Hacker News Reader

Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I guess the problem is nobody wants to "own" countries anymore. Probably for good reason, colonization caused a lot of evil. However if you want to make a country do what you want, you can't just blow it up and then expect them to listen to you. Controlling people requires actually controlling them, and that is icky.

View on HN

While the old prememant ownership thing has gone out of fashion, maybe we could have something like a 20 year lease where the Brits go in again and bring law and order? This kind of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Egyptian_Sudan

Meh. We had the great Bengal famine under British rule. And none of it was due to lack of this and that.

Amrtya Sen "Nobel" in economics was related to this.

Several famines.

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

The first step would have been leaving the African Union.

I feel like the mandate system of the interwar period is kind of what you are thinking of.

Yeah maybe something like that. You'd want some international body to give it legitimacy, maybe have it run by the scandinavians as the British track record and some have mentioned has its blemishes, and you'd need some amount of western military so if local warlords started killing people they could retaliate with himars or fighter jets or some such. And an understanding that they'd support local democracy and be prepared to go home when no longer wanted. Perhaps by referendum - if 50% of the locals wanted the foreigners gone it would be done. Rather than say the Afghan situation where they just disappear at some random point leaving a mess.

Are you sure the Scandinavian countries would volunteer? They have an increasing Russian threat close to home. And none of them have expeditionary militaries. Any deployment to Africa would require extensive assistance from USA/UK/France for logistics, intelligence, communications, and fires. And how would you even conduct a referendum in a conflict zone with no effective civil institutions?

A foreign intervention isn't necessarily a bad idea but doing it effectively would be far more complex than you imagine.

Debt bondage is much cleaner.

Yeah. The PRC has this process down. None of the long term side effects of colonialism, but the benefits of immediate access to resources.

That's historically been phase I.

Phase II is when debt-burdened countries stop paying their debts, and the creditor sends in their military.

Phase III is when other countries support the debtor, for a variety of reasons, and start a proxy war.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com