The primary aim of US domestic policy is Wall St profit.

If that means starting a war of fifteen or subverting popular democracies around the world, that's considered business as normal.

This makes the US seem more like a military failure than it actually is. The US does not use military force to maintain its empire. It uses military force as an excuse for domestic military profit, and as a misdirection from less overt forms of political manipulation.

The primary difference between the US and the Soviet Union is that the US mastered two very important arts - overt international lifestyle propaganda, used to define imperial values as self-determining high-status markers, and covert indirect repression.

The USSR never understood the value of either. Putin doesn't seem to have learned that lesson. He's still doing the 'You know we have nukes and soliders, so you'd better take us seriously' thing in the Ukraine.

It may work there, for a while, but - unless those nukes are used - it may dent US hegemony, but it won't destroy it.

China is the only country which has more military leverage and longer experience of building empire through careful status management and media control. Post-communist China isn't there yet, but it has certainly has the potential to win a narrative war against the US.

Then we are actually in agreement!

This sub-thread was started by redstar with the premise that a successful foreign policy needs military power, claiming the Kohl government's independence recognitions as evidence. Be it due to passion for controversy or a bout of Germanophobia to externalise his justified despair over the state of the French Left, he couldn't refrain from stating it with a distracting hyperbole that spun the narrative of pro-Serbia apologists even further (Kohl and Genscher's move quite arguably only aggravated the conflict, but that's a far cry from starting it). However, the greater problem of his argument was that recent examples of imperial foreign policy backed with military power weren't exactly successful. Redstar tried to explain this away by denying US agency in the conflict in Kosovo, although the support for the KLA was a quite significant move (aggravating the situation much more than the independence recognitions): it not only led to the escalation of rebel and Serb police/military violence before and especially during NATO's bombing campaign, but virtually ensured that independent Kosovo become the mafia state it is now. (And yes, the Kosovo conflict didn't begin with the US support for the KLA, either.)

Apart from Iraq most foreign policy is a common enterprise anyway.

But with increasing disagreements and running-apart strategies, see Ukraine again.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

To much had "we had to destroy the city to save it" results. The one big success - dissolution of the eastern block - is very much the result of soft power.

The only sensible approach was to have left Yanukovich in power and not to have gotten involved in November '13. But that would imply that foreign policy is based on national interests. Here I agree with TBG. I think it is, but only in the sense that national interests, so far as they extend to the nation and people as a whole, have been hijacked and conflated with the interests of the elite wealth extraction crowd to whom the importance of maintaining their control over the domestic population far exceeds any other concern. This is true about the USA, Great Britain, Germany and France if in differing degrees.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."