Today we often let surrogates fight our wars
For an interesting read find a volume on our involvement over the last century in Central and South America. Almost all of the wars and killing in those lands were spurred on by American corporate interests with heavy CIA involvement propping up dictators that would see to the crushing of socialist labor movements that threatened to hurt profits. Of course some of those movements had some despicable individuals within them and occasionally we ended up seeing to the demise of people that had it coming but in almost all situations the guy that replaced them was just as bad or worse.
You can thank them for the extremely low cost of bananas these days.
Art