The United States boasts the largest, widest spread, and most powerful military ever to exist on the face of the planet, and as such, often receives criticism on both domestic and international stages.  Some accuse the United States of being war hungry, as demonstrated by its huge defense budget and involvement in armed conflicts the world over.

Of course, as the big kid on the block, the U.S. serves as an easy target when trying to simplify the woes of the world.  It’s far easier to accuse the United States of destabilizing the Middle East than it is to take accountability for your nation’s own foreign policy and support of terrorism, for instance.  Of course, that isn’t a statement intended to discard the fair level of responsibility the U.S. deserves to have laid at its feet: our hasty and poorly planned withdrawal from Iraq, for instance, could certainly be credited with creating a vacuum fit for filling by the likes of ISIS.

That instance isn’t the exception to the American foreign policy rule, but rather a continuation of failures some would argue we have yet to learn from – but as with all things, the reality of the situation in the Middle East and Asia are far more complex than witty memes and social media statuses will allow for; especially when making America the boogeyman is so much more marketable.

North Korea, China, and Russia recently began working in concert to shift perception of developing tensions around the Korean peninsula by taking advantage of this simplistic view of the world.  The U.S. has the biggest guns, per say, so it stands to reason that they’re the ones causing all this trouble.  After all, as far as China is concerned, it has been American aggression that has heightened the stakes with Kim’s regime, not their illegal pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their repeated threats of using those weapons against the U.S. and its allies.