US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6243

You have an extremely poor understanding of what economic imperialism (the force that created the British Empire and American Empire) entails. I'll try to give you a ELI5 that'll cover the broad strokes.

1) Random private individual wants to make some $$$$
2) He notices a business opportunity in some foreign land due to their natural resources/geographic location/whatever
3) He starts a company, raises investments and makes a deal with the local warlord that allows for him to exploit the thing freely while the warlord provides labour, political coverage by being a black face saying "yes, this is fine, we want this", assent of the population (generally through force) and so forth.
3a) If no warlord, create warlord
4) The warlord in turn gets western luxuries, $ for his palace and, most importantly, western armaments to secure his dominance over the people. This is when an area of land that was historically and ethnically diverse becomes what we start to think of as a western style nation state due to the strong central government created as an economic proxy.
5) Invite the warlord to send his kids to Eton, then Oxford. This means that his kids are growing up in the same old boys club as the bankers, politicians and other influential classes, it solidifies the relationship for the future, the warlord is no longer a warlord, he is now a king.
6) Everyone makes a shitton of money (except the people of the nation having their resources exploited because they didn't really get a slice of the deal, the warlord was just some dude who found the awesome niche of "I'll say I own all these resources and then let you have them if you give me guns to shoot anyone who disagrees").

This was the model in Egypt for the Suez canal, in Argentina, in China, in India before the India Act, this is how imperialism works. There's none of this "publicly bending them to your will" bullshit, there is no desire to humiliate them, there is just an awful lot of money for the shareholders being made. The state of the imperial nation isn't even involved at this point and ideally never will be, you don't want to actually run the place, having a proxy means that he can do things that you couldn't, you just want to be able to ship the stuff from the place to your domestic markets. The warlord keeps shit calm and peaceful and then shareholders feel comfortable building infrastructure in this foreign land to improve their profits etc and slowly the place becomes an actual developing nation. You end up with dozens of companies, for oil, ores, rubber, timber etc all with this successful relationship. The warlord keeps shit down but he knows that ultimately he's just a blank face to you, if he fucks shit up you'll find some random villager and ask him if he'd like to be king before giving him a lot of guns and telling him to take the place over.

The problem comes when the warlord gets out of line and does something dumb like seize all of the foreign investments and nationalize them, refuses to pay debts or somehow fails to suppress a revolution from another warlord who wants to do something like that.

7) Investments get threatened
8) Investors go to the political classes in London (who incidentally they went to school with and are often also investors) and demand that the government socialize their losses
9) British navy shows up and colours the place pink on the map

This is what happened with Egypt and the Suez canal. Egypt was part of the Anglo-French empires long, long before it become part of the British Empire. Not because they couldn't claim the place but because there is no desire, not by the government nor by the investors, for them to do so. This is the first point where actual direct interference on a nation state level happens and it is done reluctantly. 7 doesn't always happen, for example much of South America was part of the British Empire but their shit didn't fall apart until the postwar era by which time they were shifting into the American Empire and America has a very complex relationship with imperialism. The fact that Argentina wasn't shared in pink on the map makes them no less a part of the British Empire than Egypt, the only difference is that the elites in Argentina knew damn well not to fuck up a great thing.

At the height of the Second World War the British government seized all private assets with $ value and did forced sales to raise $ to honour the British and French (after the fall of France Britain took over all French arms contracts) arms purchases from America which had fully drained the nation's $ reserves. This was before lend lease although the $ drain continued through the war. What this meant, in practice, was a full scale selloff of the profit generation of the British Empire to private American interests, although America had long been in the economic imperialism game herself and had her own investments throughout the European Empires in addition to her own colonies. This is the point where the British Empire starts to become the American Empire which still exists to this day.

When step 7 happens in Iran in 1953 things get more complex because the investors can't simply go to the American government and demand that they invade the place (unlike Hawaii but that was an earlier time when people thought that shit was acceptable). America sees itself as a torch of liberty against the British Empire and the fact that it is also the most powerful imperial power is a difficult situation. So instead you get the CIA involved to try and replace the dumb warlord with a smart warlord who can keep shit together so that everyone makes a shitton of $ forever. Britain would have just tried to run the place but Britain had been doing this shit for a long time and had it down whereas America thinks that it knows better. And now nobody gets any Iranian oil but whatever. This is also why the CIA engages in a billion proxy wars with warlords all over South America in the second half of the 20th C. That was all British/American economic empire but the rise of Marxism got a lot of the people asking why all their raw materials were making foreigners and dictators rich and not them. Investors complain to US gov, US gov tries to intervene by arming the local elites to break the rebels and suddenly you have death squads wielding US weapons.

