> and in a lot of cases less democratic

Almost all. I can really think of two counterexamples, Japan and Korea (and it took a very long time ~30 years? for korea to figure itself out). Maybe Jugoslavia can be put into that bin too, though it's not clear if the US intervention hurt or helped.

I have to preface this with a very emphatic the ends absolutely do not justify the means, but, defying ill repute and near-unanimous pessimism, Iraq seems to have been able to slowly stitch its parliamentary system back together and respond to democratic pressures (protests, elections) without resorting to fraud and violence. It's too early to celebrate, but things look a lot better than they did ten years ago.

you can add Germany to the list, albeit France and UK also had a say there

Setting up the Weimar Republic after WW1 didn't go so well, then the aftermath of WW2 there were decades of east+west Germany. I don't see that as a positive example of a foreign power setting up a government.

The Weimar Republic wasn't set up by the Entente and not going to war with the Soviet Union to liberate East Germany was, to put it mildly, a reasonable decision.

The USA side was much better than the USSR side...

> The US is rarely interested in affronts against democracy unless there's a geopolitical advantage to be had by leveraging it.

Who are the countries who are willing to intercede militarily purely to liberate a country?

> From a practical standpoint, US interventions almost always make things worse for the people who live there, and in a lot of cases less democratic.

I think this is a fair criticism—intercession is hard—but the question isn’t whether things are better or worse than they were, but rather whether they were better or worse than they would have been under Soviet influence. And you can analyze this as “whether or not a specific country is better or worse” as well as “whether or not the world is better or worse for the diminished soviet influence that would have been afforded by that country falling under Soviet influence”.

in Afghanistan for how long? now Taliban control more territory then they did before US came in...

Libya? way way worse, i mean its a place you can buy slaves in open markets now after US intervention...

list is huge, some places they would take out democracy to put in puppet dictatorships all in the interest of the US, they will work with Saudi Arabia and in last 5 years starve 80,000 kids to death in Yemen under 5 years.

i can only list a few countries that US intervention ended actually helping both the US and the country.

so yes USA will claim to come in to give "democracy" or what ever humanitarian excuse but its never for those reasons, its always for the interest of US and US corporations, i mean didn't the US take a country just because corporations wanted it for growing Bananas? and still to this day they are messing with them ?

It’s like you didn’t even read my post...

I read it. As far as I could tell you were saying that intervention was sometimes worthwhile because the Soviets are evil?

I'm not sure I got it either. As an argument for interventionism it was poor.

I don't know how you got any of that from my comment. I'm quite explicitly not arguing in favor of interventionism, nor am I arguing that Soviets were evil. I'm making a metaargument that criticisms of US interventionism must compare US interventionism with Soviet interventionism; it's insufficient to say that US interventionism is worse than no interventionism because the latter wasn't a plausible option. So yeah, it's a shitty argument for interventionism because it's not an argument for interventionism. ;)

pretty sure the issues that belarus has is more to do with its dictator lukashenko then "soviet influence": https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Soviet influence it is. Lukasenko was a party boss in USSR

Putin was KGB mafia boy.

Kravcuk, and Kucma were party bosses of state enterprises.

Aliyevs were KGB men

Shevardnaze was USSR's foreign minister

The whole of Central Asia is basically ruled by exactly the same Moscow's satraps since late eighties, with exception of wild tempered Kyrgyzstan.

Mongolia, "the 16th republic," also had communist comeback, only ended by an extreme, Norko style economic collapse.

The only country of ex-USSR where CPSU did not recapture the power outside of Baltics was Armenia, but only thanks to power going to their nazis. A medicine worse than the poison.

> The only country of ex-USSR where CPSU did not recapture the power outside of Baltics was Armenia

And Georgia

It was, Shevardnadze ruled for 8 years.

Which ended in 2003. I'd argue that CPSU, since 1991, has had much less internal influence in Georgia than Armenia, which is still heavily Russian-aligned. Georgia is trying to join NATO...

Most likely, yes. But consider none of this would be happening without Russian backing.

