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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (126391)	3/17/2004 12:34:14 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 281500

count me in;)

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (126391)	3/17/2004 8:11:07 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I am happy to find such broad agreement. Our main problem, then, for the purposes of this thread, has to do with our activities in the underdeveloped world. I think that is a mixed bag. We should have done more to promote democracy, or at least "benign authoritarianism" in Central America, for example, long before matters came to a head in the '80s. Instead, we reacted to threats to American property or to movements towards the Soviet sphere, then lost interest after the immediate crisis. So you see, right from the beginning, my problem is not that we intervened, but that we did not intervene enough to make a lasting change, until, that is, Reagan came along and helped to improve the regimes in the region. (I am not sure of the current state of the matter, but things were hopeful in the late '80s, with elections and land reform and negotiated reconciliation). Yes, I think we have made mistakes in supporting some regimes in the name of stability that doomed us to being viewed as complicit in their brutality. I do, though, believe in lesser evilism, so though I think we should have backed reform and elections in more instances than we did, I think that sometimes we had little choice but to do business with "regimes on the ground", just as we did when opening to China. I do not think this discredits our overall strategic concerns in the Cold War, nor do I think we would have been better off to have let nature take its course when the Soviet Union was actively engaged in advancing the Communist cause. I believe in the ultimate devolution of empires, but I think that anti- colonialism and the divestiture of the British and French empires, particularly, occurred too quickly and without adequate preparation. I consider most of the problems in the Third World to be, not a result of imperialism, but a result of judging states without resources, human or material, to succeed, against standard that are increasingly advanced in the West. Without the imperialist phase, which at least brought some investment and infrastructure, most of these countries would be worse off, not better. Well, this is enough for one post...........