Every Single Foreign Policy Idea We’ve Ever Had
Source: WordPress
When America’s political and military elites aren’t seeking confrontation in our weight class, they have traditionally enjoyed punching down at other, much smaller and weaker countries. The list of countries the United States has invaded, annexed, occupied, or overthrown is so long, there literally isn’t room here to go into details about why we keep doing it. Usually, the invasions have a splashy public justification (anarchism, communism, terrorism, WMDs, etc.) and a super-secret real reason (money). Starting back in the Grover Cleveland Administration, we have intervened with force in the affairs of:
Look at the dates on that list. It runs less than 30 years, and there are around 30 interventions named. None of this even starts to cover the post-war world. During the Cold War, we were told that we simply must invade Iran, Greece, the Philippines, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to stop the spread of Global Communism. Maybe that’s true, but it’s a mighty big coincidence that the need to stop Communism dovetailed so nicely with our already-established habit of invading countries we’re pissed at.
Even the end of the Cold War didn’t stop this. Since 1990, the United States has launched largely unprovoked military action against Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Zaire, Sudan, Afghanistan (1998), Iraq (1998. . . President Clinton had domestic troubles that year), Yugoslavia, Yemen, Afghanistan (2001-who the hell knows), Iraq, Colombia, Haiti, Yemen, Somalia . . . the list just goes on and on. You can read a depressingly comprehensive list here, but the inescapable conclusion is that the United States has blundered into a foreign policy that requires us to invade various countries every few years, rain or shine.
One interesting feature of the countries on that list – the ones that aren’t complete basket cases now hate our stinking guts. It’s hard to believe the present state of these countries is unrelated to our past interventions. Russia, for example, was invaded in 1918 as part of a deliberate effort to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. Do you suppose that had something to do with subsequent Soviet paranoia about American imperialism? Maybe, if the United States hadn’t spent a century invading Nicaragua, the Sandinistas would have been less successful. Perhaps Fidel Castro, who the CIA tried to kill at least 40 times, had a point when he talked about the United States as if it was the second coming of Nazi Germany? Is it possible that history of invasion and assassination colored relations between the two countries for decades? Maybe it’s also worth asking why your history teachers never told you about any of this.
Happy Fourth.
