America's Neo-conservative foreign policy

[Cellblock2429]

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Okay, or do you need me to hold your hand to guide your illiterate self even more somehow?

/----/ No, I just needed some help understanding your tortured sentence structure. It reads like a really bad Google translate. "The article's message appears quite opposed such simplistic treatment."

 

[ESay]

You're right ... I forgot about Taiwan. When I was young, South Korea and Taiwan were military dictatorships. I don't know a lot about those two countries, or Japan, in terms of the 'depth' of their liberal democracy. I wouldn't be suprised to find that it's rather brittle. (Although I have been surprised to see our own melting away.) My guess as to the 'authentic' Oriental sort-of democracy -- ie not one fashioned strongly by America, either as occupier or protector -- would be Singapore. If China evolved to be like Singapore, it would be step forward.

Singapore is a city-state virtually without history, empire traditions and so on. China and Singapore are two absolutely different things. It is not even apples and oranges.

 

[Grumblenuts]

/----/ No, I just needed some help understanding your tortured sentence structure. It reads like a really bad Google translate. "The article's message appears quite opposed such simplistic treatment."

"opposed >to< such" -- two letter word dropped!
Wow, have a cow, why don't ya!

 

[Doug1943]

Singapore is a city-state virtually without history, empire traditions and so on. China and Singapore are two absolutely different things. It is not even apples and oranges.

Okay ... I don't know. I've never felt that I understood the Eastern countries. Singapore is Chinese, but of course a special sort of Chinese, and very much the product of Lee Kuan Yew. I used to go out there for a couple of weeks every year to teach, starting in the mid-90s , and have followed, at a distance, their political developments, but being able to see the world as a very differnt culture sees it is another matter.

 

[Cellblock2429]

"opposed >to< such" -- two letter word dropped!
Wow, have a cow, why don't ya!

/——/ My bad for not reading your mind. Are you Joe’s speech writer?

MAKE NO MISTAKE. If you try anything to raise the cost of frisizhnjubs I will veto it."- JB​

 

[themirrorthief]

When, just after 9/11, Mr Bush began proposing invading Iraq, I was skeptical. In discussions with friends, I quoted Robespierre's observation that people do not like missionaries with bayonets. But, after the invasion, I got won over to the idea of democracy promotion, ie the neo-con position. (I was already sympathetic to neo-con domestic policy, but that's another argument.) And, I have to confess, I probably succumbed to public pressure: after I made a rather cynical comment about the invasion's prospects -- before it happened -- to a class I was teaching, a young Iraqi woman came up to me after the lecture, and tore a strip off me: "You're our only hope! You don't realize how bad it is! " etc. It didn't help that she was beautiful.

Well, as Ben Franklin said, experience keeps a dear school but a fool will learn in no other. I think I've learned from the terrible school of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What have I learned, exactly? I'm not an "isolationist" in the strict sense. I believe the democracies need to ally with each other militarily. I believe that liberal democracy, if we don't destroy ourselves in a big stupid war, is the future of mankind. But these transformations have to come from within, as countries are drawn into modernity, illiterate superstitious peasants, or their offspring, become urban, educated people, aware of the world. This is a work of generations.

We can help, a little bit, in various not-very-exciting ways.

So, as against the neo-conservative democracy-via-the-82nd Airborne-promoters, I'm a foreign policy realist, with thwowe Long View.

An easy, concrete example: we should drop the embargo of Cuba, and flood the place with Yankee tourists. And offer the Cubans fifty thousand scholarships for their young people to come to the US to learn English, etc. (We could do it without any cost.) We should turn Guantanamo into a Medical School to train doctors and nurses for all of Latin America, with the Cubans supplying most of the teachers and us supplying most of the money & equipment.

The Cuban government is aching to follow the Chinese path to capitalism and we should help them do so. More would then follow. Everyone in Cuba knows that socialism doesn't work. And if we dropped our hostility to Cuba, then the pro-democracy forces there would be harder to portray as pro-Yanqui traitors. We would work out a deal to compensate those Cubans who lost their property -- increased trade would pay for bonds for them -- and Cuba could become a normal Latin American country. (Or, looking at many Latin American countries, maybe an abnormal one -- they don't wan't to become another base for the cartels trying to satisfy America's insatiable appetite for drugs, and I don't blame them.)

This is too long already but we could argue about Ukraine and how we got here and what we should have done, in another thread.

world politics is like cancer....ultimately radiation may be the only sure cure

 

[Doug1943]

world politics is like cancer....ultimately radiation may be the only sure cure

That's a real possibility. Einstein said that he didn't know how World War III would be fought, but he knew that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. At least we won't have to worry about international economics, or international anything.