The US only intervenes if a rich American has a profit motive that benefits them. Standing up for the Bosnians was the last rare instance where this wasn't the case. Selling bombs to both sides to maintain perpetual conflict is the usual favorite play.

The US intervenes in plenty of places where there is no profit motive outside of the standard military industrial complex. I think, for example, it's hard to argue that there was a profit motive in somalia, or bombing that pharmaceuticals factory in the sudan, going back further and getting out of africa, Grenada, e.g. Not that these interventions weren't stupid for other reasons.

Not sure about Sudan but Somalia is a key shipping chokepoint. There very much is a profit motive there.

Geographically. Somaliland might be, but that's a de facto independent region only marginally connected to Mogadishu, where the intervention was.

Then why did piracy spike after the US intervention?

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose" - Captain Picard

Thats not what happened. There was no piracy problem. Then the US toppled the government. Then there was a piracy problem. The US didnt intervene to stop a problem that didnt exist. I was responding to the claim that destabilizing the Somali government in 1993 was profitable to wealth Americans because shipping lanes are near Somalia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Soma...

>After the collapse of the Somali government and the dispersal of the Somali Navy, ... groups, using small boats, would sometimes hold vessels and crew for ransom. This grew into a lucrative trade, with large ransom payments. The pirates then began hijacking commercial vessels

Thanks for the insight, I really wasn't aware of the extent of their actions.

The quote I posted is a bit cryptic by itself. What I meant by it was that perhaps the US had plans that would lead to greater benefits for them in the region, but these plans backfired by inadvertently creating the Somali piracy problem.

They did everything right with regards to whatever they were hoping to achieve, but they still failed and then pirates happened.

I didn't say it was a success.

The US is no stranger to strategic military intervention that costs lives and money and achieves nothing very substantial - from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.

Speaking of which - what was the profit motive in Vietnam? There was definitely geopolitical motive, but I can't imagine there was a "rich American" person or corporation calling the shots for themselves in indochina

What are you talking about, the military industrial complex made an insane amounts of money from that war.

> The US intervenes in plenty of places where there is no profit motive outside of the standard military industrial complex.

It was the cold war. I'm pretty sure the MIC could have justified so much spending in other ways besides vietnam, but we are venturing into counterfactual territory.

Right, US stood up for Bosnians for the goodness of their hearts, not to weaken Serbs, historically Russian allies, and to signal Turkey and middle eastern oil holders "we support your foothold in Europe".

Probably, but it was also the right thing to do.

And it was also clear nobody in Europe cared or was going to do anything, even if it was also in their craven interest.

Probably didn't align with their August vacation schedule plans or something.

They were a little more hesitant to engage in airstrikes because they knew that Serbia would step up the ethnic cleansing if they did.

& they did.

The US was more concerned with there being instability in Europe than any overriding moral concerns.

300,000 of Serbs forced out of Croatia in period from 1991 to 1995. Where were US bombs to prevent that particular ethnic cleansing?

US bombs landed on Croatian Serbs on multiple occasions thus enabling ethnic cleansing. But no biggie, what's small ethnic cleansing between NATO friends?

> The US is rarely interested in affronts against democracy

A Mig fighter jet was dispatched to shepherd the airliner. This represents a threat to anyone on a flight through or maybe even near Belarus's airspace.

It is clear a fighter could not do anything about any bomb on an aircraft.

It was there to force the pilot. Last I checked, a pilot has final authority on a plane's heading and destination, not air traffic control.

Putin's ambitions seem like a geopolitical risk. Maybe on both sides; it seems Autocrats right now like a good 'buffer' - e.g. North Korea. Plus a new forming 'axis' vs 'democracy' power struggle

Hard to argue with the second when looking at the past 2 decades, but looking broader in the past century I think there are many more arguments the other way. Most of Europe for one.

This is clearly the wrong question to ask if you want to determine whether interventions were merited. You need to ask: is it likely the situation would have been worse... or better had whatever specific intervention not taken place, and you need to include positive and negative consequences to at the very least the wider region, if not the entire globe.

After all, you don't blame a nurse for all their dying patients if their specialty is palliative care; the counterfactual matters.

