Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Criticism of American foreign policy


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus, with major and speedy clean-up highly encouraged. Regards,   A rbitrarily 0    ( talk ) 23:04, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Criticism of American foreign policy

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This article is a pile of original research produced by massive amounts of synthesis from sources that do not directly make the points in this article. Just to give an example: the UN budgets are cited as evidence the US foreign policy is "good". Obviously, those budgets don't draw such a conclusion. Another major issue is that it treats the foreign policies of various US administrations as a single immutable topic, so criticism (or praise) of the policies of Reagan, Clinton, or Bush administration is all jumbled into one article; surely there are many areas of continuity in the foreign policies of various US administrations, but there are also sharp differences. A more detailed discussion is at the NOR board. I don't think this article is salvageable. Pcap ping  15:27, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - WP:SYNT, coatracked facts, arguments and conclusions not actually supported by the cited sources. My initial response was that the "Topic is notable, but the execution is flawed", and recommend stubifying... however, the POV nature of the topic title does need to be considered. I doubt that this article could ever be anything but a POV magnet.  I strongly suspect that it was created as a POV fork, to allow mention of criticisms that were rejected from other articles.  Certainly there are lots of people who criticize US foreign policy, and much of that criticism deserves to be discussed in wikipedia... but it has to be discussed in context.  Criticism of US foreign policy needs to be disussed in articles about US foreign policy, (and criticism of specific polices should be discussed in the article about that policy). Blueboar (talk) 15:53, 20 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions.  -- Pcap  ping  15:28, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.  -- Pcap  ping  15:29, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. Simply too many problems to list - some good ideas in there, but too open to problems with original research, synthesis, and undue weight. Chase me ladies, I&#39;m the Cavalry (talk) 23:00, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete The scope of the article is too wide and the current content seems contrary to WP:SOAP, starting with a bizarre apologia. I recently learnt that the early USA spent much of its Federal budget paying tribute to the Barbary pirates.  This seems remarkably supine and so I suppose there's criticism of this to be found.  Balancing such material in a giant omnibus article is beyond us.  Colonel Warden (talk) 10:50, 21 February 2010 (UTC)


 * (Weak) Keep, clean up. At least three editors on No original research/Noticeboard seem to share the view that the article might be improved through regular editing. Foreign policy of the United States now only contains a brief summary of the subject and is already almost 80kb long. It used to be 140kb long before the split . According WP:SIZERULE and WP:CFORK, the existence of this sub-article is completely justified. I agree that the article has some major issues, but it covers a highly notable subject and it certainly doesn't look like a blatant POV fork that needs to be deleted right away. It's probably the first time I saw a "Criticism of ..." article that tries to maintain a neutral perspective. See: Talk:Criticism of American foreign policy, Talk:Foreign policy of the United States. — Rankiri (talk) 14:12, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Those are false analogies. I did not nominate it because it's a "Criticism of ..." article. Please read the nomination, and the article carefully. FWIW, I've worked on Criticism of Wikipedia myself in the past, so I know how a valid article of that kind looks like. Talk:Foreign_policy_of_the_United_States suggested splitting it by topic and/or history; it did not suggest creating this pro/con beast, which is just as entangled as the original. Pcap ping  14:28, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I didn't say you did. My point is that the subject is notable, the existence of the sub-article is justified, and at least some of the views expressed by the article are extremely widespread and supported by a number of WP:RS publications. Any individual problematic passages can be removed, and even the entire article can be stripped of any improper content and turned into a stub. Therefore, according to WP:ATD, if the page can be improved, this should be solved through regular editing, rather than deletion. — Rankiri (talk) 14:45, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear, the article does contain a number of synthesized views and conclusions. I won't argue with that.— Rankiri (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Since we're talking theory here, "Criticism of X" is generally justified if X is relatively well defined and rather immutable (over time). Under the title "Criticism of American foreign policy" one can discuss way too many topics; was the intervention in Vietnam subject to criticism, sure; was the withdrawal (change in policy) subject of criticism, sure, was the isolationism during the first part of WWI subject of criticism, sure, was the decision to go to war criticized, I'm sure it was by some, etc. Based on this, it should be clear that the division between "is good"/"is bad" is silly because the policy aspects discussed are hardly the same in the two sections. It's like having an article saying "Alice is a pretty girl, but Bob is an ugly boy" and title it Criticism of children. History of U.S. foreign policy can certainly contain (sourced, of course) critical material about the various aspects of US foreign policy in context. If you'd like to have this article userfied to you for such purposes, that's fine, but leaving this around as an encyclopedia article in the hope that someone will eventually fix the massive problems in it is not a reasonable proposition. Even History of U.S. exporting democracy militarily (another spin-off like this article) is problematic because it contains little history a lot of opinion, but at least there the topic is narrow enough. Pcap  ping  15:14, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I just want to point out that the article History of U.S. exporting democracy militarily was creating and crap-ified by the same author that crap-ified this article. History of U.S. exporting democracy militarily should absolutely be deleted. But I think that this article should be kept, completely wiped clean, and improved (see my comments below). Thanks for pointing out the other article. Putting it up for AfD now. Jrtayloriv (talk) 07:12, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, I completely agree that the article's format is absolutely horrendous. But, again, that is probably why it was tagged with and  in the first place. It seems unreasonable to require a two-month-old article to meet the expectations of WP:TPA, don't you think? — Rankiri (talk) 15:30, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree -- this article could easily be improved, but it's going to take some time. I don't think it should be deleted. Just blanked, and then stub-ified. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 07:19, 23 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Incubate and split/merge - The whole premise of having a neutral article with arguments in list form is flawed, especially if there are so many different arguments. Some of the more well-sourced parts of this page concern topics that already have articles where the text would be more appropriate. I don't see how an article that fits the title could be written that is not WP:SOAP. Besides, at 189 KB it's almost twice as long as the limit for almost certainly requiring a split according WP:SIZERULE. Smocking (talk) 16:53, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Incubation sounds like a good idea. As for the size, note that a good half of it comes from its needlessly detailed References section and another half needs some serious trimming. — Rankiri (talk) 17:05, 21 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. Yeah, it's bad, but the article will be ridiculously imbalanced without it. -Sensemaker
 * Sorry, could you clarify the above?


