None of the foreign interventions the US stepped into since the end of WWII have been worth the cost.
That cost cannot be fully evaluated without also answering what the cost of NOT intervening would have been. As it stands, your assertion is just that, an assertion, and a poorly founded one at that.
Communist governments are incompetent and self-destructive and would have failed whether we attacked them or not,
Oh, really? And exactly how many communist governments imploded prior to 1989?
In 1988, that assertion was only an unproved academic theory espoused only by foriegn policy think tanks, who argued over it like rabid, unchained economists.
The soviets played the game, and they played it hard, and they played it for keeps, right up until they ran out of gas and went teats up. Until that moment, any notion that they might just go poof and collapse in a relatively orderly fashion was waaaaay too hypothetical to bet a free planet on.
especially if the USSR hadn't been kept afloat with grain subsidies and other measures.
The easiest way to turn a fluid, potentially dangerous and manageable situation into a chaotic, actively dangerous and unmanageable situation is to toss hunger induced food riots into the mix.
As they say, that would "not be in our interest".
Furthermore, the strategic advantage of having your enemy's dinner table beholden to your trade should be obvious, but in case it isn't, the grain subsidies were one of several important levers we could reach into the soviet sphere with.
The only beneficiaries of the international adventures have been the corporations that pull the government's strings from behind the scenes.
Oh, please. Not the old corporate shadow government boogeyman. I'll let someone else take that one.
The US can't be seen as an untainted international "good guy" after funding Latin American death squads and supporting any brutal dictator willing to promise he wasn't a commie.
The cold war was long and dirty, and I don't think any reflective evaluation of it can realistically claim that we came out of it with lilly white hands.
The world is an inherently dirty place, and the best that can be done is to keep as clean as possible.
Becoming virtuously dead/defeated while ushering in a new dark age of global communism is an outcome that doesn't impress me.
The only way the country can be absolved is for it to wash its hands of imperialism once and for all.
Absolved by who?
What nation on this world is can realistically claim moral superiority to us that they could grant us absolution?
And at then end of the day, how _exactly_ is it that washing our hands of our alleged "imperialism" going to serve the interests of freedom in the world?
Global misery and darkness would have been the price of losing the cold war, and failing to fight that long, cold war wouldn't have changed that miserable outcome.
