As Michael Phelps finishes his Olympic career in Rio, he will walk away from it all with 23 gold medals – more than twice as many gold medals as any other Olympian. This astounding feat, of course, deserves utmost respect and commendation. It is not every day you break a 2,000 year old record. But can we stop comparing one man’s accomplishments to the accomplishments “and lack thereof” of other entire countries?

Recently, "TIME Magazine" put Phelps’s victories into perspective by remarking that 62 countries have taken home fewer gold medals than the American swimmer. They reinforce this magnitude by further stating that their comparative metric does not even include an additional 44 countries that have not won any gold medals.

But if "Time Magazine" wanted to contextualize medal counts of individual athletes by using the medal counts of individual countries, their article was a halfhearted attempt with an unsatisfying result.

Simply giving aggregate medal counts of countries as a method of providing context to an individual’s accomplishments is insufficient if no context is provided to the chosen metric itself. Without such perspective, aggregate medal count is an arbitrary number, meaningless except to provide gluttonous pride to Americans who will now blindly claim, “We have an athlete better than your entire country.”

Ironically, though, the American swimmer’s success over 106 countries is due in part to American and Western political and corporate influences in these countries. "Time Magazine" failed to mention that these countries with few athletes and fewer, if any, medals are countries that the Western world has continuously exploited for profit.

It is no wonder that these countries struggle to produce athletes that win myriads of gold medals.

Vietnam, for example, was engaged in war brought about by American interests that, at a modest estimate, resulted in nearly 2 million deaths – about 5% of the total population. Meanwhile, “no bid” non-competitive contracts to private corporations earned U.S. business interests approximately $14 billion in today’s money. That’s a 7,000 dollar to death profit ratio.

Business was so strong corporations in the U.S. could hardly keep up with demand – Caterpillar Tractor Company’s annual report to shareholders proclaimed, “1965 was another record-breaking year and only the physical limitations of production capacity kept sales and profits from being higher.” Of 400 U.S. corporations doing business abroad in 1966, three of the top ten profit earners were profiting from the war in Vietnam, according to scholar James Carter.

Yet, while U.S. corporations were profiting from building military infrastructure, the U.S. military damaged 40 percent of Vietnamese forestlands and completely obliterated 1 percent of the land. Some argue this destroyed almost 50 percent of the forest’s wealth.

The U.S. made a profit and Vietnam paid the price. Vietnam was not focused on winning gold medals, they were focused on rebuilding a nation in turmoil.

Not far away, in Cambodia, a similar narrative of exploitation and oppression can be found.

In 1969, the U.S., led by President Nixon, began a four year long carpet bombing campaign without the knowledge or approval of the U.S. congress. As many as 500,000 people died as a direct result of the bombings, but it is difficult to estimate how many more hundreds of thousands of people subsequently died from the effects of displacement, disease, and starvation from the bombing.

The U.S. led devastation increased support for the notorious Khmer Rouge and eventually led to the installation of the Pol Pot regime, which killed almost 20 percent of the entire Cambodian population.

According to investigative journalist John Pilger, however, “The U.S. not only helped to create conditions that brought Camodia’s Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the U.S. was secretly funding Pol Pot’s exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support - $85 million from 1980-1986 – was revealed 6 years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Wine, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Pol Pot’s policies literally took Cambodia to “Year Zero.”

They had more important things to worry about than gold medals.

Elsewhere in Asia, particularly in the Middle East, the U.S. has played a role in destabilizing countries for profit.

Following years of Cold War turmoil in which chemical weapons were used indiscriminately against civilians, Afghanistan was again recently invaded, this time for its marketable drugs and natural resources.

As a facet of Western occupation of Afghanistan, the U.K. and the U.S. were entrusted to carry out a drug eradication program. Yet, under Western occupation and the U.S. sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai, opiate production increased from 185 tons in 2001 to 3400 tons in 2002. Western forces secured a monopoly on approximately 90 percent of the world’s opium supply.

Opium markets were restored, and prices and profits spiraled. These proceeds of the illegal drug trade were – and still are – a source of wealth formation largely reaped by powerful business interests within Western countries; and, American foreign policy sustains these interests.

Decision-making in the U.S. State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon instrumentally support this highly profitable multi-billion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade. Intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates ally with organized crime and compete for strategic control over heroin routes so that the multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics can be deposited in the Western banking system and laundered in offshore banking havens.

Moreover, the U.S. has strategically occupied areas in which multi-billion dollar gas pipeline projects have been contemplated. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s agenda has been to exert control over transport routes of natural gas, ignoring national sovereignty.

In the process of Western occupation, approximately 92,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001 with about 30 percent of these casualties being civilians. An additional 100,000 people have been injured since 2001.

Perhaps most tragic, however, is that 66 percent of Afghans, or 18.5 million people, suffer from mental health problems.

According to 2013 census data, 18.5 million people is approximately equivalent to the entire population of Florida, or the entire populations of Wyoming, Vermont, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska and New Mexico combined suffering from mental illness as a direct result from Western occupation.

But we are worried about how many gold medals they have won – really?

The same can be said of Iraq – the country invaded on knowingly false information of weapons of mass destruction. Under Western occupation, 4 million Iraqis have been displaced, about 100 people are killed daily, 33 percent of the population lives in poverty and unemployment levels have been as high as 60 percent.

Since the invasion, and in the face of widespread poverty and turmoil, the U.S. has engineered policies to open the country up to foreign investors for Western profit. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his company Halliburton “coincidentally” made close to $40 billion, and corporations in total earned nearly $140 billion in aggregate profits from the Iraq war.

The bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimate that the level of corruption of these defense contractors may be as high as an additional $60 billion.

Is it still difficult to understand why some countries do not have gold Olympic medals?

The previously mentioned countries are by no means a comprehensive list, either.

Palestinians literally had their land “legally” stolen from them, and are treated as second-class citizens under government occupation, if recognized at all.

Syrian civilians and hospitals are being bombed indiscriminately, while defense contractors continue to make profits.

Similarly, Yemeni citizens and hospitals are also being bombed extensively: the International Committee of the Red Cross has documented 100 attacks on Yemeni hospitals by Saudi Arabia, armed with American weapons. In the last 5 years, Washington has made $100 billion in arms selling to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the U.S. government recently blocked humanitarian relief for Yemeni civilians, despite the fact that 21 million people lack basic services.

In Libya, Western forces spent about $500 million to oust Gadhafi but expect to get a “return on investment” of $300 billion in business contracts.

These countries do not need gold medals. They need to stop being exploited by the West.

Michael Phelps is great. Honestly, maybe he is “better” or “more astonishing” than some smaller countries’ entire athletic lineup.

But that is not the point.

The point is that if we are going to make comparisons of individual accomplishments and cross-cultural, national accomplishments, we must understand the historical context of Olympic medaling rooted in oppression and profit before our evaluations can be considered complete.