Would a group of people who are interested in events affecting the US, are dispationate, and who know their opinions will be acted upon, choose war over peace? Using real events and real results it appears to me that the answer is 'no'. In August 1971, near the end of the Vietnam War, it was necessary to stop redeeming dollars in gold and free to adjust to speculation, an ounce of gold cost more and more dollars after that. The cost of the Vietnam War broke the stability of the dollar. Through the 1980s and 1990s the dollar slowly recovered but in late 2001 the Bush/Chenney/Romney/Rice government went to war again and from then on an ounce of gold cost a lot more US dollars.
The oil crisis in October 1973 might be to blame for half of the post-Vietnam War rise in gold/fall in the dollar, perhaps. The rise in gold/fall of the dollar from Oct 2001 stands out as the effect of massive war expenditure.
I'm using the people who decide which currencies to hold their assets in as a group who make hard-headed decisions about which nations have stable currencies and can redeem those currencies. That may seem an unorthodox way to represent democracy, but it is easy to measure and responds rapidly and accurately to events. I'm not implying that it was wrong to bomb or invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Etc., just that on an economic basis it is best wherever possible to prevent problems from turning into wars.
But when you ask the weapons makers (Defense Industry??) they always vote for war and their lobbyists tell Congress to do the same.
If we could get the lobbyists out and Citizens United out, then our public and good people could fix everything
I am pretty informed about history and can give some insightful perspective. Real democracies have avoided initiating wars of aggression, except in the case of very new fledgling democracies that do not have many years of experience in democracy. The US did invade Iraq the second time, but they did have reason to initiate military action against Iraq the first time, 5 to 8 years earlier. So this is not really the most clear example. Then Afghanistan was invaded by the US under a somewhat flimsy excuse, although Afghanistan was being ruled by somewhat extremist Islamists who had set the country backwards. As far as I am aware, there are no cases of a developed democracy invading another developed democracy. But the possibility might not be entirely impossible. There is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is a big one, but both the Russian and Ukrainian governments are very corrupt, the Ukrainian government probably even more so than Russia, and Russia is in many ways still not a very "advanced" democracy and has some elements of, or is to some degree a dictatorship.
Sort of but not really. I don't really want to get in that debate with you, in this discussion. The main justification was a bad dictator was ruling the country with an iron fist, had committed numerous human rights abuses on a smaller scale, and might be developing inhumane weapons in violation of a previous international peace treaty agreement. Remember what the actual question here being asked is, and think about how this fits into that. It's not really a "black & white", "yes or no" example.
I'm puzzled over whether we have failed to learn from and are repeating the mistakes that ended Britain's role as a World leader a hundred years ago. For many years Britain had by skill and military power ruled a substantial part of the World. But World War 1 was very expensive, and Britain borrowed heavily from a rising World power - the United States - a sum it has not fully repaid. And then came World War 2, which though preventable, soon became unavoidable, and Britain lost its empire after WW2. I was concerned by the possibility that the United States was doing the same thing right now - running too much of the World, getting into expensive wars, and borrowing money - in this case mainly from China.
We borrowed a lot of money from China after the 2008 crash, but even after that our 'foreign debt' was still only about 1/3 of our total debt, with the rest being debt that we owed to our own citizens in the form of bonds, securities and pensions and the like. I havn't looked into it much in the last few years (since covid) but my understanding is that we've just been printing money to pay for the extra stuff. That doesn't change the debt much, it just reduces our purchasing power. Which one would think would make our debtholders concerned, since the money they would be getting back would be worth less than the money they 'invested' in us...
A similar question to the OP would be: Would the US public would do a better job of running the country, keeping it going, and waging fewer wars, than the establishment and weapons makers are doing at present?
