While I get the gist of what your attempting to communicate, I'm a little more hesitant to go as far as to say your statement above with a completely straight face
I'd probably reword it to:
As I said, I get what it is your attempting to communicate, I just can't paint it in as black and white a color pallet as you are. The world, including our country, is a very very grey and fuzzy place.
Likewise, I understand your point that things can be gray at times, but I'm talking in terms of the United States' major strategic goals. First and foremost aong those is fostering strong democracies. I'm talking about this mainly in the context of democratic peace theory, which almost every president has espoused, particularly since the end of the Cold War:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
We're always going to have bumpy relationships and arguments with countries, and every country is going to have its financial and security interests that conflict at times. But if you look at a map, our closest allies, and the countries that are doing best, are democracies. The UK, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Italy, Spain, etc. Likewise, the countries we're closest to in Latin America are strong democracies: Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, Brazil. Follow this around the world and you'll see South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey (although notsomuch recently), South Africa, etc.
Aside from our relationships with some incredibly messed up but strategically critical countries that we have to work with (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan come to mind, although Pakistan is technically a democracy), that's how we make our foreign policy. We may sometimes criticize those who challenge U.S. economic and/or political interests, but in almost every case it's because they're also violating democratic principles. The Chávez government is a perfect example. There's an incredibly strong correlation between acting in an authoritarian manner and not supporting the types of values the United States supports internationally. Chávez, Khamenei, Mursi, Gaddafi, Putin, Ortega, the former Burmese junta, etc. Take your pick.
And re: spying on them, literally every country does that. I hate to sound so callous, but that's how it is. France has been stealing industrial secrets from G8 countries for decades. India spies on everybody. We share intelligence among the Five Eyes (New Zealand, UK, Canada, Australia, and the U.S.) and there's a mutual pact in which we've agreed not to spy on one another, but I don't think we should punish U.S. intelligence for doing their job, which is to read other peoples' mail. The scope of it probably needs to be reduced, but the collection is part of their mission. The Brits tapped the undersea correspondence cables in the 1920s, but nobody cares about that now
Sorry about all these walls of text haha. tl;dr democracies are great, we like them, and everybody spies on everybody.
