haha oh wow. politicians suck is the understatement of the century. i'm not saying they are all terrible people but definitely their incentives are all messed up. and they've ****ed up this country pretty badly.
Corrupt policing by America is better than no policing at all? Says who?
Americans won't let truly vile and atrocious shenanigans go down? Guantanamo? Vietnam? Japanese internment?
Attempts to combat communism failed miserably and made the US much worse off. The thing that brought down communism was its own economic failures.
There wouldn't be wide rings of terrorists planning attacks against the US. We would have much better relations with several countries. And a lot more money. Plus there's all those American lives lost.
Attempts to police the world have had a large impact on the US's fiscal situation.
The core values of the US are still non-interventionist though. Founding fathers etc.
You realize the US entered WWII because it got attacked by Japan right?
Better than anarchy though. If you say otherwise, read the book the Bottom Billion, anarchy causes mass amounts of poverty.
Corrupt policing is far better. Take for example Egypt. When it was under dictatorship, it was a good dictatorship, and one that the US agreed with because the country was growing the most from that dictatorship, and had the most utility for the people. Then, anarchy broke out, and now Christians are being murdered daily in Egypt. Corrupt policing isn't perfect, but it's much better than other types of policing.
Side note: the policing done by the US is one with checks and balances, namely with the international community and other western liberal democracies such as Canada, Britain and France. The US is not the only party, but as any other police force, they're the ones who will be the catalyst for action.
In the moments that kind of legislation was needed was in the moments where there was a danger to the safety of the US, and ultimately to the rest of the world. That kind of policy doesn't last forever however. There's justifications to those actions, and the benefits far outweigh the costs.
That's one case where the US failed. Although, you're wrong about how communism failed; the revolutions of 1989 were largely the catalyst for the fall of communism. It's pretty drastically different because nowadays NATO countries provide material support for those kinds of revolutions, and typically those fights can be made significantly easier, as in the case of Libya.
They did manage to push Al-Qaeda out of the countries they invaded, and they did manage to push out the oppressive Taliban regime from Afganistan. The better relations were largely with regimes that we don't like to align with, and already have bad relations with. Countries that have good relations with the US are going to stay onboard no matter what. The money lost can be made up eventually, and the US can afford to take out that trillion dollars. And lastly, casualties have been relatively few, and the soldiers themselves volunteer to go into war.
Values change overtime.
Of course the US entered only because it was attacked, it didn't have the political willpower or the dollars to enter without justification. Now, the US is significantly richer, has more political willpower, and loses significantly less lives. Not to mention the fact that they can police now with their advanced technology, and their nuclear weapons lol.