Remarks on the Decline of American Empire

>>>1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on middle eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat.

Lost me in the first paragraph. It hasn't been "thousands" but tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Thousands may be how many american military lives have been lost but that is certainly nowhere near the actual cost of any war. Such little assumptions belittle the value of non-american lives. If you want to muse about the decline of american exceptionalism, a good start might be to avoid repeating its mistakes in your own writing.

And there is more:

>>>Wars involving primitive religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us...

Um... "primitive religious fanatics" don't exist in only the "unimportant regions of the world". That is unless the author meant to include Europe, SE Asia, Africa and the US as unimportant. (I'd include south america but cannot recall any off the top of my head).

One hopes neoconservatism is good and dead. It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

I think the American public tired of this neocon hawkishness and I'm hopeful we see a change in our foreign policy.

The decline is overstated. International goodwill was at a very high point with Obama's election (Nobel, anyone). There's still nobody that can compete on the US's scale. There's a reason Macron wants to empower and streamline the EU (besides his power fantasies). Russia is a stagnant and isolated state, China has major ongoing issues with poverty and environmental degradation. China can't wage a war with the US outside of China itself.

It's good that the "empire" is in decline, but a focus on the present misses the fact that world powers go through long cycles of decay and rebirth. The British lost the US in 1783 (pretty major loss), but by 1922 was at its greatest extent.

It takes one election or world event to turn things around.

> It was an ambitious ideology which presumed everyone in the world shared western values or wanted them.

Eastern European here. After the fall of the iron curtain, what we really craved for was economic cooperation with the West, liberty of expression and civil and property rights.

Instead, we got US-sponsored liberal NGOs to steer the public opinion in certain directions, NATO military bases to protect us from evil Russia and crappy mass culture in the form of Hollywood movies. It was a great disillusionment for most people.

To me the lynchpin is the monumental catastrophe represented by Iraq War II and the entire decades-long Middle East quagmire in general. It's been nothing short of national suicide, especially when one considers what else might have been done with all that money. We almost literally set the surplus of an entire American generation on fire and watched it burn.

The neocons are the worst villains but not the only ones. They just represent the peak of a flow of lemmings over that cliff that began in the 1970s and 1980s.

We will be repaying the cost of these wars both in absolute terms and in terms of lost opportunity for generations, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. We will pay not only with money but with internal strife, political extremism, and lost international prestige. Our involvement in the Middle East may be the worst series of decisions in the history of human civilization when considered in terms of the magnitude of that which was lost.