>In an effort to alleviate a tiny portion of your ignorance, I point you to the person who inspired me to take this handle.

Yes, I know who Stanislav Petrov was. Hence, the quotes placed ever-so-carefully around his name. But, you managed to miss it anyway. And, if you still do not see the irony, then there's not a lot I can say here.

But, that you missed that subtlety (really not so subtle) and that you so proudly posted a link to a Wikipedia page to attack my supposed "ignorance" is telling: your deficiency is not in reading Wiki pages or Googling historical information, but in processing and understanding it beyond the ideas that were provided to you by someone else. It's little wonder that you fall prey to such a simplistic worldview and keep berating others about "history": You see value in history as a collection of facts and, absent the ability to think for yourself, you find it difficult to understand how anyone can reach a different set of conclusions than those given to you.

This is why you point out what you believe to be America's mistakes without realizing that what you omitted is even more telling. It's why you fail to see the internal inconsistency with your own arguments from one sentence to the next. It's how you can declare two things to be "bad" without realizing that they both cannot be so--or that perhaps one was less-bad and necessary in any case.

You don't understand or acknowledge how the geopolitical climate changes over time and policies might change accordingly. Thus, you fail to interpret history as a continuum, but rather a set of discrete occurrences wherein you consume others' qualitative judgments about each in isolation and believe that the "final answer" is the sum of those judgments.

It's also why you arrive at this worldview that fails to separate actors from underlying ideals. Thus, if one bad actor does something in the name of democracy, then it's "U.S. bad. Other countries good".

It's why you see things as black or white; perfect or imperfect; good or evil. Though, strangely, you seem to have a blind-spot where other nations are concerned, leaving the U.S. as singularly evil. Did Russia not invade Ukraine? Are they not "propping up a dictator" in Syria? Were these their first misadventures? Did the U.S. make them do it?

It's why your "solution" entails retreating from the world stage and then...well, what exactly? A perfect world suddenly emerges wherein all hostile state actors renounce their world-views and geopolitics, then equally retreat?

It's not about anyone propagandizing liberal democracy or even whether every actor in the U.S. has always lived up to that ideal. It's about whether or not you believe liberal democracy or just plain democracy to be a good thing. Once you've made that decision, then there are hard questions to answer and, unfortunately, those answers are sometimes imperfect.

All of this I say affording you the benefit of the doubt as a hapless victim of propaganda with honest intentions. If that is the case, however, what's most shocking is the utter lack of self-awareness that prompts you to go around beating people over the head for what is, essentially, the breath-taking paucity in your own understanding of the world.

Still, the worst-case scenario is actually that you understand it all and are simply choosing to join the army of propagandists against the U.S. It's no accident or secret that those propagandists will benefit at the expense of our nation, so it makes many wonder how we should think of those who give them aid and comfort.