4 ms·
United States used to at least credibly pretend that it cared about human rights. It is squandering its superpower soft power that it used to use to influence t
by guelo 8y ago
United States used to at least credibly pretend that it cared about human rights. It is squandering its superpower soft power that it used to use to influence the world towards democratic ideals. I blame the Democratic party neoliberals for buying into the free market religious myth that capitalism will magically fix dictatorships.
- cbg0 8y agoDemocratic party neoliberals are to blame that the republican house, republican senate, and republican president are squandering the US' superpowers?
- guelo 8y agoBefore Reagan and Bill Clinton the Democrats used to be in opposition to some of the free trade extremism. Once they capitulated it developed into a Washington bipartisan consensus no matter who is in power.
- kopo 8y agoWell...all that Saudi oil money has to go somewhere and isn't it just better most of it flows into the US instead of China or Russia or wherever? Wielding soft power doesn't have to be tightly coupled to it.
- guelo 8y agoIn my ideal world we would be isolating Saudi Arabia and treating it as the drug dealer feeding the world's addiction to oil that we need to kick.
- kopo 8y agoYeah...but maybe in the ideal world the addiction gets kicked and the drug dealer get rehabilitated. Isolation will probably create its own consequences.
- Findeton 8y agoWhat time are you talking about? In the 40s they had concentration camps inside the US for japanese people. In the 50s they experimented on some towns/US citizens with different diseases, and in the 70s and 80s they created coups all over South and Central America against democratic governments.
- cabalamat 8y agoYes, and in all those time periods they had a far better record than their main adversaries. C'mon people, is it really that hard to get that the West (1) has a flawed human rights record, and at the same time (2) has a better record than the main other countries?
- coldtea 8y agoThe main other countries being? Even USSR didn't have 2/3rds of the world's population enslaved and their countries occupied. Western colonial powers did. This is just Africa for example [1], add Asia (including at times China and Japan, and Latin America, plus parts of Europe (e.g. Cyprus, a British colony). Heck, the 2 world wars weren't started by those "other countries" either. European countries started it too. [1] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--SDNKBhke--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/1250557424428648110.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--SDNKBhk...
- zarkov99 8y agoThat is more a matter of competence than morals. Asia and Africa had no better moral instincts, any look at what they did within shows that, they just lacked the competence to conquer beyond their geography.
- coldtea 8y agoThis idea is the most disgusting part of western morals... The inability to understand that, with their faults and all, not all cultures are equally power-grubbing like theirs. And that who did what to whom matters... At least they could say they're sorry, instead of "I only fucked you over because you didn't have the power to fuck me".
- stevenwoo 8y agoThe United States foreign policy has never been about human rights, it's always been realpolitik, we give it lip service when it suits the end result (which is not credible except to credulous Americans.) The main exception was Jimmy Carter - https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/carter https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/ca... The international good guy theory of the United States foreign policy is a fiction fostered by history books in American K-12 public education - it's not supported by the evidence of a century of interventions in foreign countries for monied interests.
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoWhich is why they said "credibly pretend that it cared about human rights" instead of "cared about human rights".