[StockHuman]

> US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason

It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea.

Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.

[skjoldr]

Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?