Let's not forget that the Soviet Union enabled WWII and was an initial aggressor along with Nazi Germany.
>To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
This underscores how much political systems are influenced by the empires of the day. When Soviet Union and America were the superpowers the world was split between democratic and communist governments. When America became the sole superpower, that accelerated the move to liberal democracy.
.. in the short term. And it worked for those countries west of Kiev. It did not stick in Russia.
The problem is that the US has always had its internal tension between the official liberalism ("all men are created equal"), the colonial racism ("except those guys"), economic freedom for the individual, and economic freedom for the megacorp. It exports all four of these, and sometimes the wrong ones win in another country. The banana republics got the racism and capitalism. Russia got hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law, enabling its collapse into a Mafia state.
It had a good stock of poor rule of law already from Soviet times, and hyper-capitalism - or even feodalism - was what it had before USSR was formed.
What do you mean in the short term? Since WWII there has been a steady global acceptance of democracy. You don't think that was something that just happened by accident? This is something to consider for those that want America to simply stay within its border and let nations fight it out to solve their problems.
Your characterizations are also highly skewed. They are reminiscent of conspiracy theorists that attribute all malice to one entity they hate. For example, American didn't export hyper-capitalism to Russia. The Soviet system was a humanitarian disaster for decades and when it collapsed it led to internal chaos until Putin showed up. There was good-faith effort on the part of America and Europe to stabilize the nation and bring it into the community (not just for altruistic reasons - Russia is a very important country).
I'm not sure what the distinction between individual economic freedom and 'megacorp' (your term) economic freedom actually is. America (just like Britain before it) has pushed for global trade - on balance that's a good thing.
Yes. The original label of the 'Third World' was applied to non-aligned nations. Those nations were still influenced by the global order created by US and Soviets, and later just the US.
>There were also plenty of military dictatorships, authoritarian one-party-states and theocracies, and a fair share of those were firmly in the USA's sphere of influence.
That's right, and not the point. The initial state of the world (for our purposes, let's start with the period between WWI and WWII but the earlier you go the more it reinforces my position) did not begin with all democracies. It began with a tiny number of democracies[1]. In the posted link you can see we went from democracies representing between 5% and 10% of world governments to more than half. Don't tell me it just so happens to be that the world adopted the political system of the major super-power. You can also look at it another way, America will exert strong pressure for democracy and market-based economy but it may not succeed and sometimes practical considerations take precedence (like the fact that the nation was locked in an existential struggle with the Soviet superpower - which had no qualms in pushing their ideology on the non-aligned world)
I completely agree that the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
Since then, every year the Western democracies resemble more and more with the socialist countries they were criticizing so much 30 years ago, both in their economies dominated by monopolies and in the surveillance of their citizens and in the restrictions of the citizens' rights.
Well, quite. Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory, you could equally say it was a victory for Communism. No, the victory in the war wasn't really due to the political systems of the belligerents - and democracy was suspended in the UK during the war.
The real long-term benefit was the installation at gunpoint of constitutions written by idealists on the defeated powers, and the construction of transnational free blocs (NATO and the EEC, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact).
The democratic post-colonial transition in the victorious powers didn't really happen until about 1968. Britain and France had to shed their colonies, with another few hundred thousand killed along the way. America had to give up on Vietnam and grant civil rights to its Black citizens. Australia and South Africa had to give up on their official policies of racial discrimination. France had its collapse and re-establishment of the 5eme Republique, after a narrow brush with military dictatorship. Greece, Spain, Portugal remained as Fascist dictatorships into the 1970s! The UK had a small civil war, complete with security services murdering in secret, troops shooting people dead in the street, and the near extermination of the entire government in a terrorist bombing.
Post-war democracy in the post-colonial Middle East states was barely even tried.
To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.