An awesome case study on this is actually the recent Libyan crisis if you want to see it play out in your own recent memory. So Tony Blair, the British PM at the time, went to Libya in 2004 to negotiate a deal on behalf of BP. The deal involved a number of aspects, an end of sanctions, British weapon sales to Libya were specifically mentioned and documented (no tinfoil, you can check every aspect of this), the actual British army were employed at taxpayer expense to train Libyan special forces, BP got exclusive rights to Libyan oil fields and Quadaffi's son, he went to school at the London School of Economics.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8353501/Libya-Tony-Blair-agreed-to-train-Gaddafis-special-forces-in-deal-in-the-desert.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1553044/Blair-Gaddafi-and-the-BP-oil-deal.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-tried-to-save-colonel-gaddafi-just-before-bombing-of-libya-10479415.html

This is textbook imperialism like it's 1840 all over again. You don't want to own the place, you just want a shitton of cheap oil to sell at inflated prices.

Unfortunately in 2011 step 7 happens, the Arab Spring hits. Now in the olden days this is exactly why you employ a bastard like Qaddafi to be your warlord because he gets his British trained soldiers holding British made weapons (https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/01/eu-arms-exports-libya) and he starts to kill all those inconvenient protesters like it's the 1840s and someone tried to fuck up a great deal. Unfortunately it's not the 1840s and you end up with it all appearing live on CNN and the BBC and people start asking questions about what exactly our role in all of this (basically caused it) was. At that point it becomes clear that Qaddafi himself is fucking up a good thing so we decide to swap him out for another guy (could be anyone) who can be the fresh face of local oppression, thus giving us a nice screen to keep making money. So we pick a side and support them with overwhelming force in an attempt to quickly switch him out while keeping everything else the same because above all we want that BP oil money to keep on coming. And of course the military support is provisional on their agreement to not change the economic agreements. In the years 2004-2011 Libya went through the full range of imperialism.

Now if you want a really fun thought, take a look at post 1970s China. China has a shitton of raw materials but even more important it has all that human capital, no real labour restrictions and a government that will absolutely smash any resistance to deals the government supports. China is a western economic imperialist's wet dream, the government is ruthlessly centralized, Marxist revolution isn't a threat for hilariously ironic reasons and a lot of the people actually support the ruthless centralization. You can go to China and make a deal to set up a factory using cheap Chinese labour and cheep Chinese raw materials and make a shitton of money for your European friends. It's not a true 19th Century style relationship because while the Chinese elites know that they need us badly China is too big for it to be our bitch anymore. If the Chinese government seized western assets we couldn't just pick a Chinese villager and make him the new emperor. But there is a very strong case to be made that China is part of the western empires as much as places like Argentina were. That the game didn't change, it was just rebranded after the Second World War.

And where do the children of the Chinese elites go to school? Imperialism is alive and well.




So, to get back to my main point. Trump threatening to humiliate the Mexican government is about as far from imperialism as you can get. The North American Free Trade Agreement, that's what imperialism looks like. Trump gives imperialism a bad name. China is engaged in empire building but they have a 200 year deficit and they themselves are being economically exploited by the west, Russia is not engaging in empire building, Russia never really got that the point of the empire is to become really, really rich. China gets that but Russia is more colony than empire these days due to their economic weakness and being built largely on the export of raw materials. The Muslim world? Just a clusterfuck of failed colonies (Iraq), ex colonies (Iran) and current colonies (Saudi Arabia). They're not empire building, they are the empire.

You don't need Trump to build an empire to make you feel good about being American, the American Empire is bigger, stronger and richer than any empire in history and it still fucking exists. Do you really think an hour of your labour is actually worth all the Chinese goods you can buy with it or do you think perhaps something else is going on here economically?