Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
The crucial thing that is happening here is that everyone seems to be concentrating on the reality of Fuch's laundry list, rather than on its rhetorical status. At the level of rhetoric, and that is where a lot of "reputation" lies, it doesn't matter if the list is "true" or if other nations do/did it either; all that matters is that the US is perceived as doing it.

If you boil all of the points down, one main pattern comes out: a dissonance between rhetoric and action - basically, the "talk" and the "walk" don't jibe for the international audience. International politics, at the level of influencing the general populace of other nations (Strategic Communications as Mountainrunner like to call it), requires a constancy between rhetoric and action that is quite different from the realpolitik behind closed doors.

On the tu quoque defence, specifically dealing with the old Soviet Empire, it doesn't work because almost everybody expected them to be lying bastids. No one with two neurons to rub together thought that their system could or would produce a better life for the people under their control or in their sphere of influence (aka imperium). But most people do expect the US to be better, and feel betrayed in that expectation when something happens that disabuses them of that expectation.
And, sadly, given the nature of the US system I don't think you're going to see many of those perceptions engaged or actually changed. Our political system focuses almost exclusively on internal perception (as in the voting public...no matter what campaign lip service might want outsiders to believe), and lacks the policy continuity to focus on anything other than getting back in office. It is what it is, and I suspect many just don't understand how dangerous that process is to focused policy. And major perception changes require focused policy.

There are times when I think the US would be better off disengaging from much international activity....