> I sometimes wonder if western populations would have the will to fight Russia if they invaded Lithuania or something.

Let's hope not. I certainly don't think it's worth anyone I know dying to protect Lithuania from Russian aggression. But anyone in Lithuania who wants to immigrate to the US should be welcomed.

> People in the west seem to have forgotten the nature of war.

We haven't forgotten, it's kept hidden from us by officials who do drone strikes and secret raids. War should be abundantly obvious. What we are doing is more appropriately called terrorism because it's focused violence intended to instill fear in people to achieve a specific political outcome. In many cases the desired outcome is removing a leader from power so that one of the militia groups who oppose him can take power, but with little thought to the consequences.

War is obvious and any brave citizen would likely be happy to fight in an actual war that was necessary to defend his or her homeland! What we do today is simply not war, it's high tech terrorism and political meddling.

> I'm pretty sure the US killed many times more Germans and Japanese in WWII and no one accuses us of "Genocide" there...

This is a straw man. Even if we assume WW2 was perfectly justified it is perhaps arguable that the US used "just enough" force to win. But if you consider the many civilians killed in Japan both through nukes and fire bombing of the mainland, is it really fair to say that the US killing of civilians weren't war crimes? We spend extra money (smart bombs, etc.) to make our war morally clean. But we didn't do that in WW2, we killed as many civilians as we could to break the will of the Japanese to keep fighting.

That sort of moral/economic tradeoff is why we consider a $50 suicide vest morally abhorrent and a $1M smart bomb acceptable, so by that standard the US committed massive war crimes in WW2. To win the war without crimes, kill only soldiers, period.

We've had decades of propaganda telling us that the US was heroic in that war, but war is ugly and men had to be drafted (mostly poor people) to fight a war they didn't consent to.

The difference with the modern stuff is that the US foments political chaos in countries and intentionally escalates violence. The net effect of this is that more and more fighting age people die off. It's hard to say that the massive number of Iraqi civilians killed isn't a useful byproduct of the US invasion. Sooner or later the people are simply psychologically broken from all the loss of life and chaos around them. The US strives to create this situation around the world. It has nothing to do with American values, freedom, enlightenment values, etc., and is simply about creating compliant people in oil producing regions.

The worst part of all this is that oil is likely to decline so much in importance in the next 30 years that US "investments" in all this middle east chaos is perhaps the most outrageous misallocation of capital in the history of the world. If you believe oil is going to be highly relevant and extremely scarce for 1000 years then perhaps the invasions are economically prudent, but we've got at best a few decades during which to reap the spoils of Bush and Obama's war escapades. Money doesn't grow on trees, lots of people's paychecks and future security is being raided to pay for these wars, which are only weakening the US and propping up oil regimes and dictators, all for only a few years more internal combustion dominance.

Why does NK make threats? Because they work. That's rational. They are keeping the US at bay. Obviously if the US could launch a few hundred missiles on NK and make the problem go away it would have done so long ago.