A friend of mine stated that the only wars America should fight are those on our own soil (we are attacked) and "wars with humanitarian reasons at heart."
This brings up the interesting question of the Korean War. Because even using the criteria above (which is the ultra-liberal/libertarian position), it's still not that clear-cut.
We occupied the South and supported a dictatorship. Russia did the same in the North. However, we did have to occupy Korea at the end of WWII because it had been a Japanese colony for 100 years so there was no native bureaucracy to turn things over to. It was either us or the existing Japanese colonial administration.
And yes it was a dictatorship in the South, but that was more from neglect than any purposeful action on our part. American knew nothing of Korea and Rhee knew how to say what Washington wanted to hear so he was installed as the initial head of government. And America then basically ignored Korea to concentrate on other problems.
North Korea (without getting permission from the Russians) then attacked South Korea. We defended against that attack. So the war was fought to defend a country we were occupying against an outside invader. Unlike Vietnam is was not us fighting an insurgency of the people we were occupying.
But in so doing, we defended a dictatorship. But the dictatorship we defended was better than the dictatorship attacking. But this turned the cold war into a warm war. But if we hadn't defended here, Russia might have believed they could take over Finland, Austria, Greece, and/or Turkey. But Russia did not instigate the North Koreans and maybe they would not have invaded elsewhere. But...
In hindsight many decades later the end result is we did a very good thing. South Korea is now a productive 1st world democracy while North Korea is one of the worst governments on the planet to live under.
So does it meet the criteria in the first paragraph? Hard to say. What this does mean is even "simple" philosophies like the one above are still open to interpretation in the real world.
