I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

Are you seriously arguing that we need military commitments so we can hope that war breaks out right around the time of an economic depression?

It seems to me that you've basically conceded the point that the US doesn't benefit from its involvement in Europe, and its involvement is simply out of misplaced idealism. I'm just saying, we should stop doing the idealism.

We both agree that the idealism is misplaced and America is a nation of fools. All I'm saying is you should accept the logical consequence of your position, and agree with me that us fools should stop wrecking everything in the name of "freedom and democracy" nonsense.

>You see the problem with you people is that you’ve strong armed your way into everyone’s business for the past century, trying to change cultures and ways of life, far beyond simple alliances - only to now turn around and abandon your so-called allies as soon as they become inconvenient for you. I say this as an African living in Europe who experienced firsthand one of your regime changes and subsequent cutting of ties when the new regime didn’t align

Europeans mostly complain about our influence on the continent, despite 80 years of peace and prosperity post-WW2. If that's not enough to please them, nothing ever will be.

But in any case: We are very bad at foreign policy and we should do less of it. That's my position. We aren't going to get any better.

The post-WW2 experiment, initiated by Dwight Eisenhower, to have a more interventionist foreign policy, has been a failure, and at this point everyone agrees on this. Most of all, it has been a failure for the USA -- our relative GDP has fallen, meaning the rest of the world got rich quicker than we did. (This demonstrates how we have been manipulating the global economic system for our own benefit, naturally.)

As a voter, I don't have the capability or wisdom necessary to reform the US foreign policy establishment. Best I can do is to hope for less foreign policy.

Everything is always America's fault, as you yourself say. No other countries have agency or responsibility. For example, America is the only country that ever seeks to influence others.

America is the only country which seeks to ally with leaders that are aligned with it. Other countries don't care whether their partners are on the same page or not. This is a uniquely American trait. Other countries just choose who to ally with based on whether they like the design of another nation's flag.

Regardless of how things go with e.g. Ukraine, America will always to blame. We will be to blame no matter what we do. So we might as well focus on helping ourselves, and mind our own business.

> It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.

Yeah! I do think people are 99% defined by the systems and scenarios they exist in, whether that's a government, a school system, a culture/society, a family, etc. You can see this all over, but my favorite example is when people from deeply misogynistic cultures move to Western countries, within a few years their views moderate. It's hard to find a more deeply held moral belief than the fundamental roles and identities of men and women, but it changes and quite easily.

Or with the Hale County example, I'm not at all surprised that as the economy failed that community they noped out of it. Reading through the NPR stuff, you'll get a good feeling for how they rationalize it (I don't think Hale County is especially beset by freeloaders) and their dissatisfaction with it. A world where people are strictly adhering to codes of morality isn't one I've ever experienced.

I'm not saying people never do moral or ethical things, and I don't think you can fully understand the world if you don't include morality/ethics in your thinking. But in the aggregate, this isn't how things work.

    hypocrisy
    /hĭ-pŏk′rĭ-sē/
    noun
    1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, 
       or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
    2. An act or instance of such falseness.