Your definition relies on the existence of a concept that’s not universal and is roughly 200 years old. National Sovereignty is a liberal spook.
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Countries, and States, existed for many years before nationalism, and so did the concept of peace between those sovereign entities.
Offer an alternative.
No, I implied you're one of the people who kisses up to bullies. That's much more specific and based on a very real irreconcilable difference we have.
Feudal entities weren’t “sovereign” by any modern definition. Hunter Gatherers did not care about sovereignty. Your definition only applies to modern nation states and sucks ass. If your definition of peace includes no mention of stopping violence I must presume you’re fine with violence and do not want peace.
Stopping violence, ok. A country in which there is violence between people is not at peace?
I get nothing out of opposing your views, absolutely nothing. How would this seem like kissing up to someone.
Yeah. Peace is a scale/goal, not a binary state between nations.
Eh, what. Is this the progressive mindset.
Show me some other like-minded individuals, friend. I guarantee you that more people share my definition in their minds.
People that aren't a part of fringe groups and thinking. i.e. the majority of people.
Well, if you want to say it was a "great" move, you'd need to set some appropriate criteria to judge it against. I don't doubt that you could select some criteria to make the point, but it opens up the obvious criticism about whether they are reasonable criteria.
The most important criterion I would judge it against is the long-term stability of the middle east. I am extremely confident that "it's too soon to tell" is the correct answer in that regard. Secondly, it being US policy, I would judge it in terms of benefit to the USA. Here I think it was an incredibly ill-considered move for the USA, as it has damaged the USA's international reputation for extremely unclear benefit to the USA.
The google dictionary definition mentions states and war, not sovereignty, as well as tranquility, not that I’ve much respect for dictionaries.
This move damaged US interests of the previous administration - Obama was swapping from the US traditional allies in the ME to Iran and the MB during his presidency.
If you look at it from this perspective you may understand my point much better
so why care about dictionary if you have no respect for it, why even mention it
I presumed you would adore appeals to authority for unknown, completely unjustified reasons.
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LOL, I like how your response to that wouldn't be to find a compilation of the best jokes to show them, but to demand they watch the full show and then tell you about it.
Of course Obama wasn't swapping support to Iran.
The notion is truly absurd. US - Iranian relations were very poor even under Obama, there are generations of loathing to overcome: it would take decades to get to trust and neutrality, never mind any kind of mutual support. Secondly, there is absolutely no geopolitical advantage to doing so: how on earth is Iran an improvement over basically the entire Sunni Muslim world west of it and Israel? Moving support to Iran would alienate all the USA's allies in the process and leave it completely without influence. And if Obama was pro-Iran, why support the Syrian rebels against Iran's ally, Assad?
The aim of Obama's Iran policy was nuclear anti-proliferation and reduced tensions, with (I suspect) the aim of reducing a threat of disruption to oil supplies and thus the burden on the USA of playing peacekeeper and having to deploy troops. The logic goes that Iran wants nukes and disrupts other countries because it is threatened: it was already invaded by a Western-backed Sunni alliance in the 1980s. If it feels less threatened, it will be less inclined to be disruptive. The Trump policy, as far as I can see, is the opposite: to threaten Iran into submission. But a brief look through history will tell us that's extremely unlikely to work.
You may have missed something in my reply. I mentioned Iran and the MB - Muslim Brotherhood. I can back that claim by showing Obama's support during Egypt's overthrow of Mubarak and the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood there. Closer ties with Iran would have allowed the US to outsource the containment of ISIS to Iran, which is what was done during Obama's presidency.
Outright support for Iran is not possible. Appeasement was the policy at the time, along with supporting political Islam (MB) in the middle east and moving away from US traditional allies (Saudi). Appeasement towards Iran meant rebuffing the US's traditional allies in the region who were opposed to it. You may view this as an attempt at stopping proliferation of nuclear weapons, but I understand that Iran would never even want nukes if it had guarantees from world powers for its safety. I personally think it's rubbish, but Iran had opportunities to flaunt their program like Libya did - they knew that the sweet spot is working towards a program but never reaching it, both for their own revolution (internal support) and for foreign powers.
We can continue this conversation elsewhere but I guarantee you that I could illuminate you on this.
This is completely implausible, Iran could not contain ISIS. ISIS needed to be contained by Sunni Iraqi tribes, the Iraqi armed forces, the Kurds, and various other non-Shia Syrian rebels - all of which the USA very conspicuously backed under Obama. Iran's only contribution was helping prop up Assad's government, which also fought ISIS.
The USA does not really "support" the Muslim Brotherhood, and never has. Chiefly they are relevant to Egypt, being pretty marginal elsewhere. The USA works with various groups as circumstances dictate, and so the Muslim Brotherhood has, at times, been a group where the US has had mutual interests, or gained a position of power that makes it pragmatic to deal with. Thus US engagement with it has fluctuated as its power and influence have fluctuated. After Mubarak fell, the Muslim Brotherhood assured the USA moderate policy - that was good enough, as the USA wanted stability, and it wasn't worth screwing with. Then Morsi fell and the Brotherhood were suppressed again, and so pragmatism meant the USA just moved on and dealt with the new regime - albeit keeping links open with the Brotherhood, because chances are they'll be back one day.
One could see this as "moving away" from traditional allies, but Saudi Arabia and the USA have certain mutual interests, they are not joined at the hip. When we want to talk about "political Islam", let's not forget SA happily exported Wahhabiism/Salafism for decades, and the USA didn't bat an eyelid until it bred Al-Qaida. Saudi Arabia's ambitions for the ME are to be a, if not the, dominant regional power. The USA is not there to act as Saudi Arabia's muscle and ensure Egypt and other neighbouring states are run by whomever Saudi Arabia wants them run by. Or at least, it wasn't until Trump. As far as I can tell, Trump has outsourced his entire ME foreign policy to his best buddies Netanyahu and bin Salman, because that's the kind of person he is: it's about who he knows, who he admires, who he thinks he has a personal relationship with, and he clearly doesn't trust his own government. Thus I think the USA is currently conducting foreign policy in the ME for those countries, not itself. That's great for Israelis and Saudi Arabians, but not necessarily anyone else, including the USA itself.
I think you have a narrow view of this. Political Islam and the MB includes as well the regime of Erdogan in Turkey and Qatar. Pakistan is also distinctly a part of this political coalition. Pakistan had, following a coup of its secular government in the 70s, pursued an aggression policy of Islamization. It had, in fact, imported "Wahhabism" into Pakistan. This is merely a sect in Islam, which is very literal in its interpretation of Islam and very fundamentalist. Civil rights, chiefly among them religious rights, had been curtailed and stripped of minorities in Pakistan. A good anecdote is that the Pakistani passport has a line at the first page of it, right at the top, which translates to "This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel". Google it, it's the funniest shit ever.
I really think you follow a certain narrative which omitted a lot of things in the process. Egypt had been the leading power in the (Independent) Arab world from its independence up to the Arab Spring, not the Saudis. The unrest moved the focal point to the Saudis because they were the second most important player. The support of the Obama regime to the Arab Spring is also a clear indicator of how it wanted to re-shape the region and move its support away from its traditional allies. If you think that they supported the wave of civil unrest because of democracy then you ought to concede the US invaded Iraq because of democracy as well.