US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3279

On March 12 2016 05:34 Lord Tolkien wrote:
As foreign policy is my pet subject, and what I've studied extensively, there is a great deal of truth to past criticisms of US foreign policy, most notably through the Cold War era. Though it should be noted many of the underlying problems we're dealing today in the Middle East, Maghreb, and Africa have much more to do with the aftermaths of decolonization and European imperialism as to any form of American bellicosity, for instance.

Really, one of the chief foreign policy errors of the United States in the past 70 years was a failure to adhere to our past anti-imperialist policies in favor of indigenous communities in the face of "communism". The long history of conflicts in Indochina and Vietnam for instance was Eisenhower's failure to recognize the anti-imperialist and, initially, pro-American outlook of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists, and instead siding with the French as opposed to the Vietnamese. From that point onwards, we had essentially fashioned ourselves as the defenders of the old, European empires and spheres of influences, and set indigenous communist and socialist movements as the primary mover for "liberation", which of course we had to contain, even at the expense of liberal democracies abroad. The failure to differentiate between Soviet-controlled movements and more explicitly anti-imperial "socialist" or other liberation movements is the hallmark of our Cold War policies in Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Argentina, and Vietnam, to name a few.

In regards to the intervention in Libya, I maintain the intervention there was absolutely necessary and warranted (as was a full intervention in Syria at the onset), even with its current woes, as without going to hell in a hand-basket. The failure in Libya was one of insufficient post-intervention institution-building: new democracies are especially fragile, especially in states where no such legacy exists: where civil society is weak and disorganized after decades of repression and state control, the government had been staffed by appointees of the old autocracy, and political parties entirely nascent. Without adequate support, such regimes are torn apart by internal political forces.

The other option would be to have supported the Gaddafis or Assads on the onset as the best means of keeping the region stable (as Russia contends, and which with the state of the conflict and the consistent weakening of the liberal rebel groups in Syria we may have to do there given our earlier failure to intervene), or to have tacitly accept their victories in crushing their oppositions. This is unappealing for obvious reasons.

And as some Europeans in this thread have mentioned Russia: make no mistake. From a policy perspective, what happens in Ukraine does not really affect the United States in any tangible fashion, and indeed our current focus on it makes things very, very awkward for us, given we've been trying to pivot our strategic focus onto East Asia for some time (to manage the myriad crises surrounding China's ascent as a major regional actor). The primary reason we're involved is due to Eastern Europeans in NATO raising alarm bells (the Ukraine situation is solid evidence for their two-decade-long argument that NATO must focus on Russia first as opposed to overseas expeditions), and moreover, our NATO allies in Europe having consistently cut their defense budgets (with Poland being one of the few exceptions), and widening the capabilities gap (and putting even more of the burden on us).

On March 12 2016 05:30 Sermokala wrote:
Saving the world from hitler and/or stalin is worth a lot of gratitude. Also wheres our money from the marshall plan?

On March 12 2016 05:30 Sermokala wrote:
Ironically Dick "The guy I shot I made apologize to me" was for gay marriage a lot sooner then other politicians.

On March 12 2016 05:46 ticklishmusic wrote:
Unexpected thread ownage

On March 12 2016 05:55 Nebuchad wrote:


You do realize he agrees with everything I've said right?

On March 12 2016 05:55 Nebuchad wrote:


You do realize he agrees with everything I've said right?

During an appearance on MSNBC this afternoon, Hillary Clinton credited President Reagan and his wife Nancy with starting a “national conversation” on HIV/AIDS:

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s and because of both president and Mrs. Reagan — in particular Mrs. Reagan — we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy. It penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, hey, we have to do something about this too.

Clinton’s telling of HIV/AIDS history doesn’t align with the facts. President Reagan waited seven years to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, even as thousands of Americans died from the disease. Dr. C. Everett Koop, the administration’s surgeon general, said the president dragged his feet on the issue “because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs.” Koop said their position was that AIDS victims were “only getting what they justly deserve.”

