Talk:Criticism of United States foreign policy

Own article

I am about to create this page as its own stand-alone, unless someone presents a compelling reason not to. DaltonCastle (talk) 21:28, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

U.S. foreign policy, while under the scope of the government, has enough to be its own page. Also, more importantly, the Criticisms of the U.S. government page currently has a number of issues that I would like to address. DaltonCastle (talk) 21:31, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Article POV

As the creator of this article, I completely understand the POV that is currently in place. I can explain: the bulk of this page is coming from a previous version of the Criticism of the United States government article, which had previously been a hyper-POV COATRACK. So, I pulled the content off that page. Now I am re-posting much of it here just so that its somewhere. Then I will trim it down and removed much of the bias. DaltonCastle (talk) 17:49, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I would ask that anyone stopping by and finding issue with this article not remove any sections while I have the construction tags up. However, feel free to edit the sections to remove any POV. I will be aiding in this hopefully within a few days. DaltonCastle (talk) 17:50, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

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Support for authoritarian regimes

TheTimesAreAChanging I saw you nominate the (currently named) Alleged western support of dictators for deletion. I also see that there is a section about it the section called "Support of dictatorships and state terrorism" at this article. Normally what happens on wikipedia is when a section starts to get too big in an article, it is usually spun off into an article. Do you think that should be the case here too? VR _talk 02:57, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Given that the section in question is quite small, no. While this entire article (Criticism of United States foreign policy) is already non-neutral, essay-like, WP:SYNTH, and a dumping ground for such content by User:Ghazaalch and like-minded editors, that is hardly a basis to encourage Ghazaalch to create yet another non-neutral, essay-like, and WP:SYNTH article, especially on such a flimsy pretext. At least the content here is in a summary style, although the "examples" paragraph at the beginning is unsourced or poorly-sourced WP:SYNTH and hence should probably be removed.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:58, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

@TheTimesAreAChanging: can you explain what you mean that this article is WP:SYNTH? Do you mean that while there are sources that criticize certain aspects of US policy, there aren't any sources (or many sources) that tie all these criticisms together into a unified topic? If so, that's pretty much an issue with any "Criticism of X", where X is a really broad topic. For example, I doubt there are many sources that cover every aspect of Criticism of BBC or Criticism of Islam. But I do think there are sources that establish "Criticism of US foreign policy" as a broad topic, like The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era etc. These sources cut across different facets of US policy.

Likewise, what do you mean when you say this article is not neutral? Is it that it only covers negative viewpoints of US policy, while WP:NPOV requires us to cover all viewpoints published in RS (and positive appraisals of US policy have indeed been made)? Again, that seems to be generic to "Criticism of X" articles which only consider negative aspects.VR _talk 10:54, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

And on the specific topic of "US support of authoritarian regimes" we have sources like this article in Foreign Policy (magazine) and this one by Steven A. Cook. Both of these sources criticize US policy of supporting authoritarian regimes. But we have more generic sources too like When does America drop dictators?, Authoritarianism as a driver of U.S. foreign policy: the cases of Myanmar, Vietnam, and North Korea and U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN INTERNATIONAL CLIENTELISM, all of which give some coverage to the fact that the US has also opposed plenty of authoritarian regimes.VR _talk 11:40, 22 October 2022 (UTC)