 * Keep BUT...
 * The article needs to be completely wiped out and we need to start over from scratch. It is currently a blatant violation of POV, WP:SYNTH and WP:OR
 * Instead of simplistic and subjective categories like "good vs. bad" or "effective vs. ineffective", we need to start with categories either like (1) "criticism of military activities", "criticism of human rights abuses", "criticism of foreign aid", etc. or (2) geographical categories: "Latin America", "Asia", etc
 * I do think that the article has potential, if we start over and do it totally differently.
 * The scope of the topic is not at all "too large" as some have stated above. If it gets "too large", then we can spinoff more sub-articles from it.
 * As far as being a "POV magnet" -- this is not a justification for deletion of this article, any more than it would be for Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no reason that this article couldn't be prevented from being POV if enough people took it seriously and worked to improve it, just like any other highly contentious political topic.
 * --Jrtayloriv (talk) 07:08, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "The article needs to be completely wiped out and we need to start over from scratch". That's an argument to delete it, and start over from scratch. Or at least move it out of the mainspace to the incubator or someone's user space. Pcap  ping  08:45, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that criticism cannot just be good/bad omnibus, it needs to address various aspects separately (like those you enumerated), and in their historical context because policy is not immutable. I don't see how this can be done in a single giant article. Pcap ping  08:48, 23 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep AFD is not cleanup, but is suppose to be used as a last resort. Use the talk page to discuss changes.  Tag anything you believe needs a reference, and remove things as necessary after giving people time to find a reference confirming anything that you sincerely doubt is accurate.   D r e a m Focus  13:16, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete I think that when you're at the point of saying "everything in the article is worthless, but it's possible we might be able to write something on this topic," you might as well delete and start over. Furthermore, it's not clear to me that it *is* possible to write a neutral article with this title. It gets perilously close to "Why American foreign policy is evil or misguided" in practice as a title - "criticism of" articles have this problem most strongly. So, definitely delete for this article, and reserve judgment for any future articles on this theme. Ray  Talk 04:04, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
 * My view is that only some parts of the article are worthless, not all of it. — Rankiri (talk) 15:14, 27 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Strong keep There is always been criticism of US foreign policy for centuries. This is valid concerns and discussion. Because of its superpower nature, the criticism is important. Almost every country in the world has some negative view of US foreign policy. Deleting this is pretty much ignorance and POV. 174.16.243.59 (talk) 04:46, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not an appropriate article topic.  A little of this could go in Foreign policy of the United States but most should be covered in regards to the specific policy area or concern (e.g. Vietnam War).  99% of this is SYNTH since the vast majority of critics (and boosters) are criticizing a specific U.S. policy rather than U.S. foreign policy in the abstract.  Eluchil404 (talk) 08:58, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete - In short Bolshevik propaganda. To elaborate, the article is a POV propaganda article with irrepairable SYNTH issue. Wikipedia is not soapbox. Defender of torch (talk) 11:25, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep The article is pretty terrible, just some guy's essay, and especially poor at linking to other relevant political articles. But the subject is undeniably hugely notable and encyclopedic, & it's surprising we didn't have an umbrella article on the subject already. If deleted there should be no prejudice to a better recreation, but brutal revision & improvemt of this one, and adding loads of the right links, is the best option. Generally, claims of SYNTHESIS are unimpressive in this context. Johnbod (talk) 16:52, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.