I think that is a blanket assumption that is, as often the case, a wide and extremely hard to defend one.
After all, some of the most successful contenders in this context were at their time considered the peak of civilized and fair governance, starting with Rome. Sure, lots of questionable things by modern standards, but are you going to go as far as say that the extremely warlike German tribes of the time and the cannibal tribes isolated in various corners of the world were clearly more ethical than them?
Similar context applies to some others, like the British Empire, or current US weird not-empire that's certainly not more ruthless than Russia or Iran.
Sure, pursuing global power is incompatible with claiming total peacefulness, innocence, non violence, general harmlessness and equal consideration for everyone, but it's a far cry for being necessarily the most ruthless too.
The German tribes and some isolated primitives weren't
capable of contending. It wasn't a choice. Still, though, I'd call the Germanic peoples more ethical than Rome, to be sure (on average). In Germania, membership of tribes was typically voluntary, and whole families could and did 'secede' from one tribe and join another. It was disorganised and sometimes messy, but I'd argue that their premises about existence were more ethical than those of Rome.
For now we look at Rome, and Rome was ruthless. Rome exterminated whole tribes, enslaved people by the tens of thousands. Not even out of any malice, but out of simple cold practicality. Rome wiped Carthage from the map, and then (again out of practicality) rebuilt it in its own image.
That's Empire. That's what it takes.
America is the same. Utterly ruthless when it needs to be. You dispute it, but I see the only world power that has actually
used atomic weapons. And I can respect that. But I don't pretend that a power operating in that arena is moral... or that it has space to be.
Yes, i have altered it from your obviously bad reading in which "no more than" is an equation.
"No more than" means, by definition "equal to or less than". Since you said "is no more moral than", your sentence means the same as "non-interventionism is equally moral to, or less moral than, pacifism". Your sentence excludes all other interpretation.
Therefore, I'm being
generous by saying you equated them. The only alternative is that you intended to outright compare non-intervention
negatively to pacifism.
The fact that you're now trying to weasel your way out of this illustrates how dishonmest you are. You could also just admit "oh, all right, I phrased that carelessly and what I wrote was wrong, but I actually ment something else".
But you never admit that, you just try to twist it so you don't have to admit fault.
