As a hardcore leftist, even I have to admit there are benefits of neoliberal policy to a strong internationally present military that at least pretends to uphold human rights and has a bunch of other countries that also pretend the same. It’s better than the alternative.
I think the war in Yemen is a good case study of the downsides of the US as global police. It is a war that was only possible through the US and UK supplying arms, and was prosecuted by a nation that doesn't even pretend to uphold human rights.
This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc.
I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.
The human rights track record of the USA military should for sure include:
* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen
* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.
* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.
Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.
As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.
The alternative being... the same invasion of sovereign nations to keep the industry-military complex going, just without the pretense of caring for human rights?
