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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Sphar who wrote (12173)	8/27/1998 9:20:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 71178

<<I can't think of a regime anywhere that the US successfully guided to anything other than corrupt fiefdom.>> Absolutely true, because of two mistakes, repeated over and over again. Mistake 1 was perpetually going against the tide. Our attempts to reinstall and support colonial regimes after World War II has more than a little in common with Canute ordering the tide to recede. It just wasn't going to happen. And when it didn't, we compounded our stupidity by choosing whatever general told us what we wanted to hear and making him dictator. Dumb. Mistake 2 was constantly choosing active intervention over passive intervention. Passive intervention means engaging a nation with trade and every other possible means of exchange. It means encouraging travel, and subsidizing students from the country to study in your universities. It means offering technical and financial assistance, and even defense against outside aggression if required. It means, more than anything, never, ever, interfering in their domestic affairs, even when you find them repulsive. Not saying blind support, mind, the carrot and the stick will always be there. They just have to be used as they are between states, not as master to slave. This is the tack we've been taking with China, and recently with Vietnam. It's working fine. If we had started doing it in 1945, I think the world would have been a better place. The addiction one hopes to inspire is to democracy and prosperity. It spreads on exposure, and it spreads fast. Ironically, the extreme militancy of the American right in the postwar period seems to suggest that they did not really believe in the superiority of their own system. How do you destroy a communist? By dropping a 15 million dollar bomb on his village or by offering him the opportunity to become a capitalist? Steve