Africa were doing bad before white people intervened, answering why isn't trivial at all. They did trade over Sahara, technological advancement and knowledge was there but Africa didn't manage to take advantage of it unlike the Arabs, Asians and Europeans.

This is nonsense, there are plenty of very leftist countries that USA didn't attack, so that provably wasn't the reason.

Communism is first and foremost anti democratic and authoritarian in these countries, that is the main issue. If you take Sweden that was very close to going towards worker owned economy in the 80's USA didn't do anything to them, same with rest of Europe. Sweden since then became much more right wing and moved away from those ideas, but at the time it looked very likely.

If that’s the case, why were so many Western backed regimes also antidemocratic and authoritarian?

My main point the attacks happened for some other reason, it could be more noble but could also be more ulterior like economic control etc. They aren't a raging lunatic that attacks anyone who tries to do left wing things, at worst they are a cold calculating evil villain that manipulates the world to their own benefit.

The point is that lot of people seem to forget that the USSR wasn’t sitting at home, either, and was deliberately funding political actions around the world as a part of the Cold War. Whether that “justifies” US interventionism is a different question, but people seem to talk about it as if the US was acting in a vacuum.

The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, yet the same “interventionism” continues? This is isn’t ancient history, we fought two whole imperial wars since the with the same exact thought process without the USSR even existing anymore.

I don’t deny that there was some kind of context to American imperialism and I have no interest in whitewashing what the Soviets were doing. But to say that these “interventions” were a purely defensive/reactionary measure against communism is silly, the US has a vested interest in protecting its hegemony control. It’s that simple.

But sure, powerful states want to protect their hegemony. Part of that includes not letting your allies turn into hostile enemy states. I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

The opinion you’ve expressed here is just the typical cynical approach that seems to lack any understanding of real world politics, or the basic fact that people in the Western “free” world might actually have a legitimate interest in promoting freedom and defending their values.

I recommend reading biographies of presidents during that era, especially Eisenhower. You’ll learn about the difficult (and often wrong) choices those in power had to make. To treat their actions as simply some kind of imperial bloodlust is not even remotely historically accurate.

Again, I am in no way arguing that these various interventions were “good” or “justified” or what have you, just that the framing of them as purely militaristic imperial conquests is flat out wrong and uninformed.

> I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

This is precisely my problem. If the US/West wants to maintain a moral high ground by claiming that their “freedom” and values are simply the best and everyone needs them, then why is there an incessant need to subjugate? There is no moral high ground with continuously destabilizing countries and making half the world’s life a living hell.

I’m happy to talk about the actual realities of geopolitics. Of course the US wants to maintain control, but that desire is a not a “moral” one.

To give you an example: the Korean War officially started when communist-backed North Korea invaded the Western-backed South. Had the South not been backed by the US, they would have lost - and indeed almost did lose.

Are you therefore suggesting that if the entire Korean Peninsula were under the control of the North today, they’d be better off? Because the reality is that South Korea today is more free and economically successful because the US intervened there.

Or what about Germany? If the US let the Soviets take the entire country, do you think Germany today would be the economic leader of Europe?

Of course, there are situations in which that defense turned out in the opposite way - Vietnam for example.

As to your last comment, again, this is just the typical cynical line that assumes everyone in the government is an evil imperialist that only pretends to care about their values.

You are ignoring the very basic fact that many of these interventions were done in order to prevent the very anti-free USSR from defeating the West. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that communism would be defeated, or atomic war avoided. And so the people in power in the West needed to make very difficult decisions about navigating this game theory situation.

Edit: Sweden started transitioning towards worker based ownership in the 80's, that is extremely leftist. Why did USA do nothing to stop them? Didn't even sanction them.

> Wage Earner funds,[1] is a socialist version of sovereign wealth funds whereby the Swedish government taxed a proportion of company profits and put into special funds charged to buy shares in listed Swedish companies, with the goal of gradually transferring ownership in medium to large companies from private to collective employee ownership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

So there, clear proof USA didn't mindlessly commit hostilities against any country doing anything leftist. So you were just wrong here.

Maybe you think that America and allies should have just stepped aside and let communist armies capture the various states, but geopolitics in real life is a little more complex than that.

Allende was democratically elected, no armed struggle from his end.

I'm not claiming that what America did was right or wrong. Sometimes violence is the right answer, maybe here too. But to pretend that we won the ideological battle through conversation and ideas is just factually false.

Parent comment is claiming the cold war was won through liberal democratic means. I claim that the tools employed by the US were violent incursions. I'm not claiming the US was violent for violence's sake. They were calculated actions with the intent of smothering any left leaning movement in the third world. Specifically the Indonesian case is egregious because their communist party was about as left wing as Bernie Sanders, and still a US-backed genocide was carried out against (suspected) leftists in Indonesia. Similar with the case in Chile. This was a democratically elected center left president, and the US-backed coup installed a violent dictatorship for the next 15 years.

That great violence unleashed in various wars wasn't actually necessary for realizing the goals of the countries involved is a very important history lesson which can prevent future violence.

(Similarly, one of the motivations for World Wars - who gets control of the colonies, seems futile in hindsight as the system of colonies was anyway dismantled.)

But that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming that they were a big part of America's toolkit in the cold war. To say that we won the battle through liberal democratic means is absolutely false. We toppled democratically elected left leaning governments time and again. Democracy was neither our means nor our end.

But that is not to say that X was the cause of victory. For too many cases, it actually lead to a backlash with regimes which were not friendly to US interests coming to power(Iran, Vietnam,..). Also, the USSR did similar acts (Hungary, Afghanistan) but could not win.

That the US prevailed owes a lot to its economic dynamism relative to USSR. (As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn't necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric.)

That isn't true, taxes has remained constant since ww2. The tax distribution might have changed, but the total amount collected hasn't changed much. Can see the curve looks about the same as always. The marginal tax rate barely matters for total taxes collected since there are so few rich people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

But in the US itself, if it is true that high tax regimes(for both income and corporate tax) did not prevent dynamism in the economy (because of what Hauser observed or otherwise), that would be an interesting to note. One analysis I read, in Jacobin - a pro-socialist magazine, was that the critical difference was that in the US, companies were allowed to fail, whereas in the USSR failures continued due to political reasons and absorbed a lot of resources.

China has a decent amount of structural issues, the US just has to hold on until they explode without exploding itself.