As far as Libya goes there are UK and former Libyan officials who say he was involved and a Libyan intelligence officer was the only person ever jailed for the attack. Even if he wasn't involved and new nothing about it, his regime was involved in a number of other terrorist attacks. He was no innocent in that regard.

You can point at the Patriot Act and say what an awful law it is and I would agree with you 100%. The fact remains though that this is a far, far more open society than that of North Korea and the North Korean leadership can and does get away with far, far more awful things against its own people. There is no comparison here...at all. I can freely criticize my government without fear of imprisonment or execution. And I don't know where you are living but I don't know very many (or any really) people that believe our government officials whole heartedly. But despite the flaws of this country, I strongly disagree that we are worse than North Korea or Libya. It just isn't so.

And full blown wargames ARE a norm. There are various very large exercises performed by many countries and a number of them are performed annually. There are certainly some that are scheduled to make a point (legitimate or not) but those are usually small by comparison (e.g. recent bombers flying over the Korean peninsula). The larger events take a long time to schedule and are usually done on an annual or longer schedule.

I agree that our posture is sometimes over aggressive but I also see extreme risks in countries like North Korea or Iran getting nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the only potential existential threat to the U.S. I consider it extremely unlikely that the U.S. would ever launch a nuclear first strike on anybody. There's just too much to lose. And even given Trumps habit of aggressive speaking, he hasn't threatened anything other than retaliation if attacked first. This is not how the leaders of Iran and Korea speak. They threaten destruction so often then we tend to ignore it. But that may not always be wise. What should Japan's response be if one of those missiles that NK keeps launching overhead lands on them, even if by accident? How about the U.S. as their ally? The U.S. may be holding military exercises but they aren't launching ballistic missiles over north korea.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that the yuan is backed by gold. It isn't. In fact they peg it to the U.S. dollar (or some percent thereof) by fiat. China has been buying a lot of gold in recent years but despite this it currently holds less than half of what the U.S. holds (and the dollar certainly isn't backed by gold) even by the highest estimates. I think the petro dollar concept is a bit overrated. With the supposed emphasis on green energy, this is going to become less of an issue over time anyway. Even if it didn't, the U.S. has vast untapped reserves of oil, coal and natural gas of its own. I wonder what it will be priced in?

I think the issue with North Korea could be solved diplomatically if NK would agree to give up nuclear weapons. I don't think that will happen though.

Yes, Saudi involvement in 9/11 is not a conspiracy theory or even something that is not well known. It has repeatedly been reported by even mainstream media often and early. That doesn't mean that the Taliban had nothing to do with it. Just because many of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and derived funding from their doesn't make them not Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden not the mastermind or the Taliban not the protector of Bin Laden. Personally, I think the whole "nation building" (or whatever you want to call it) that has gone on in Afghanistan is stupid and counterproductive as was the invasion of Iraq. They should have stopped after capturing or killing Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership. That should have been "mission accomplished". Iraq certainly did have WMDs but they were just old and no longer effective. The U.S. knew he had them because we gave them to him years previous. Regardless, it certainly wasn't enough to invade over and has obviously been counterproductive as has every other nation building exercise.

Don't get me wrong. I do think U.S. foreign policy is pretty horrible in many cases. I just don't think the U.S. or its leadership is as bad as that of North Korea or Iran. Or even close.

As far as Syria, I think the U.S. should just get out. I think we would agree on that. As far as who gassed who, as of a year ago the U.N. did in fact conclude that it was Assad who gassed his own people, on at least two occasions in 2014 and 2015. He is accused of doing it many more times but that has not been proven conclusively.