Like it or not, the elected President does lead on defending American interests, including which ones to prioritize, and they get to do that because they won the election.
I callout the naivety of believing the the U.S. President personally decides the "American interest" of every action taken. It is a reality today that a nameless, faceless, unelected somebody on the third floor of a building in Arkansas or Arizona can decide on the spur of the moment whether a person in Yemen or Canada should die and press the button to make it happen at the hands of the U.S. government. No elected official needs to be consulted.
Anything that violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice can land a soldier in the Army on that list up to and including killing random civilians abroad with military equipment outside the scope of an operation. You can look up the dockets for the other service branches yourself, but you don’t get impunity for all of your actions just for being part of the military.
Only through circular logic. If Trump dropped a nuclear bomb on Ohio tomorrow, he'd say it were in America's interests to do so, and six supreme court justices and most of congress would shrug their shoulders and say it's not their place to second-guess him, he has an electoral mandate of an entire 48%.
You are the one who said we defend American interests. If you can't defend that statement, then just retract it.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that I am talking about your Orange Guy. I am not. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden all murdered people and should be held accountable.
> You seem to be under the misapprehension that I am talking about your Orange Guy.
I’m not. (EDIT: just edited this in, though I thought I’d already written this part earlier when I quoted you. My bad.)
> You are the one who said we defend American interests. If you can't defend that statement, then just retract it.
We do defend America’s interests, but the President—any sitting President—sets the agenda for how the American State and Military goes about it. Resource allocation is a part of leading. What part of that is difficult to understand?
