The worst, most damaging and outright stupid ideas that have defined the American foreign relations are these:
- Free markets love democracy. If you give the gift of neoliberal economy to an authoritarian regime, it will democratize.
The reality is the opposite, of course. Neoliberalism loves authoritarianism (remember COVID?). Shipping the entire US manufacturing to China didn’t bring about democracy in China. All it did was make the US dependent on an authoritarian regime.
2. Russia is worried about its security and needs to be constantly reassured that it’s safe. For this purpose, its neighbors should be disarmed and what Russia says about its true goals and intentions should be ignored. It has free markets after all, so this means it is a democratic country because see above.
The dedicated lunacy of this approach remains unchanged regardless of what reality demonstrates. Yesterday I heard from a dude I know with connections in Washington who says this is still the only framework of thinking that exists regarding Russia.
3. It’s crucially important to prevent Latin Americans from fixing the mess that the Cold War plunged them into. Any time things improve in a Latin American country, every time Latin Americans finally start figuring out their own shit, do everything you can to prevent them. We need the rest of the hemisphere in which we live to be an absolute mess because…. reasons.
We can see this in the treatment of Nayib Bukele who is vilified like he’s the second coming of Hitler. All that this achieves is make Central Americans who love him even more resentful against the US. We are going to move these Central Americans into Ohio and Alabama anyway. Doesn’t it make sense not to make them angry in advance of that transportation?
4. The policy of giving money to Iran is an amalgam of the three preceding policies on the list. Throwing money at a problem in hopes that it will magically bring forth democracy, reassuring people who want to see us dead that we are friendly, and a total misunderstanding that people in faraway cultures are not necessarily like us. They might be or they might not be. You need to use your brain to figure out which is which.
The result of these policies is that we have sunk tons of money into empowering our enemies. We are literally paying to make countries that hate us stronger. And we do our absolute darndest to antagonize countries that like us.
I know that little of what I write is as futile as these two posts. People are so bent on obtaining from political partisanship the emotional nourishment their lives lack that they simply switch off when you tell them that it’s not about their imaginary Messiah / Antichrist. But it’s still a fascinating topic how a handful of people came up with a handful of bad ideas, and even when events have proven that the ideas are wrong, we are still clutching onto them for dear life.
Marx was wrong. It is not all about money. Ideas always come first, always decide everything.
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