South Korea and Taiwan perhaps?

South Korea became democratic after a revolution against the US-installed government. But even then, it's an incredibly weak democracy - every single South Korean prime minister resigned in disgrace, without any exception, after some kind of illegal action or corruption (!!!).

Also Japan

Japan at the national level is barely democratic, the LDP has won all but one time at the national level in 50+years, and the term in which they weren't power they installed party-loyal functionaries to almost ignore the democratically elected government. A few times they did have premiers from other parties for a brief amount of time, but they never completed a term because they went against the LDP.

In Japan, a party with over 10% of the vote is surveilled as a criminal organization and it's leadership is thus being targeted 24/7 and prosecuted for anything remotely possible such as putting flyers in mailboxes, in order to disrupt the political process.

If it's a democracy, it's one of the weakest ones.

Why LDP is still strong even though it sucks (but I don't say there are any other good party) is due to single-seat constituency system that aims two-party system learned from USA. Thanks USA!

The system is now proven completely failed, but who can change the law is who benefited from the law.

> In Japan, a party with over 10% of the vote is surveilled as a criminal organization

You may refer 調査対象団体 but I can't find the 10% criteria. JCP is the only national party listed on the list for historical reason. I never heard that JCP member had prosecuted by posting mails. Other organizations are really worth to be surveilled. I don't think this is why democracy in Japan is not good.

Winning the Cold War made a lot of European countries democratic.

WWII

The GOP wants to check IDs because their voters are more likely to have ID. That’s the only reason. It’s not some noble effort to protect the sanctity of our elections. Illegal immigrants don’t vote.

That sure didn't take long.

Is that comment inaccurate?

Kuwait 1990 Haiti 1994 Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995 Kosovo 1999 Colombia 2000+ Afghanistan 2001 Libya 2011 Iraq 2014

There have been a lot of catastrophic $&@$ ups and terrible ideas, but it's selective history to claim there have been no positive outcomes for the people who live there.

Iraq? A million people died as a result of the Iraqi intervention.

2014 was preventing the Iraqi government collapse to ISIL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Iraq_(2013%E2%80%9320...

IMHO, it seems like most Iraqis are better off living under a government than IS, but your opinion may differ.

You've got this exactly backwards. The invasion of Iraq was a contingent factor in the rise of ISIL. In particular Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi regular army was incredibly stupid. The bulk of the regular army, not the republican guard, acted more as a nation wide police force than a military proper. Disbanding them meant there were now 100,000's of thousands of young men with basic military training with no more income to provide to their family. That became the recruiting pool for both the insurgency and ISIL.

Yes. And in 2014, what would you have proposed to do about decisions made in 2003?

I see no reason to limit discussion of the consequence of what we did in Iraq to 2014, but even then, it's not nearly as positive as what you're claiming. Iraq post 2014 is now effectively a client state of Iran, something that makes life much more dangerous for broad swaths of ordinary Iraqi citizens, as well as the region in general.

I don't think it's reasonable to argue your intervention in my house fire was successful because you used your bulldozer to clean up the rubble, if you were the arsonist that set fire to it in the first place.

If you'd like a particularly poignant "fly on the wall" style look into how ordinary Iraqi people saw the invasion in 2003, and their predictions for the future, check out Iraq in Fragments. Many of their predictions have come true in the years since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiu8cXhjpX4

So, what do you think the international community should have done in 2014? Or are you advocating for non-intervention in what was unfolding at that point?

ISIL existed/exists directly due to America’s waging of war on Iraq. It’s disingenuous to list that there.

Just because a previous intervention was ill advised does not mean a later one was; quite the opposite; you could even consider it taking responsibility for damage caused.

It's clearly not disingenuous to include the 2014 intervention in the list of the more reasonable ones.

I mean, if you present it as somehow excusing the earlier mistake; that'd be a different issue.

ISIS would never have been able to gain even a fraction of a foothold in the pre-Iraq war government, for all its ills.

Small nitpick, the country is Colombia, the university is Columbia.

Thanks! Not enough coffee. Corrected!