I think we share aspirations here, but have a different perception of both history and the universality of liberal values.
A few more comments...
I didn’t mention Taiwan because we didn’t invade it. But it did take a path similar to South Korea in that it transitioned from a Kuomintang dictatorship to a democracy.
Regarding helping Russia – that was after the Soviet Union fell. Until then, the goal was to cause the USSR to fall while protecting as much of the world as possible from them.
Reagan was far from an idiot – he was an experienced executive (former governor of California) and very well read on political theory and history. He wrote his own very well received talks that he gave on the radio between his governorship and presidency.
His policies broke the back of the USSR economically, while fighting USSR’s proxy wars in various countries. But once the USSR fell, we tried to help Russia transition to democracy and the free market. That was a serious effort, but it failed, probably because the experts involved didn’t understand Russian culture, and didn’t appreciate the corrosive power of widespread corruption. But we tried.
Gorbachev claims to have wanted to dismantle nuclear weapons, and yet at the same time he presided over the largest and most dangerous biological weapons program in the world. The USSR under Gorbachev manufactured many tons of lethal biological agents, including smallpox and Anthrax, and planned to use them in warheads against cities in the US that had just been hit by nukes.O
nce a country has nukes, it is almost impossible to make it get rid of them. Ukraine shows why nobody is going to give up their nukes in the future. Ukraine gave up a large quantity of thermonuclear weapons and ICBMs in return for territorial guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Yet look at where they are now.
Libya is another object example: Khadaffi turned over his (and Saddam’s) nuclear program to the US and UK in return for a promise from those two countries that we wouldn’t depose him (and that he would stop supporting terrorism). A few years later, the Obama Administration deposed him (Hillary Clinton bragged about it).
With those examples, why would any country that has nukes give them up? They provide a great deterrent, and when controlled by imperialist nations, limit actions that can be taken against them.
If Russia had no nukes, NATO forces, or even just US forces, would have wiped the battlefield clean of Russians there in a week or two.
Back to Vietnam… you assail the use of Agent Orange and bombing. Agent Orange (which I may have been exposed to) is only mildly toxic, and was thought at the time to be completely harmless. There is much misinformation about Agent Orange, including in veterans groups I belong to. It seems every time a Vietnam vet gets diabetes, for example, he blames it on AO. And yet the odds are very high that AO was not a factor, except in a tiny minority of those vets. Same with various cancers.
The communist country of Vietnam, of course, displays every deformed child to blame the US’ use of AO – again, not scientifically valid.
Bombs were used to kill enemy or destroy enemy supplies and infrastructure. That’s what you do in war. When a country is invaded, as Vietnam was, it needs to defend itself. We helped, and one way we did it was with bombs. But the US tried very hard to minimize civilian casualties when doing so – and those precautions cost the lives of many US troops and lengthened the war.
Re: Cambodia – eastern Cambodia and Laos were occupied by North Vietnam, and used to stage attacks against South Vietnam. Of course we bombed those areas. Then when the vicious Pol Pot (a proxy for China) was in the process of taking over Cambodia, we bombed his forces too.
BTW, did you know that after the dust settled on the Vietnam War, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and deposed Pol Pot, and then China invaded Vietnam?
As for ending war… many wars are popular with the people. If China goes after Taiwan, do you really think the people of mainland China would be against it? I doubt it.
“I believe if people are truly aware of the world and their family's potential in a free world where human rights are available, I think any person would want those rights and those freedoms.”
You might be right, but unfortunately I don't think so. I think our disagreement in that area comes down to to issues, one involving the nature of man, and the other the radical differences in cultures.
Your belief is based on western values. Those are not held by all cultures – some are very different.
Also, every society has some very bad people in it. We don’t know all that makes someone a sociopath or psychopath, but we do know they comprise as much as 5% of the population. Plus every society as malcontents, or people who are economic losers.
This history of man seems to shows that war is very common. We have indications that liberal democracies are less likely to engage in offensive warfare, although the history on that is short.
