The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited interventionism to American public

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited interventionism in the eyes of the American public.

What the last few years have done in contrast is discredit anti-interventionism, or the idea that American power cannot be used for good.

First came the Abraham Accords, where contrary to every prediction made by practically every Middle East expert, Israel signed peace treaties with several of its neighbors without taking care of the Palestinian issue first.

Throughout the first Trump administration, the maximum pressure campaign had Israel, the Arabs, and the US all on the same side against Iran.

The Syrian regime falls, the new leader in Damascus is pro-Western. We ended up fighting both Assad and ISIS, and defeated them both.

Then you had the Venezuela operation. Without losing any American soldiers, we removed the Maduro regime, and replaced it with a government that has been freeing political prisoners and opening up the oil industry to American companies.

Cuba will probably be overthrown without any cost next, ending the over half-century nightmare there.

Now, after taking a detour during the Hamas war and wiping out Hezbollah's leadership, Israel along with the US slaughter the entire upper echelon of the Iranian regime. What's next in Iran? Who knows? But isn't there at least a chance it'll be better than the old theocrats? Why would anyone dismiss the possibility? People deny this is possible just because they want America and the West to fail.

Russia and China remain problems and North Korea is an exception. But when it comes to weaker enemies around the world, we can just kill them and everything will be fine.

As it turns out, we misunderstood the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lesson wasn't "never do regime change" or "never kill bad people."

The lesson we should've taken was "don't do social engineering through war." Killing bad people and removing bad government is fine, both in terms of American interests and from a humanitarian perspective. Now that we've seen how easy it is, we arguably have a moral obligation to keep doing it.

There is a lot to be gained by just removing the worst of the worst. Going from Stalin to Khrushchev and Mao to Deng made things much better. Same with going from Maduro to Delcy, and the same is likely to be true with regard to whatever comes next in Iran and Cuba. Don't waste your time on micromanaging the country and having feminist art exhibitions like we did in Afghanistan. Just remove regime you don't like first, and then be pragmatic with the next steps.

America is powerful and good. We just need to understand that it is ok to admit it.

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