Fake or not, we Americans will have to harden ourselves to worldwide savages gassing children and burning people in cages. Those who decry “moral imperatives” will have to find financing elsewhere. As a baby-boomer child of a WWII vet, I once thought we should continue with the world stewardship but we don’t nation build now. We can no longer afford it, nor do we have the stamina for such undertakings any longer and so many are quite sick of being played as the world’s suckers.
Americans are no good at nation-building. We don’t like to stay in the nations we build, unlike the Brits and Europeans. We like to go home. We ought to recognize this but Washington never does.
I think we could build nations, but we simply don’t have the STOMACH for it, and even if our leaders did, they’d be jailed in Europe for taking the necessary steps (such as torturing and then killing leftists/terrorists and their families, taking down entire towns and cities that ‘resist’, etc.).
So, it’s not really money, but it doesn’t matter - you’re right, we can no longer do it.
Humanitarian intervention might work some places. But the real issue is that we aren’t dealing with nations in the Middle East - we are dealing with countries arbitrarily created by the UK or France which don’t represent coherent polities. Iraq and Syria should be partitioned along ethnic lines and Kurdistan should be our biggest ally in the ME
Communism and its tentacles should have been completely destroyed during WWII when we had a chance.