Love Many, Trust Few, Do Wrong to None” is the policy of the United States government. But what does this mean for the rest of the world? The United States is the de facto leader of the West, and with the decline of Western Europe and Japan as centers of both economic and military power, the United States will increasingly play this role. If you’re just casually concerned about human rights, but you don’t have time to do research or even take the time to listen to a podcast on the subject, you might be prone to assume that we live in a world where all that matters is what the United States is doing and saying, and all other states can go jump in a lake. But this is an incredibly dangerous perspective. It means assuming that the U.S. is right, and it means ignoring the very real possibility that a bad American decision could cost you your life. And the biggest flaw in an “America good, everyone else bad” mindset is that it overlooks all of the places where America is bad, and how much we aren’t actually the only ones. For this reason, there is nothing inherently wrong with criticizing American policy. No matter what America does, someone is bound to object to it, and by doing so you are doing a service to your readers. There are so many examples of awful things that our leaders are doing in the name of national security, or making the country’s economy better, or protecting our borders, or protecting Israel, or trying to help a country that is too poor to help themselves, or preventing our enemies from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, or supporting a democratic reform movement in a country where democracy is in decline, or any other number of American policies that are causing suffering and death abroad that there is no way you could go through all of them and still have a good day. But before we go any further, we should talk about the biggest problem in these reviews: where do you draw the line between policies that are bad, policies that are atrociously bad, and policies that are evil? Take what the United States does in the Middle East. One of the cornerstones of America’s foreign policy for decades now has been providing aid to Israel. Since Israel is mostly Jewish, a big part of that aid has involved offering military support to the Jewish state. Since many countries who receive American aid don’t like the idea of being on the receiving end of a U.S. military strike, that military aid comes in the form of defensive weapons like fighter jets and missile batteries, to make sure that Israel can defend itself in case of an attack. So are U.S. weapons sales to Israel evil? No, that would be absurd. They are doing what any responsible military is supposed to do in the 21st century: they are providing a defensive capability for the people of their nation. This is how good states interact with bad ones: you don’t try to be the hegemon; you don’t try to force your ideology on another state; you don’t start bombing them; you use your money and power to defend yourselves when they attack. Because then, once you provide that defense, the other state will have no choice but to respect the sovereignty of the country you are helping and not target them. Now, that being said, Israel is not a good state. It treats the Palestinians with less regard than a colony treats its slaves. It uses its power to bully its neighbors. It has a fundamentally unjust system of government and a deeply unjust set of international policies, mostly to make up for its weakness. So in that sense, yes, the U.S. having any sort of working relationship with Israel is pretty unjust. But that doesn’t necessarily make it evil. It just means that it’s terrible for American foreign policy. But that’s a good thing. On the other hand, there are times when one of our key foreign policy goals is hurting people, killing people, and oppressing people to further the interests of the United States and American corporations. In those cases, the policy is evil. And at this point, I have seen articles about American policy in the Middle East. What you’re looking for is an argument for why a given policy is atrociously bad. A good, strong, effective argument. If you can’t even provide a persuasive reason why a given policy is bad, just stay away. If you have to talk around the issue for some reason, try to do it in a way that is more subtle and indirect than simply accusing the United States of wrong-doing. For instance, try to argue that the problem is that the United States is just too powerful, and instead of getting into a huge fight about this, we should simply reduce our power and so make ourselves less harmful to other states. Likewise, try to avoid making sweeping statements. Yes, our foreign policy is evil. Yes, it is also unjust. No, it’s not the only part of our government that is evil. There are lots of other parts of our government. (Unless you believe that, like the author, we have somehow lost our free will.) Yes, our system of justice is broken. Yes, there are many people, and even many powerful people, in our government who are doing evil things, not as a matter of policy but because they are deeply flawed human beings with rotten character. Yes, this doesn’t change the fact that the current policies of the United States are often destructive and evil. This doesn’t mean that all people and all societies are evil. Just that the United States isn’t really all that special. In particular, look at the argument: we are evil. I had written that one a while ago as part of a reaction to another piece on Reddit. The piece did not actually claim that we were evil, but if you read it, you would have thought it was. And although there were some pretty poor uses of language (implying that our policy of bombing Iraq for no reason was an example of sadism, for example), I tried to be as measured and not say anything that I was afraid might be unfairly interpreted as a claim that the U.S. was evil in the sense of doing atrocious things to other people purely for the sake of evil. As a very quick way to check your own writing for this type of flaw, say you were describing some situation in which some American soldiers and other people were on the wrong side of the line drawn by the United Nations Human Rights Council. You should definitely describe the American soldiers and other people in the most diplomatic possible way, avoiding making any arguments that could be interpreted as an attack on their honor or character. You should avoid implying that they are evil. You should carefully separate the actions of the people you are discussing from the actions of the government of the United States. You should do this because, as you will be able to see below, if a policy is evil, then criticizing those policies is not anti-American. It is anti-evil. I am not going to discuss the other examples in this book at any length, because if you are going to write about American foreign policy, and you are going to try to write about it critically, you will have to touch on issues like foreign aid. It is also a point worth keeping in mind: while anti-American means that I find something awful, as it is used in American discourse it has a very particular meaning. An argument that criticizes the actions of the U.S. government is almost never anti-American. It’s anti-evil. It’s not anti-U.S., it’s anti-wrong thing the U.S. government is doing. You can criticize something that is very obviously bad for the U.S., and it’s not anti-American; it’s anti-bad thing that the United States government is doing. Because what counts as wrong is really a lot more complicated than you would think. Take war. The way I would argue it is that war should be about defense, not offense. War is often about punishing other states for attacking us, and I think we shouldn’t do that. But war should be about trying to stop a country from continuing to make your life difficult by launching attacks on you. An argument that I think is persuasive against war and war-like behavior is made by Michael Doyle, who was President Obama’s chief speechwriter for his 2008 presidential campaign. He argues that wars must be about self-defense because the concept of self-defense is about responding to attack, and one of the main reasons we go to war is to defend our ability to live in peace. And if you think of war as an offensive action, he argues that your war has failed and should be abandoned the moment you ever feel the slightest bit of threat. We should always make our first priority to achieve peace, and if we can’t do that, we should make peace with our enemies. But maybe this is just a more extreme version of the argument that America’s foreign policy is basically just one giant case of imperialism and colonialism. In that case, what counts as a military threat is also a matter of interpretation. Is China being aggressive towards Taiwan enough of a threat that we should go to war? What about the Chinese military budget or their rapid growth as a technological power? Which one is more important? What does it mean if China gets better at making cars and rockets every year? Is that a reason to go to war? Is the American military so dominant right now that China doesn’t have a chance of winning a war against us? Does America need to put our defense budget into rockets and fighter