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Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine. Technically Iraq as well, although I don't think the Iraqis were particularly happy about that.
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Failed at installing democracies elsewhere? Aside from Afghanistan where has the US done that? More often the US has installed or propped up autocrats w/ varying degrees of success
Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine. Technically Iraq as well, although I don't think the Iraqis were particularly happy about that.
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The US also came into those countries with massive reconstruction funds. Injecting tons of money buys a certain amount of loyalty, especially from anyone in those countries who did not support the previous regime or had fallen out of love with it. 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 durin…
We "injected" incredible amounts of money into Iraq and Afghanistan.
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.
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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'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.
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I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic. That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence. The British were imperialistic and they were actually kind of good at it. It was sheer idiocy, an exercise in spending massive amounts of money to build up our own enemies and negate our own supposed values, turning billions away from Western democracy and towa…
> I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic. US has been imperialistic from birth. Heck the revolutionary war was fought to secure our right to be imperialists and commit genocide against the natives. Our reason for existence is imperialism. Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world. > That’s giving it too much credit as it impli…
Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too? Did the Pharoahs believe in their mortuary cult or did they just make that stuff up to con people into stacking up big rocks?
One thing I’ve learned in my time around here is that most people actually do believe what they say they believe and if you listen they will tell you who they are.
The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world, and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was. They thought they were bringing them the light and saving their souls. Made perfect sense to them at the time given their beliefs. Pharaoh really thought a big pile of rocks would make him immortal.
The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes. Some people do that, but most don’t. The real problem is that a whole lot of what we believe is deeply flawed and we aren’t smart or experienced or objective enough to see it. We get caught up in self reinforcing ideologies and in systems that become ends in themselves. We also get ridden around by our brain stems and driven by emotions and urges that we rationalize so well we con ourselves.
Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Conspiratorial models of history are comforting. It’s more comforting to believe it’s all just evil sociopathy since that suggests that if we can just get good people in there they can give us some kind of utopia. The reality is that if we get good people in there they will fuck up, be corrupted by power, or delude themselves. We know this because we’ve already tried many times.
We are just not that smart.
Most car accidents are not the result of homicidal maniacs trying to run people down. Most of them happen because we are bad at driving cars. We are even worse at setting grand historical visions to create utopias.
This is why the best systems we’ve come up with are full of checks and balances and are designed to be deliberative and cautious. It’s a way of protecting us from ourselves.
Getting back to US foreign policy, the real problem is that while our country’s founders did a good job creating such a system for domestic affairs they left foreign policy under specified. This left it as a domain where “good” people high on their own supply could embark on adventures without appropriate peer review.
Government of all things with its monopoly on force should be as boring and bureaucratic as possible. Adventuring should be allowed in limited consensual domains only.
That coup allowed a liberal society to flourish in Iran... now look where they are. I'd rather have US coups than any type of Iran-Russian autocratic regime.
One of the main reasons religion grows very strong in Iran eventually leading to the revolution was the Shah oppression of religious beliefs. Women were beaten in the streets if they had a scarf covering their heads. He was unpopular dictator, but of course the west like friendly dictators.
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Failed at installing democracies elsewhere? Aside from Afghanistan where has the US done that? More often the US has installed or propped up autocrats w/ varying degrees of success
Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine. Technically Iraq as well, although I don't think the Iraqis were particularly happy about 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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well i’m not going to change that with my guessing but i’d wager that it has more to do with the values of the populace, the willingness of the people to engage in and be ruled by democracy, and the regional stability at the time than anything the US did or didn’t do
I’d argue the US government/military involvement was crucial in both Japan and West Germany. The US military ran their governments for a few years, eliminated their domestic politics from being involved in war/defense decisions, restructured their governments, made excellent choices when it came to social, education, healthcare, transportation, and industrial policies. I would argue that local values played a part, b…
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.
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Yes, the same Ukraine that is still actively at war for its existence after being invaded by a nuclear superpower. The capital is still being bombed, the democratically elected leadership is still under threat of assassination, so many of those infringements upon freedom are actually reasonable.