Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
[...]the USA has already invaded or fought wars in the below locations between WW2 and now.
Exactly! That's the whole point. The USA has become a superpower as a result of the WWII, mainly because it suffered the least - the entire infrastructure was intact and all the isolationists in the US were silenced by the Perl Harbor attack. (Can anybody else see a parallel with 9/11? Anyways, it's a different story...)

So, when you start counting your countries, you should start counting from the point the political power has declared an expansion/intervention foreign policy. Not from the end of the WWII. Also, it was already noted here that the US and the USSR were both engaged in the similar military conflicts and covert operations de-facto fighting each other. All those Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc.

Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
Roadmap: Iran, Syria, North Korea...
The roadmap for the USSR had officially been the entire world.

Look, I'm not trying to say the US does not have an expansionist foreign policy, it obviously does. But, please, stop idealizing the USSR saying the US is worse than the USSR in the foreign policy or something like that. Any superpower is tempted to grow until the internal tensions are too high, and then the superpower crashes into the smaller pieces. I don't think the US is an exception to that rule.

I appreciate your concern about the abundancy of the US military bases around the world, but you should also realize it's not that easy to withdraw. During the Cold War era, Western Europe was crying to save it from the USSR, hence the NATO, the bases, and the financial dependency of the entire world on the US to mutually maintain the whole thing. (And those bases are not 100% US bases, since the soldiers from the other NATO countries serve there as well. And all NATO countries still contribute money to maintain those bases and it's expensive to them.)

So, now your $1,000,000 question is: if there's no USSR why do we need NATO? And my reply to that would be: because, nothing had fundamentally changed! The major idea of many NATO bases was to have the short-range nuclear weapon so close to the enemy that the enemy would have no chance to launch an attack. (If you have a lot of targets, it lowers the chances of the successful attack.) In the WWIII one side should aim to survive the nuclear winter, otherwise there's no point to start. And as our dear guy Yeltzin had once said: "Clinton for a minute, for a second had forgotten what is Russia, which possess the full arsenal of the nuclear weapon." (Some people still believe he was a democrat and his reforms were democratic and based on that belief they blame the havoc of the 90s on the democrats, but that's another story...)

Can you see my point? It have already been 20 years since the collapse of the USSR, but the global nuclear threat had not gone anywhere. So, if you put yourself in the shoes of a typical NATO high-level strategic planner, what should you do?

1. Continue to have the military bases as widespread in the world as possible, and
2. Prevent the other countries from joining the nuclear club.

Does that tempt the involved parties from the personal exploitation of the system? Of course it does! I don't even think there could be a disagreement on that.

But, what better options do we have right now? The WikiLeaks with all its bravery and heroism cannot stop the nuclar war, won't you agree?