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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

United States used to at least credibly pretend that it cared about human rights. It is squandering its superpower soft power that it used to use to influence the world towards democratic ideals. I blame the Democratic party neoliberals for buying into the free market religious myth that capitalism will magically fix dictatorships.

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The United States foreign policy has never been about human rights, it's always been realpolitik, we give it lip service when it suits the end result (which is not credible except to credulous Americans.)

The main exception was Jimmy Carter - https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/ca...

The international good guy theory of the United States foreign policy is a fiction fostered by history books in American K-12 public education - it's not supported by the evidence of a century of interventions in foreign countries for monied interests.

Which is why they said "credibly pretend that it cared about human rights" instead of "cared about human rights".

What time are you talking about? In the 40s they had concentration camps inside the US for japanese people. In the 50s they experimented on some towns/US citizens with different diseases, and in the 70s and 80s they created coups all over South and Central America against democratic governments.

Yes, and in all those time periods they had a far better record than their main adversaries.

C'mon people, is it really that hard to get that the West (1) has a flawed human rights record, and at the same time (2) has a better record than the main other countries?

The main other countries being? Even USSR didn't have 2/3rds of the world's population enslaved and their countries occupied. Western colonial powers did. This is just Africa for example [1], add Asia (including at times China and Japan, and Latin America, plus parts of Europe (e.g. Cyprus, a British colony).

Heck, the 2 world wars weren't started by those "other countries" either. European countries started it too.

[1] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--SDNKBhk...

That is more a matter of competence than morals. Asia and Africa had no better moral instincts, any look at what they did within shows that, they just lacked the competence to conquer beyond their geography.

This idea is the most disgusting part of western morals...

The inability to understand that, with their faults and all, not all cultures are equally power-grubbing like theirs. And that who did what to whom matters...

At least they could say they're sorry, instead of "I only fucked you over because you didn't have the power to fuck me".

Sorry, but how are Western and non-Western morality systems different when it comes to justifying power-grubbing or hostile action?

I don't see how that is a Western moral, in fact modern Western mores are incredibly self-loathing about imperialism, in sharp contrast with say Japanese attitudes, just as a recent example. You suggest that non-Western cultures are less power grubbing. Which ones exactly? The Aztecs? The Mongols? The Japanese? The Zulu? The Arabs? The Persians? The Chinese? Power grubing is as universally human as speech.

“2/3rds of the world's population enslaved and their countries occupied”

At this point, even Howard Zinn would be placing a hand on your shoulder and warning, “Bring it down a notch, kid.”

I agree with you. But that is not what the parent stated, he said that "United States used to at least credibly pretend that it cared about human rights". I don't think the US ever credibly pretended it cared.

Yes, as far as empires go, the US is not that bad. I actually wonder what's going to happen if China becomes the next superpower/empire, given that they are a dictatorship. And they may even use that fact to say they are more efficient, because a dictator can swiftly take decisions while parliaments are quite messy.

Will China achieve 100% renewable energy before Europe/US? It definitely can, and they'd sell their dictatorship pretty easily on that achievement.

They also supported and funded Pinochet, Suharto, Saddam, overthrown the democratically elected president of Iran (Mossadeq), meddled in sovereign countries like Korea and Vietnam, and so on. Heck, they divided Europe into zones of influence between themselves and USSR too.

Democratic party neoliberals are to blame that the republican house, republican senate, and republican president are squandering the US' superpowers?

Before Reagan and Bill Clinton the Democrats used to be in opposition to some of the free trade extremism. Once they capitulated it developed into a Washington bipartisan consensus no matter who is in power.

The current POTUS is anything but a "free trade extremist"

Yes, for better or worse Trump is breaking the Washington concensus on trade and you get a lot of opposition from the establishment both left and right.

Well...all that Saudi oil money has to go somewhere and isn't it just better most of it flows into the US instead of China or Russia or wherever?

Wielding soft power doesn't have to be tightly coupled to it.

In my ideal world we would be isolating Saudi Arabia and treating it as the drug dealer feeding the world's addiction to oil that we need to kick.

Yeah...but maybe in the ideal world the addiction gets kicked and the drug dealer get rehabilitated. Isolation will probably create its own consequences.

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