I've never seen any analysis of why the US was able to install stable, successful democratic governments in Japan and Germany, and generally failed to elsewhere.
With Germany, you are basically asking how they managed to install a stable Western government in a Western country with a history with similar forms of government and the institutions to support them. It was probably easier than convincing the Confederate States of the legitimacy of the US after the Civil War.
Yes, some of the small states in the empire were democratic, but that only added to the instability of the whole after 1918 as the Weimar Republic struggled to unite people with very different histories.
What matters is the tradition of running a normal democracy. If the elections are fair, if the ones who lose their power step down gracefully, if there is a peaceful transition of power, and so on. If you have a tradition of that, adapting a different form of democratic government is not that hard.
> What matters is the tradition of running a normal democracy
A country ruled by a hereditary leader with virtually unlimited power could hardly be called a normal democracy.
It does matter how much power the elected officials have.
We also promised them protection and trade and for some reason generally made good on that.
We didn’t do that with Iran or any of those other countries we messed with during the Cold War. In fact we seemed to not even really care much what happened after the coup. The only objective was to contain communism, so as long as whatever thing took power was not communist it was fine. It didn’t matter if they were monsters or even if they were even more anti-American than the previous regime as long as there wasn’t a hint of Soviet ideology.
We totally overreacted to communism to the point of actually building up more determined and ideologically consistent enemies.
Germany for one apparently gave much more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations than it got out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Expenditures in reverse. Imagine the allies had extracted much more wealth from Afghanistan or the Irak than they have put into it – itʼs inconceivable.
Slightly alternative explanation for West Germany, combining what others have said:
- First stage: The allies under US leadership were running the country anyway, they did it well and there was sufficient cooperation by Germans, for whom the Germany that was defeated represented an entity utterly discredited on account of the most horrible crimes against humanity.
- Second stage: The feeling “the Americans are actually on our side – defeating us they have liberated us and then helped us to a new state in which we can live better than ever before, plus they are protecting us from the USSR” became more or less mainstream.
(The experience in East Germany was completely different of course.)
So I think the most important factor was that American victory and American predominance were associated with liberation and freedom.
But if it counts, then the US propped up every country in NATO by defending them from the USSR and Russia.
Or Japanese, because the island was a Japanese colony until 1945. Rule of that island was hardly a Chinese internal matter, as it was in fact decided in 1945 by the United States (part of the surrender of Japan).
And the U.S. State Department's official position in 1959 was that Formosa was not a part of China as a country.
In short, the RoC lost the civil war completely and fled to new territory. After that, there was just the threat of the CCP pursuing the RoC beyond what were (certainly as recently as 1945) the borders of China.
1. they had been citizens of imperial China for hundreds of years during the Qing dynasty, until Japan briefly and brutally colonized the island in 1895. And,
2. Han Chinese had been the majority on Taiwan since the 1600s — and parts of Taiwan (the Penghu islands) had in fact been originally Han Chinese, and had been ruled by China since the early days of the Yuan Dynasty (and semi-unofficially settled by China since the Song dynasty). It simply isn't true that "The island of Taiwan/Formosa did have people on it before the RoC fled there, but they were not Chinese." They were majority Chinese even on the main island, and had been for many centuries, long before the PRC vs RoC civil war.
Taiwan was not "new territory" for China. If you're going to quote the State Department on whether Taiwan was originally part of China, then have a gander at their 1943 statement: "all the territories that Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Formosa and The Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Cairo_Declaration And while the U.S. claims that this was a statement of intent that was never fully implemented, it's still a statement of intent, and the RoC administered Taiwan post-WWII, and has never stopped.
The RoC didn't flee to new territory, they fled to the last remnants of the existing territory that they could defend in a civil war. And the U.S. propped them up, and continues to do so (in my opinion rightfully, but of course, I'm biased).
Also, this really isn't anything like the U.K. frankly.
Kurdistan (parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) should probably be a sovereign country, separate from Iraq.
Sunnis and Shiites hated their swap of power roles after the 2003 invasion. Those who were elected to government post-2003 were too concerned with punishing the others rather than unifying the country.
Also, people lose their minds when basic security is lacking and the policy of debaathification in post-2003 turned out to create a brain drain from government, military, police, and utilities.
Sometimes I wonder if Iraq’s instability was caused by the US’s migration to high tech military, which reduces the need to have 5x the numbers of soldiers on the ground as happened in Japan and Germany.
This is squarely the fault of Donald Rumsfeld, who was given plans pre-war by General Eric Shinseki and the rest of the Joint Chiefs that involved significantly more forces. Instead, Rumsfeld pitched a fit and made them redo the OPLAN so it fit his whole high-tech "revolution in military affairs" crap.
Rumsfeld was hired by Bush. Colin Powell sold the invasion to the US public and the UN. The US Congress overwhelmingly supported use of force. Who knows exactly the extent of Cheney’s involvement. Rumsfeld only had authority because of the chain of events before that.
The only sizable presence of anything of the US origin in Ukraine were Protestant missionaries, unlikely supported or directed by the US government. Everything else was there in such low numbers that it was, essentially, unnoticeable. If anything, the US didn't really pay attention to this part of the world...
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Less flippantly, those countries gave it their all and lost. In most other places, the real struggle started after the government was toppled.
I would argue that local values played a part, but an emphasis on education, long term planning, and a lack of US political dysfunction were much more impactful.
Also worth mentioning that the wins over Japan and Germany weee pretty decisive. 1960s South Vietnam, 2001 Afghanistan, and 2003 Iraq (and potentially 1991 Russia) were all pretty ham fisted efforts and there was no US consensus about what to do with the country.
I don’t know enough about 1951 S Korea to say anything useful, except it was a military autocracy until the 1980s, at which point it made an incredible shift towards democracy and the economic growth story was one of the world’s most amazing.
The economic growth, or at least the seeds thereof, largely came during Park Chung Hee's dictatorship, which ended in 1979 with his assassination. GDP per capita increased over tenfold during his tenure. The shift towards democracy afterwards was tumultuous for a while, with the first real civilian presidency being Kim Young-sam's in the 90s.
You're definitely right that the growth story is one of the most amazing in history. It's a country roughly the size of Indiana with no natural resources to speak of, and over 50 million people (over 10 million more than California, the most populous state) crammed into the few flatlands it has, being a very mountainous country. Yet it was able to go from an agrarian society to a highly developed nation, with the 12th largest GDP, home to feats like building a third of the world's tonnage of ships. It's absolutely wild.
The Marshall Plan.
And people forget that it had quite a lot of opposition back at home in the US.