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Re:Australia May Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy by pjc50 on Thursday June 06, 2019 @09:18AM (#20114242)
> 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.

Re:Australia May Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy by ptaipale on Thursday June 06, 2019 @09:30AM (#20114319)
I do not think that Russia needed to import from US any hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law.

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.

Re:Australia May Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy by macspoofing on Thursday June 06, 2019 @09:49AM (#20114503)
>.. in the short term.

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.