Christ, what a weird world this is where I, a committed lefty in international relations with a deeply cynical view of foreign affairs, is in the position of defending the importance of US leadership in international affairs and the importance of security alliances such as NATO
It's not all that weird given that recent political trends have seen leftists tending towards more globalist ways of thinking while conservatives tend to favor more nationalist thinking.
I'm not trying to get you in a GOTCHA! moment. Just want to better understand your thought process and understanding
It's not so much about specific events as it is there seems to be a general attitude that sees the world assuming the worst about our intentions with every action we take, whether it be providing aid or disaster relief efforts, diplomatic negotiations, or military interventions. It seems like we are always assumed to be bad faith actors, and I don't think that's fair. While we certainly have a lot of screw ups in our history that have had some pretty disastrous and horrific results, I don't think we went into a lot of those situations with genuine bad or evil intent.
And then there is how the world seems to view our people culturally. Americans are generally assumed to be fat, stupid, lazy, arrogant, and rude. None of those are even close to being accurate generalizations of our people. Do we have people like that? Of course. But so does every other nations, but it seems only the US gets judged based on our worst citizens. And it also bothers me that a lot of those negative generalizations come from people who have never even visited the US, while a lot of foreign tourists who do visit generally leave with a much more positive opinion of our people. So we are being largely judged by people who don't even have any first-hand knowledge of our nation or people. Now that may not seem important, because who cares what some yokels in a far away land think of us right? Well those yokels will be voting for the leaders of their nation who will be negotiating with us and determining what their nation's relationship with us should be. So if their people are believing inaccurate negative stereotypes about us, then it's likely they'll elect leaders that also take a dim view of the US as well.