I clicked expecting to enjoy another public black eye for the School of the Americas, and instead I’m left with dread that the USA has privatized that training. Because of course you have.
America and our democratic allies spent half a century fighting totalitarianism, only to turn around and treat the post-Cold War "peace dividend" as carte-blance to sell out everything we had just finished fighting for. Now authoritarianism is on the rise again as a result.
This has to be most idiotic own-goal in history.
By destabilizing and ousting democratically elected leaders around the world and replacing them with our puppets? Or do you mean fighting those puppets when they became inconvenient?
I suspect what happened is not the history you think it is.
The US (and much of the west by extension) certainly has a very spotty history of supporting democracy, especially if it was in their economic interest to support the totalitarian regime.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "social welfare".
Refugees that Europe deals with is mostly Syrian and Afghani. The US supplied weapons and support to Syrian rebels and weapons to anti-communist mujahideen. Now, hindsight is 20/20, but Assad was literally using chemical weapons on Syrian citizens. The Taliban was wantonly wreaking destruction across Afghanistan causing the refugee displacement. These are complex issues when it comes to human rights abuses and geopolitics. My point is that the US paid a price in attempting to be world police, regardless of the outcome. It wasn't economically beneficial as the grandparent comment stated.
People in US are free to vote any party that they wanted. They supported the people that spends trillions in the army instead to vote for other options.
If you have presidents that despised healthcare, expressed publicly their preference for the uneducated ones, and loathed the poor, the disabled and the non-white, well... this is what you asked for. Deal with it.
If you have presidents that spend trillions in the army and you don't want it, choose presidents with other priorities.
I'm really sorry, but please don't blame Europe for that.
This statement is also incorrect when referred to several key places the US have picked over the years (e.g. Pinochet's Chile or Syngman Rhee / Park Chung-Hee's Korea), and of course looking at the constant heavy military occupation of several "allied" countries, a fact without precedents in history, rather than the fable of "exporting democracy" this just looks like version 2.0 of the British Empire :)
Germany and Japan, though, got heavily de-industrialised and there was a conscious plan to bring the living standards to a much lower level than they used to be. Patents also got seized, and in general Germany and Austria did not recover their pre-WW2 prestige, even, for instance, in terms of the "new Heisenbergs and Schrödingers", which never came.
Yeah, maybe for the population of those countries and the US budget. But think of all the military suppliers, they must be very happy!
EDIT: spelling
That's a strange way to talk about carpet bombing and chemical weapons. Besides, the US lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon
"The Vietnamese government officially calls it the "Day of liberating the South for national reunification" (Vietnamese: Giải phóng miền Nam, thống nhất đất nước) or "Liberation Day" (Ngày Giải Phóng)"
.. I don't think the Vietnamese democratic government thanks you for it.
It's widely accepted that the US made seriously grave mistakes.
> Besides, the US lost
I was attempting to phrase it as the US supporting values or institutions that would eventually lead to democracy, not that US support means it will win.
> I don't think the Vietnamese democratic government thanks you for it.
They don't obviously and we ended up with the worst of all outcomes. It would've been better for the Vietnamese people if there was never any civil war, even better if the US hadn't supported the South. But, best of all for the Vietnamese people would've been if the South had won. One look at the GDP difference between Vietnam and Korea would create some serious introspection on that scenario. To save you some time, it's $47,000 to $12,000 PPP.
You may want to look up who installed the Taliban in the first place.
"During their rule from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban and their allies committed massacres against Afghan civilians, denied UN food supplies to 160,000 starving civilians and conducted a policy of scorched earth, burning vast areas of fertile land and destroying tens of thousands of homes."[0]
El Saud was put in place as rulers of Saudi Arabia by the British, not the Americans.
Consider Mossadegh in Iran - an elected, secular politician who was replaced to put Shah - a monarch, in power:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
Then, of course, all across Latin America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Arguably still oppressive after we’re done but better than before.
I suspect what happened is not the history you think it is.
I hate justifying the US's behavior in this regard, but all such critiques need to at least be context-aware.
The USSR was attempting to spread a system of totalitarian social, economic and thought control world wide. At the time, almost everything by comparison was a lesser of two evils. In opposing their efforts, anyone who also opposed the USSR, be it a European Democracy or a third world strongman, became a US ally. Anything to thwart the spread of the USSR's variant of Communism. Supporting strongmen was ugly and unpleasant, but those were also desperate times.
The USSR was expanding rapidly and adding satellite states left and right. Any strongman who 1) opposed the USSR, and 2) who was strong enough to maintain control of their country despite USSR attempts to destabilize and gain proxy control of it, was a potential valuable ally in the greater contest. Sometimes the strongmen were the only ones in a given country who could meet both criteria, and the US had to work with was available. Ugly, but c'est realpolitik.
Though I'm not sure Iran can be justified even under that framework. Fomenting a coup in a country with a democratically elected government and liberalizing society just so we can take their oil instead of buying it at market rates is unjustifiable, even in a Cold War context. Their oil could potentially tip the military balance of power, but surely an alternative to a coup was some kind of oil-for-military-aid treaty with a fellow Democracy.
Maybe they weren't fighting totalitarianism in the first place.
In Soviet Russia, Party finds you!
What a country!!
Perhaps this is an indirect result of the US providing military support to totalitarian regimes, but I don't see how it accounts for a rise in totalitarian/authoritarian tendencies in Russia, China, and other countries that don't receive such aid.
Nationalism and authoritarianism/totalitarianism tend to have more support when economic and other factors make people worried about their futures. In such situations, the natural human instinct is to crave stability at any cost, which opens the door for nationalism and authoritarianism/totalitarianism.
Russia and China received immense amounts of US aid.
After the USSR fell, the US was concerned about their nukes proliferating, and gave billions in foreign aid, financial/credit support, and technical assistance to Russia to help them rebuild their economy and maintain nuclear security.
For China, we opened our markets and brought them into the WTO, which massively enriched and empowered their economy and government, and without which they would not have developed nearly as quickly.
Likewise, the death squads trained by the School of the Americas were not there by some mistake or bureaucratic misstep -- it was known who they were working for, and their training was quite intentional.
Sure, we can argue that unapproved training will still take place, but it doesn't let us off the hook for the "counterinsurgency" training that was and is still consciously given to known repressive regimes.
I mean, Congress could pass laws, but then you’d need to define a cartel, prove it in court, prove they were training, etc.