So I've been doing a shit-ton of geopolitical reading lately. And let's set morality aside: we'll steadfastly ignore the fact that drone strikes in Pakistan are a dangerously immoral way to conduct foreign policy, we'll disregard the harm inflicted upon the Middle East by American exceptionalism and focus only on direct financial and strategic benefit to the United States.

The PNAC was right.

If what you want is a strong America with lots of strategic interests, the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, this whole pigfuck in Syria is what you want. Terrorism is a sideshow and war is profitable. The British "Great Game" gave them The Charge of the Light Brigade. The American "Great Game" gave us Pat Tillman killed by friendly fire.

I protested the Iraq War. I protested the invasion of Afghanistan. I'm not a fan of war. But from a strategic standpoint, the United States has never been stronger. Especially as Russia turns inward and China scrambles to secure mineral rights in Nigeria and Kazakhstan because we have the entire rest of the world sewn up. Water wars? Even if California turns into the Sahara agriculture is 5% of its economy. Oil wars? The US has completely untapped reserves and Alaska is just sitting up there. Iraq is a puppet, Saudi Arabia is a puppet, we're letting the mullahs burn themselves out in Iran (if the US had any strategic interest in furthering our relationship with Iran, that shit would flip faster than the Berlin Wall) and we have Israel as a buffer state between us and the majority of Islamic fundamentalists that serve the dual purpose of destabilizing the region and giving us a boogeyman to rail against that can do us exactly zero strategic harm.

It's fuckin' ugly. Empire-building always is. But in amongst the grime and blood, the US won handily.