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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who very often criticize US's international decisions, I tend to disagree.

I think that the US-USSR opposition radicalized USA, fed its nationalism and its paranoia and led it to develop an empire, something that is simply not in its culture (when you compare to typical colonial empires)

Wasn't the united states already developing an empire long before the cold war? things like the philippines and hawaii come to mind

It was a short period and basically stopped after WWII. They could have occupied Japan and a thousand island if they wanted to and did not (now please just give state status to Puerto Rico)

USA is more interested in free trade than in military conquest. Something I dare say, that is totally unlike USSR. Being an "ally" of USSR meant something totally different than being an ally of USA.

i’m strongly convinced, but would genuinely love a strong counterargument, that the single clearest US foreign policy priority since WW2 has been the establishment of free markets. My perception is that we are supremely confident that we can outcompete anyone, anywhere. We just want a market where we’re free to go head-to-head

Don't forget the dollar and the fact any transaction made with this currency falls under American law. This is imperialism imposed by rule of law rather than by force, but still imperialism in the end.

Example:

https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3012497/heres-why-h...

Excerpt:

When photos of Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei showing journalists around his office began to circulate this week, there was a book on his desk that caught the eye of the Chinese internet community. The tome, a Chinese translation of Le Piège Américain, or The American Trap, was written by Frenchman Frederic Pierucci, a former executive with French rail transport company Alstom, about his five-year-long tussle with the US Department of Justice.

The book has captured the imagination of Chinese readers because it mirrors in some ways what happened to Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was detained in Vancouver on December 1 and is out on bail and facing extradition to the US on allegations of helping defraud banks to circumvent US sanctions on Iran.

Pierucci was arrested as he disembarked from a Cathay Pacific flight in New York in 2013. He pleaded guilty to charges of authorising bribes to Indonesian officials to win a boiler plant order, under an anti-corruption law that allowed the US to pursue cases overseas if the transaction was made in US dollars or email had passed through US servers.

Pierucci ended up serving two years in prison in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and was also put on parole for three years. He claims that the anti-corruption investigation was motivated by the US helping General Electric in its acquisition of Alstom’s energy business.

Last year, ZTE was brought close to ruin after the US initiated an export ban on the company for breaching the terms of a settlement. On the detention of Meng, Pierucci said the US was using “exactly the same tactic” by getting someone close to the company’s leadership, putting pressure on them to cooperate with the Department of Justice. He also accused the US of using its judicial system to weaken its competitors and gain profits for their own companies. When asked about having been in contact with Huawei, Pierucci said that he has never been contacted by Huawei or received any payment from the company.

The US want ‶free″ markets, but with bonus if they are using dollars, have no problem taking bribes from US firms, respect US sanctions and give a few oh-so-subtle advantages to US firms there and there.

Note that I don't blame them, any world power would do the same.

The US wants free markets its business class can benefit from. Just as it wants democracy its business class can benefit from.

It's almost as if what the US really wants is an old-fashioned hegemonic empire that benefits its ruling class, and rhetoric about democracy and free markets is an expedient wrapper for that.

I think this is true only if your definition of a free market is what the US likes. After all there are a lot of restrictive laws needed to set up this "free market", like patents, trademarks, etc. Not to mention subsidies and tariffs affecting things as well.

By some measures the US isn't even in the top 10 on market freedom: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Definitely not in agriculture though, where protectionism and massive subsidies abound.

Note that the US did, in fact, occupy Japan for 6 years or so after WWII.

That occupation was nothing like typical colonialism, though. The occupation was there simply to ensure their transition to democracy, and then they left.

Nitpick: transition back to democracy.

Serious question: what do you mean with "back" to democracy? I have never thought of either shogunates or the imperial development after Meiji restoration as "democractic". Is there a significant democractic era in Japan somewhere before?

Yes, absolutely. Prewar democracy in Japan was a complicated thing. It was largely controlled by elites from the Meiji to early Showa periods, but in the late 1920s universal male suffrage was extended with one huge caveat - the Communist Party was outlawed and police and intelligence services were given carte blanche to lock up, torture and kill leftists unless they publicly rescinded their views. While these acts largely succeeded in destroying opposition, defacto military rule was only put in place during the late 1930s.

Japan’s modernization, grappling with democratic and populist forces, and unfortunate collapse into fascism is some fascinating history to read about. “Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy“ is a good starting point.

Probably a frenchman nostalgic of the Republic of Ezo :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ezo

Yes the Last Samurai had a kernel of truth, but it was not about an American guy, it was a bunch of French officers who deserted to help the Shogun in exchange of him proclaiming a republic. It has all the elements of an epic movie, including a desperate boarding of an ironclad by a samurai-French force that was repelled by a gatling gun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Miyako_Bay

Check out search results for "Taishō democracy".

Well, yes, but was it significant enough to warrant the post-1945 change as "back to democracy"? I feel that is pretty doubtful.

As Wikipedia puts it: Overall, during the 1920s, Japan changed its direction toward a democratic system of government. However, parliamentary government was not rooted deeply enough to withstand the economic and political pressures of the 1930s, during which military leaders became increasingly influential.

