Comment by the_gipsy 3 days ago
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions.
At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
I don't see much evidence that's the US wants to defend the world from authoritarians. Some of their closest allies are authoritarian countries.
Maybe. They seem to actually like expansionist authoritarians now. Evidence being the Russia Ukraine peace effort.
Mostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#US_invasion_and_Is...
Apparently the invasion was Oct 2001 and Bin Laden hiked over into Pakistan in Dec 2001
It was not an act of war since Afghanistan didn't have an official government - in practice the Taliban ran things - but the attacks were carried out by the Al Qaeda which was spread over the Middle East. The Taliban might have been sympathetic to it but they were not actively supporting them or had any official collaboration with them.
Strategic motivation? If one assumes the US is going to be globally involved, yes, but that's begging the question.
Economic motivation? Not so much now, with the US being a dominant oil producer, and with petroleum itself losing importance. Even then, it's questionable if this could justify the full cost of the US military.
I think the original motivation was two fold: it was a combination of some sort of moral obligation to defend the "free world" from authoritarians, and (after WW2) a desire to keep small countries (and recent WW2 enemies) from deciding their only option for defense was their own nuclear deterrent.