It's amusing to see liberals defending American military intervention on the grounds that people of color deserve it.
However, there is a grain of truth in the assertion. Before the Second World War, American conservatives were isolationist. They didn't want to get involved in another European war -- why should Americans die to save the British and French empires? After World War Two, they become reflexively militarist: war by the US anywhere, any time, was supported by them. The rationale behind this was that these wars were necessary to stop the spread of 'international Communism'. After that spectre vanished, military intervention had other rationales -- but behind them lay the unquestioned belief in overwhelming American military superiority: we would always win.
Afghanistan and Iraq changed that attitude. Now American conservatives tend to revert to their older position: why should we care what one tribe of savages does to another?
The fact that Trump is president and making the decisions puts another twist on things: no one really knows why he does what he does. Will he do a Nixon-in-Vietnam and admit that we have lost in Afghanistan and working out a face-saving "give us a decent interval before you take over" deal with the Taliban? Who knows?
Probably the only fairly certain thing that guides any American administration in foreign policy is to obey the instructions of Israel. The Israelis are pretty smart people, with no illusions about Muslims, and quite able to work out where their interests lie. As Russia displaces the US as the power broker in Syria and Iraq, the Israelis will do a deal with them.
More than that, they, and other long-term-thinking nations, will begin to orient to China as it rises and the US declines. The wild card will be American behavior -- it will still have a massive military capability, albeit inferior to China's, even as its internal moral decay makes it impossible to predict what it will do with this capability. The realization that the US is rapidly on the way to being Number Two in the world will hit different groups in the US at different times -- some groups [the flag burners] will welcome this, others will simply not accept it. This will be the danger period, for the whole world.
