Can't tell the good guys from the bad guys

It figures.  As soon as I mention a drastic decline in the insect population I read about an infestation of a new  invasive species making a mess of things in the eastern US.  This time the culprit is the spotted laternfly, a species native to China, India, and Vietnam.  Hmmm...aren't two of those countries run by the Commie Red Menace?  Maybe that's the secret plan of the Chinese to gain world domination; screw spending all that dough on military hardware.  They'll simply slip a few nasty bugs in a shipping container on its way to Walmart and let Mother Nature do the rest, a modern take on the old Chinese practice of "death by a thousand cuts."

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The "forever war" article I linked to didn't seem to be overtly biased to me but that's just the way I read it.  Different things popped out to me than what Mr. Beagles took from the article.  The AI implications aside, what struck me was this passage:

 With a military budget larger than that of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Britain and Japan combined, and some 800 bases around the world, the US has an abundance of firepower and an unparalleled ability to deploy that firepower anywhere on the planet.

So, what's the plan?  We have all this stuff so we might as well use it?  I'm all for national defense, the key word being defense.  The US was in and out of WW2 in less than five years and here we are now, still dicking around in the Middle East after more than seventeen years with not much to show for it.  We do not know how to win the conflicts we are engaged in and are bogged down in local religious and clan/tribal rivalries.  American foreign policy seems to be "keep stepping in shit."  Maybe, as Mr. Beagles says, we should be going after the bad guys but do we even know who the bad guys are or what they want?  They seem to be a lot of local nobodies who become leaders whenever there is a vacancy.  And we shouldn't forget that a lot of those bad guys got started when the US supported the Mujahideen when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  The idea of "unintended consequences" comes to mind.

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I don't know if the Khashoggi business will tear things open regarding Saudi Arabia, but I hope so.  The Saudis are bad actors but the US made a deal with devil long ago and now we're stuck.  I don't know exactly what the US interest in Yemen is and at this point I'm afraid to ask.  And as long as the US keeps supporting autocratic and hostile regimes like Saudi Arabia I don't think we can call ourselves the "good guys" any more.  Is it all about the money, we buy their oil and they buy our weapons and that's all there is to it? Sometimes I wonder.