even if though the foreign state has never contemplated this potential advantage

So any time your imagination runs away with you, you need to treat others as your enemies?

I get you’re being sarcastic but the reality is that people also benefited from being reactionary and so were incentivized to play dumb about what the government does; French people who hate Traore for example don’t hate him because he’s a dictator, they hate him because his success (and consequently the success of the Sahel states) will impact them economically but because they don’t want to reveal their orcish nature, they pretend they hate him because they hate dictatorships

I wish, instead the take away has been that America is turning into China

And today, “the Nazis were just defending against Soviet aggression!”