anybody in here ever hear about cuba?

Yeah, that Che Guevara guy was from Cuba, right? Handsome guy, talented too. Do you think he'll release a new album soon?

right right but the thing is, cuba can't trade because the united states says cuba can't trade.. not that they don't find workarounds for that kind of thing but if you ask any cuban they'll probably tell you one of their main issues is the embargo

The point of the embargo wasn't to make the US richer, it was to give an incentive to the ruling class to raise human rights standards and allow civilians democratic acess to politics. Proponents of the embargo argue that if we lifted it, it would only benefit the ruling class anyway.

yea.. but that's a useless strategy if you're trying to get people to comply with human rights... we tried the same strategy with saddam and guess what? dicatators will sooner starve their people than obey a foreign power to go against their own geopolitical self interest

Yes, but now you're changing subjects. Free trade with Cuba would benefit the US. It's mostly on moral (and public image) grounds that we uphold the embargo.

I make no argument of its efficacy. Obama had started to loosen up the embargo a bit, but many are against it on moral grounds (I. E. It would undermine American values to trade with a regime that abuses it's own people).

right i got sidetracked

you say it was a moral issue, i say it's convenient that we have a moral issue with cuba out of all countries who just so happened to have had a socialist revolution, making them a clear potential proxy state/point of geopolitical leverage for the soviet union, and only 90 miles off the coast?

yea i don't dispute that if you listened to politicians at the time speak they'll talk about morality but i'm having a hard time buying that narrative when the historical pattern presents something that makes much more sense to me

but in any case my original point was that the united states holds the most leverage in any sort of embargo/sanction situation. not the fact that we derive our wealth from embargoing cuba. but the fact that if you go against american power those kinds of consequences can occur. so the UN is more like la costra nostra than anything else. europe has historically always been divided/at war after the roman empire fell.

I don't deny that geopolitical incentives are involved, but do you really have difficulty believing that those politicians believed socialism was evil and democracy was good? Socialism had a lot of bad representatives at the time (Castro's regime included).

Maintaining strategic advantages against evil as the good guy is smart, and it's implemented in a variety of ways, and because the US isn't a single entity, there are a lot of different interests involved in US actions. Some are idealistic, some are materialistic. As you'be alluded to in your own post, the goal of many coldwar tactics were to keep socialist (synonymous with totalitarian at the time) interests in check.

There are past examples of US going to war over moral issues. Most historians agree that The American Civil War was almost entirely morally motivated. It was detrimental to the economy and defense of both the North and the South, yielded no strategic advantages, it was essentially two ideologies clashing.

Rumsfeld Era in the US is on the opposite side of the spectrum, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest war racketeering influenced a lot of military decisions. And it's put us in a nasty position, really, fueling anti-western sentiment to the East. I don't think that was a good move strategically for the long-term for the US, despite any perceived short-term gain. Nobody likes us anymore. We aren't the saviors we were in WW1 and WW2.

well, i don't necessarily doubt that people will generally value their own system over the other guy's system. i do think that basically capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive. both are supposed to be implemented on a global scale, where as there's only one globe. but even if russia hadn't been communist, they would've been the natural rivals to the united states, it might have been a bit less fierce, but nonetheless they would have been rivals. sort of like putin's russia today, which isn't communist, yet we're getting some friction there.

when you talk about the us going to war over moral issues you have one good example, the american civil war and then a number of light conflicts that were more like interantional publicity stunts than actual wars. beyond that the US is mostly self interested just like any other power. keep in mind that a civil war is a very different type of war, strategically speaking. look at the other major wars the US has been involved in. the us population adopted a highly isolationist ideology directly following ww1,due to massive amount of lives cost over 'european entanglements' ww1 was a clearly amoral war. there was no good guys or bad guys just an intractable pattern of alliances. then ww2 started, where there was a clear aggressor, an actual precedent for talking about good guys vs bad guys, and americans wanted no part in it. until some planes smashed into some ships in the pacific.

and yet what people remember is that the japs attacked us at pearl harbor out of the blue, sneaky japs. meanwhile roosevelt basically forced their hand by interfering with their naval interests in the south pacific. why?? because clearly somebody would have to dominate the pacific. the us and japan are natural maritime rivals just due to geography.

i mean tbh the idea of the united states as some military moral vanguard is completely laughable to me.... you only have to look at the track record of conflicts and wars that we have been involved in throughout the years. there's no consistency whatsoever. we deal with tyrants when tyrants are receptive to protecting us geopolitical interests. in other cases, where the tyrants become a nuisance for us, we become 'morally outraged' and 'something's gotta be done about this putin guy, huh?'

i dunno it seems to me like your narrative is more affected by ideology than actual US foreign policy is. because it will always sound better to approach it that way, so they'll always use that rhetoric.

Your arguing against a strawman when you say the US is not a moral vanguard. I'm highlighting ideological influence in an effort to demonstrate that the geopolitical narrative is overly narrow, and that there are several factors (some which we can't measure). I don't think any decision to go to war is so simple. But there are checks and balances to make sure more than one personal interest is involved (which is why Bush had to lie about WMD to go to war).