In 1985 the Reagans’ friend Rock Hudson, then dying of AIDS, traveled to Paris in a desperate attempt to be treated by a French military doctor. As Buzzfeed’s Chris Gender reported last year, Hudson’s publicist sent the Reagan White House a telegram begging for help in getting Hudson moved to a French military hospital where the doctor could treat him. Nancy Reagan personally saw and rejected the request.

Nancy Reagan may have played a role in encouraging her husband to push for more funding for AIDS research, which Congress did appropriate. However, says Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, “Shameful is not even strong enough a word for the record of the Reagan administration on this. Did she try and fail, or not try very hard? I really don’t know.”

In fact, the Reagan White House even laughed off questions about the epidemic as it was spreading across America, which is the subject of the new documentary When AIDS Was Funny. That is hardly the conversation the victims of HIV/AIDS needed.

On March 12 2016 05:34 Lord Tolkien wrote:
In regards to the intervention in Libya, I maintain the intervention there was absolutely necessary and warranted (as was a full intervention in Syria at the onset), even with its current woes, as without going to hell in a hand-basket. The failure in Libya was one of insufficient post-intervention institution-building: new democracies are especially fragile, especially in states where no such legacy exists: where civil society is weak and disorganized after decades of repression and state control, the government had been staffed by appointees of the old autocracy, and political parties entirely nascent. Without adequate support, such regimes are torn apart by internal political forces.

On March 12 2016 06:08 Plansix wrote:
How do you build "new democracies" in countries with no democratic tradition or study? You can't just take cultures that have lived under dictators and drag them to respect balance of power and the system. They have spent their entire lives living under an unfair, corrupt system, it won't work.

On March 12 2016 05:49 IgnE wrote:The shift away from "anti-imperialist" foreign policy started before Vietnam and was directly related to the need to create/maintain markets in view of the Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods, but it had its roots even before that in American schoola of economic thought that emphasized the importance of exports for the growing nation, which had surpassed UK and Germany as the industrial center of the world even before WWI. Vietnam's "anti-imperial" socialism was never going to fly not only because of some wrong-headed and overriding anti-soviet ideology but because it was anti-American capital.

On March 12 2016 06:03 OtherWorld wrote:


So what do you do when you have to build a "new democracy" in a country that's too fragile for it, like Libya (or Iraq, or Syria) was? How do you prevent them to be "torn apart by internal political forces"? Do you occupy the country for years and years? Or do you spend your citizens' money to help them?
And more importantly, why do you consider that a foreign country is legitimate to intervene in a civil war?

On March 12 2016 06:17 Lord Tolkien wrote:

While yes, the shift was ongoing (Guatemala and Iran occurred at roughly the same time period), the decision on Vietnam publicly solidified our opposition to the burgeoning anti-imperial, nationalist movements of the decolonization period, despite numerous overtures from Minh for US intercession on behalf of Vietnam from WWII onwards.

Anti-imperialism by itself implies nothing for the creation of new markets. At the time, states and national groups were attempting to find new modes of development in the effort to reverse the undeniable accumulation of the world's wealth in the hands of a few Western nations. Import-substitution had not yet gained its (disastrous) popularity among "developing" nations, and indeed if we look at second-wave developmental states (the Asian Tigers, and South Korea), the path to prosperity in the period would require a strong state-capitalist approach coupled with explicit integration with Bretton Woods and the free trade regime, which does not conflict with the need to develop large consumer economies overseas at all.

In terms of anti-American capital, then we'd have to look at Latin America, and the main case for that would be Guatemala and Cuba. Outside of Latin America, though, our interventions were either purely pragmatic or ideological in scope as opposed ones couched in economics.

On March 12 2016 06:03 OtherWorld wrote:
So what do you do when you have to build a "new democracy" in a country that's too fragile for it, like Libya (or Iraq, or Syria) was? How do you prevent them to be "torn apart by internal political forces"? Do you occupy the country for years and years? Or do you spend your citizens' money to help them?

And more importantly, why do you consider that a foreign country is legitimate to intervene in a civil war?