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I liked how the United States used it's military up until the war in Iraq. What we were doing was deploying our forces widely throughout the world, to protect other nations that we were friends with from military threats. I liked this, because it means that those other nations do not need to build such large militaries of their own to protect themselves. If the United States had continued to use it's military benevolently, and used it to defeat threats to world placidity in the bud (Serbia, by my estimation), then the other first tier nations would be complacent militarily.
I recall reading an essay predicting that North Korea could be a catalyst of an arms race in the Orient. Since I perceive North Korea as a potential threat to stability and complacency in the Orient, I believe that the United States ought to perform it's regime decapitation there. North Korea is also a place that is surrounded by and could be absorbed by stable and prospering countries. By attacking North Korea, we would have been preventing threats.
I see Iraq as a different story. Iraq wasn't much of a threat beyond it's own citizens, the Kurds, and Iran (maybe, maybe Israel). By eliminating the Iraqi regime, I believe that we have made the region less stable (even if much of the stability was based off of cruel regimes and oil). By invading before we had convinced the rest of the world (and especially the first tier countries), we convinced those first tier countries that the United States could be a threat to them. These countries now have the need to build up the militaries to become militarily independent of the United States, and to stave off what might be perceived as an American threat.
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