Even if you leave out actual shooting and bombing people, the US Empire is one of the greatest mass-death regimes in history. The political-economic kleptocracy uses its hegemonic power and military threats to alter the legal and economic environments of foreign nations from Panama to Formosa. It regularly uses both its own military and its puppet agencies such as the United Nations to blockade and sanction foreign countries, and to prop-up thuggish regimes who are compliant with the needs of the Corporate Super-Class. The indirect effect this has on domestic regimes’ political and economic environment has resulted in the deaths of literally tens of millions of people who are being deprived of access to medical, food and other resources that would otherwise have been available to them. Even if you think some ‘alternative’ source of starvation and tyranny would have filled the vacuum had the USA not been the one doing it, they are still responsible for what they actually are doing.

If one counts the Ukraine famine and the actions of the Kyrgiz Socialist Republic in the death total of Stalin, I don’t see why we shouldn’t count these murder-by-sanction and murder-by-proxy against the US Empire. Which would make the USA right up there with Chairman Mao for total body count – if not higher. The difference is that the USSR and Chinese Communist death totals were largely confined to the domestic spheres of the old Russian and Chinese empires, whereas the USA is murdering and starving people on a global scale.