The last article I was able to read on the Times before running out of articles from paywall:

[halialkers]

 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/obama-as-wartime-president-has-wrestled-with-protecting-nation-and-troops.html


^This kind of vapid fatuous headline is why I despise the media in my country and see it as little more than TASS/RT with better PR. 'Unexpected two full terms at war' from a candidate who from 2007 onward was running to expand a war that was clearly being lost, and proceeded to wage it with equal deft attention to reality and basic military logic as Shrub's war in Iraq. Complete with expanding humanitarian catastrophes and proceeding to swell the power of the enemy while officially pledging to stop them and slow them down.

Then there's the official protestation in the article that no President wants to be a war President which is a goddamned lie. The USA did not go from a coastal enclave of Atlantic British colonies to sea to shining sea or acquire Hawaii by peaceful means. The United States is an empire soaked in blood wielding weapons of iron, a beast with fangs of iron and claws akin that treads where it will, seeking those whom it will devour. It is what Genghis Khan sought to create, and Charles V, and Timur and the other would-be world conquerors. All empires are evil, and use evil means to attain evil ends. Empire itself is a quest for greed and slaughter for fun and profit. Anyone who seeks to run them by definition seeks to be a war President, as empires function from military power applying maximum slaughter preferably at minimum expense, as overly long overly expensive wars with mass armies are bad business for a would-be imperial hegemon.

In the last few decades, the US Empire overthrew the premises it proclaimed as its own goals in 1991. It overthrew the premise of international sovereignty, delegating in finest British tradition the right to end regimes at will and replace them with 'good government' in the image and the likeness (and the barbarous savage dysfunction of people who use technology reliant on the very evil physics and biology they decry even as they try to destroy what keeps their technology functional). It has refused to abide by treaties (so do other countries that are not considered pariahs when they officially sign and pledge their word and then renege on it, but expecting Justin Trudeau to change that or Canada to be remembered for existing when it's so overshadowed by the savage behemoth to the south is expecting a bit much). It produces an inferior mockery of fascism that lacks the discipline and careful attention to calculatedly overthrowing democracy and replacing it with an empty-headed cult of war for war's sake, to bring blood to the blood god and skulls to the skull throne for war is the purest and noblest of all things.

In all of this, that the USA is the greatest destabilizing force is a given. A global empire smeared in the blood of its victims and with the most powerful military machine in human history will by definition be the greatest single force of evil in human history, given that all empires are evil looting and killing machines. Until Syria, the USA was the only state wrecking things and bemoaning the blood and iron and fire of the wreckage it produced, kneeling in the bloodsoaked ashes holding the severed heads of the victims its bombs slay and crying in false sorrow to the heavens how this could be. That is unfortunately not the case anymore. 

Yet the United States lacks the wit, will, or honesty to admit that we like waging war because we're the biggest and most powerful empire in all of history. That we take relish in what our weapons do to our victims. And until we admit that the ashes that we produce are the result of that empire, we will flail and elect more buffoons until one of these jackasses finally busts open the nuclear taboo and ends the world. All empires are evil, but no empire is more dangerous than when it is at least partially aware of the reality of its own decline, and flailing doing foolish things thinking they somehow reverse it when they do nothing of the sort.