No, they didn't leave: https://militarybases.com/overseas/japan/

From Wikipedia:

"United States control of the Philippines was never intended to be permanent. From the beginning, the colonial mission was seen as one of paternalistic "tutelage"—of preparing the nation for eventual independence—and aside from a few "retentionists", the question was generally not if, but when, independence would occur."

The U.S. fought a brutal war against Filipino independence from 1899-1902, but progress continued towards self-rule via the Jones Act of 1916, the The Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1935, and finally the 1946 Treat of Manila which relinquished all U.S. claims to sovereignty in the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Manila_(1946)#Initia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(18... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Philippines_(18...

>United States control of the Philippines was never intended to be permanent. From the beginning, the colonial mission was seen as one of paternalistic "tutelage"

That snippet sounds a little self-serving, "we're just a force of good and we want good for all". The situation is more complicated, and the more powerful countries -including the US- around the world at that time were all in pursuit of expanding their territory and power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Imperialism

Yes, that's why the U.S. also fought a brutal war against Filipino independence.

Regardless, they ultimately delivered on the promise of independence, and at the apex of American military and political power.

Ah, Wikipedia, that reliable source of political opinion stated as fact. Whose intent? The other option would have been just not to occupy the Philippines for fifty years. Can you see how that would have seemed like a different (better?) policy to most Filipinos? Leaving that aside, actions of USA officials and opportunists over that period was not much along the lines of "tutelage" in the finer points of democracy and very much along the lines of "let's take advantage of this preexisting Spanish feudal arrangement in order to extract as much as we can from these people". Philippines is still dealing with the effects of that.

My comment was not to defend the racist, patronizing, and jingoistic proclivities of 19th-century American politicians, but to explain how the U.S. approach to empire differed in both outcome and intent from its European and Asian counterparts.

I'm not seeing that. Most European colonial powers have withdrawn from most of their colonies. Those colonies still feel the effects of colonization, both ill effects and more benign effects. How are the actions of USA in Philippines different from that?

Compared to other colonial powers the U.S. introduced representative democracy, got rid of the state religion (Catholicism), and bestowed colonial peoples with a broad set of civil rights and liberties. They also decolonized right after WW2 at the height of their power in Asia, in contrast to France and the U.K. which hung onto their empires even into the 50s and 60s.

Representative democracy is if anything in worse shape in Philippines than it is in USA. Certainly it was nothing to admire during the decades Marcos ruled. Also Catholicism is still very common. Colonialism with slightly different ritual formalisms, yet largely the same aims and results, is still colonialism. USA colonialism doesn't require American governors to remain in place. IMF/IBRD administrators do the job just as well, and they didn't leave in the 60s.

I think you have the cause and effect reversed. US/USSR conflict was used to fire up fear and unity (paranoia and nationalism) in the population for the people in power and that complex became independent when it started to make believers out of the people who created it and their followers.

Standalone complexes like that flip around and start controlling the people who created them to control others and take on a life of their own nurtured and directed by people who want to use them to gain power – nurtured but no longer controlled.

I infer you didn't experience the Cold War.

I infer you've never lived in one of America's colonial vassal states. Both empires probably had to treat their subject populations a bit better in the presence of a geopolitical alternative.

> Both empires probably had to treat their subject populations a bit better in the presence of a geopolitical alternative.

That's not quite sane: you're (1) placing this as an alternative to a full out nuclear war, and (2) placing the US' and the USSR's influence at equal footing.

I infer you didn't experience the hot war that would have been, if the US had a nuclear monopoly! Curtis LeMay was seriously pushing for using the US nuclear arsenal on multiple occasions, including against Moscow and in Vietnam. He pushed for this even knowing that there was a near certainty of nuclear retaliation. How influential do you think his voice would have been without MAD?

> would have been

Why? I guess the Vietnamese communists would have surrendered to the US and the country would have lived under its influence instead of the Soviets', and that's assuming Ho Chi Min would have received enough support in the first place. There's no reason to assume the US would have nuked at someone's whim.

BTW, the French and the Brits also have their nuclear arsenal. There would not have been a "monopoly".

This isn't just "someone's whim", but the Air Force chief of staff, the guy entrusted with the authority to make such recommendations.

See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

> Towards this aim, LeMay delivered the first SAC Emergency War Plan in March 1949 which called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 cities in the USSR within 30 days. [...] Air power strategists called this type of pre-emptive strike "killing a nation". However, the Harmon committee released their unanimous report two months later stating such an attack would not end a war with the Soviets and their industry would quickly recover. This committee had been specifically created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to study the effects of a massive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, within weeks, an ad hoc Joint Chiefs committee recommended tripling America's nuclear arsenal, and Chief of Staff Vandenberg called for enough bombs to attack 220 targets, up from the previous 70.

Note that March 1949 was 5 months before the USSR's first atomic bomb test.

It's not a leap to suggest that if the USSR didn't obtain nuclear weapons in 1949, the US would have shown much less restraint than they did. And "restraint" is already not the first word that comes to mind to describe American foreign policy in the 20th century. (As for France and the UK, I don't think the US president would have worried about the UK nuking Washington in retaliation for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR).

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