bomb acceptable, so by that standard the US committed massive war crimes in WW2. To win the war without crimes, kill only soldiers, period.

We've had decades of propaganda telling us that the US was heroic in that war, but war is ugly and men had to be drafted (mostly poor people) to fight a war they didn't consent to.

The difference with the modern stuff is that the US foments political chaos in countries and intentionally escalates violence. The net effect of this is that more and more fighting age people die off. It's hard to say that the massive number of Iraqi civilians killed isn't a useful byproduct of the US invasion. Sooner or later the people are simply psychologically broken from all the loss of life and chaos around them. The US strives to create this situation around the world. It has nothing to do with American values, freedom, enlightenment values, etc., and is simply about creating compliant people in oil producing regions.

The worst part of all this is that oil is likely to decline so much in importance in the next 30 years that US "investments" in all this middle east chaos is perhaps the most outrageous misallocation of capital in the history of the world. If you believe oil is going to be highly relevant and extremely scarce for 1000 years then perhaps the invasions are economically prudent, but we've got at best a few decades during which to reap the spoils of Bush and Obama's war escapades. Money doesn't grow on trees, lots of people's paychecks and future security is being raided to pay for these wars, which are only weakening the US and propping up oil regimes and dictators, all for only a few years more internal combustion dominance.

Why does NK make threats? Because they work. That's rational. They are keeping the US at bay. Obviously if the US could launch a few hundred missiles on NK and make the problem go away it would have done so long ago.

So what, you'd have us return to the traditional "obvious" war and fire-bomb cities to the ground, with long-term and oppressive occupational forces? The Russians tried that in Afghanistan in the 80s. Didn't work out so well for either side. Many more innocents and soldiers died. Why resort to those tactics when drones/special forces can arguable be more effective with less blood on both sides?

It's not a straw man. Genocide has a very specific meaning: the intentional, total destruction of a particular ethnic group or nationality. Not all war crimes are genocide. We can debate whether US strategy in WWII constitutes war crimes, but by definition it did not involve genocide. Nor have any of our actions in the wars since. We were not trying to wipe out all Germans, all Italians, or all Japanese.

I'm not even going to get into the "war for oil" conspiracies. The Iraq war was a mistake, but if we did it for oil then we did a really shitty job.

And North Korean threats don't keep the US at bay, their massive conventional forces stacked along the border do. Their threats merely inflame the situation and make their own position worse. They come off as childish temper tantrums at best and invite direct retaliation at worst, and only serve to make it clear that North Korea has zero desire to peacefully co-exist with the rest of the world.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if, upon obtaining a reasonably large nuclear stockpile, they threaten to use it in order to extort food aid among other concessions.

The only reason the middle east is relevant whatsoever in US politics and world affairs is because of the large concentration of petroleum beneath the sand. Once oil loses relevance the middle east will essentially cease to exist as we know it.

Middle Eastern life has been dramatically influenced by Western intervention for generations, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like if allowed to settle into a stable state. Pan Arab movements are a force of progress in the sense that they create a solidarity movement that is less vulnerable to manipulation on the basis of ancient ethnic and religious distinctions.

> The Iraq war was a mistake, but if we did it for oil then we did a really shitty job.

We wanted to control Iraq, the most important land mass in the middle east, both to project power throughout the middle east and to prevent Russia from taking it. At the time of the invasion, Russian and German firms had extensive oil extraction and refinement contracts with Saddam's government, but the Bush administration redistributed the spoils to US and coalition firms.

Don't tell me you think the US invaded Iraq for terrorism related reasons. At the time of the first US invasion (GW1) the US had normal diplomatic channels with Iraq and the US ambassador didn't think the US would care if Saddam annexed Kuwait. The US allowed diplomatic relations to degrade simply because doing so made selling the war easier. But no serious person would think that Saddam would step down just because GWB demanded it in a blustery (and humiliating to the US) speech.

> the intentional, total destruction of a particular ethnic group or nationality

This was done to Baath party members in Iraq, who mostly happened to be Sunni muslims. The US looked the other way after the forces we armed decided to do it. Sunni are a minority in Iraq.

> We were not trying to wipe out all Germans, all Italians, or all Japanese.

I have not argued otherwise. I focused my comments on WW2 to war crimes.

The US has created conditions in many countries that have led to tremendous loss of life of fighting age people. This may not technically be genocide, but the distinction doesn't really matter.

We go in and destroy infrastructure and create a cesspool in which we arm and pay people to kill each other. It's a sick way to thin a population, and we have all sorts of justifications and silly terms for aspects of it, but it is abhorrent.

As we should have learned over the past few decades, nation building rhetoric and "regime change" rhetoric is nonsense. We destroy infrastructure and then blame the victims when they don't all turn out to be Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, or when they or their injured or grieving family members are less enthusiastic about more suffering after the US-funded regime change effort leaves them in chaos.

It's not just stupid and ineffective foreign policy, it's morally abhorrent conduct that has cost the US significant respect around the world, and (quite ironically) created a reality distortion in the minds of many Americans where American actions are considered somehow appropriate or normal. It's reminiscent of the sort of absurd beliefs posited to N Koreans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iraq#Ser... seems to contradict you. US companies only control two oil fields, and in terms of gross revenue China actually receives more than any other country. Russia, Malaysia, and China have more service contracts than any coalition nation.