"the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism"
When has the U.S. ever blinked an eye at selective enforcement of our "principles".
Hold on while I try to control my laughter.
T. Roosevelt said somewhere - I've seen it quoted! - that if we gave the Philippines back to the Filipinos, we might as well give Arizona back to the Navajos.
But the language politicians and societies use definitely does have power to come back and bite them in the ass. A prime example is American anti-slavery and civil rights advocates from at least Frederick Douglas onwards using the plain words of the Constitution, and the "Founding Fathers", and patriotic rhetoric form both world wars, to argue their case.
That said, what gswift said, in terms of them easily finding a way to bolster Musharraf while undermining Chaves.
I hate the news. Why must you force me to know what's going on in the world these days?
To follow up on 3 - which I think is right, but I'd probably nitpickingly substitute the Declaration of Independence for the Constitution - one of the major Soviet dissidents* centered his opposition on making the Soviet Union live up to its own laws and Constitution, which were actually, on their face, not as oppressive as the regime's actions. A fair amount of sympathetic people thought this was crazy because the Soviet leaders clearly didn't have much regard for a lot of the law, but as I understand it he did make some progress with this strategy.
*I'm blanking on the name. I think he was a mathematician.
(after googling to "refresh memory") I think so.
Further research indicates I'm thinking of this guy.
but I'd probably nitpickingly substitute the Declaration of Independence for the Constitution
You're very much correct. Good catch.
My understanding of the Allende Bullet(s) is that, to this day, it remains unknowable whether Allende was killed by by Chilean military, carabineros (the police), or Allende himself.
Undoubtedly, the CIA was involved in fanning the flames of the trucker strike that was going on, and generally trying to put structural pressure on the government.
Mano negra? Any help?
I can't imagine what specifically we're doing in Venezuela, but I don't doubt we're doing something.
And to follow up on 9, anyone interested in Esenin-Volpin and human rights can find an abstract of the paper - or a very similar one - I heard discussed a few years ago here (scroll down to near the bottom of the page). It's relevant, in a way, to the procedural liberalism question.
11: My point being that using the rhetoric about "the Allende Bullet" is only going to invite some nitpicking, whereas I might go with "Invitation for a Venezuelan Pinochet." Only more clever.
Undoubtedly, the CIA was involved in fanning the flames of the trucker strike that was going on, and generally trying to put structural pressure on the government.
This dramatically understates the case. And whether Allende offed himself just prior to being murdered (or at the very least captured and tortured) by the police or soldiers, or whether the police or soldiers killed him themselves, is really splitting hairs.
13: Oh sure, try to backpedal now, fascist.
15: Pwnage is the new waterboarding, you pinko.
Now hop into this helicopter with me. We're going for a ride.
(Oh god. Too soon. I know.)
But seriously, I do wonder what we're doing in Venezuela. We need their oil. We need their help with the Colombian FARC and ELN. I'm not entirely clear what they need from us, other than a relatively stable US dollar (going swimmingly, by the by). And, um, not bombing them.
Ooh, Helicopter ride! Will we get to see the ocean? Tell me now!
19: Actually now I feel bad about joking about the torture that happened in Chile and elsewhere. Everyone go visit Villa Grimaldi tomorrow.
Everyone go visit Villa Grimaldi tomorrow.
Don't! It's a trap!! He's just trying to round us all up for helicopter rides!!!
I don't understand this argument at all. The US is going to assassinate Chavez because Musharraf is making up look bad? Is that the argument?
The argument is that the US can't explicitly, publicly take action against Chavez without being open to the objection: if Chavez is so bad on democracy and human rights and you're acting for democracy-promoting humanitarian reasons against him, why aren't you acting against Musharraf, who's now clearly the one with a worse record? So if the US is going to do anything against Chavez and not much against Musharraf, the acts against Chavez will have to be covert.
I don't know if this explanation makes things clearer. I understand the logic behind it, but as gswift already pointed out, the US doesn't always act logically with these things. Especially when it can find other reasons than humanitarian democracy promotion for its actions.
Can anyone tell I've wanted to comment today, but in wholly or mostly unmasked threads? Soon I'll have to sleep, though.
If that exegesis is correct, then isn't that the wrongest argument ever made in a world of wrong arguments? If anything like that held in reality, the US Army would be mired in North Korea now instead of Iraq.
I really am taken aback that anyone with even a passing familiarity with U.S. foreign policy could think, "Man, we're totally gonna have to be sneaky or we're going to look like hypocrites!"
How long is the list that makes this a sick joke? Iran in 1953, our love affair with the Saudis, Uzbekistan...
Yeah, the whole world thinks of your nation as big fat hypocrites*, however, isn't the key thing that the US is able to represent itself to itself as the good guy?
* and mine isn't any better, lest this seem like a bit of kneejerk anti-US sentiment.
isn't the key thing that the US is able to represent itself to itself as the good guy?
It really shouldn't continue to surprise me how many people truly buy into it.
* and mine isn't any better
And that just adds to my disgust. There's no escape.
I really have no idea what the argument is; after all, Musharraf isn't any kind of socialist and the reasons to take action against him have nothing to do with socialism. I'm not aware that capitalism itself is panicking, or paniking, about Hugo Chavez; it seems more worried about its crappy mortgage investments. I am aware, however, that "capitalismpanik" isn't a word in any language I've heard of, but yer man is putting it in italics to make it look foreign and erudite.
An argument could be made* that the circumstances surrounding the end of the Cold War (in Europe, particularly) have left human rights and democracy as legitimate reasons for intervention in a much stronger position than before. Not necessarily because of things the US did, but because of the importance of dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in pushing regimes to hold to the Helsinki Accords (see Charter 77, for example) and other human rights agreements. The fall of the Soviet Union also removed anti-Communism - at least that motivated by fear of Communist world domination of domino proportions - as a reason for intervention so legitimate as to override humanitarian concerns.
So by the 1990s, human rights had become much more important as a justification for intervention than before, thereby leaving anti-hypocrisy arguments in a better position than before.
*And I guess I'm making that argument, but with the caveat that I'm skeptical that it's strong enough to actually prevent intervention for other reasons. On a practical level, how many of those past covert actions were covert enough to get around the hypocrisy charge? Not many, as far as I can tell. But I suppose this is "If you told me, you'd have to kill me" territory.
I wonder how the linked post would fit Georgia into this scheme.
Shameless name dropping, in my undergrad 10 person Latin American lit class, Isabelle Allende hung out for a week with us. (I still didnt like her books.)
the whole world thinks of your nation as big fat hypocrites*, however, isn't the key thing that the US is able to represent itself to itself as the good guy?
Nattar gets it correct. We've supported bad people. We've supported good people. If the bad people are good to the most important good people (us), then we do not really care how bad they are to their own people.
If you help us, then you must truly be good in your core, despite all other evidence to the contrary.
I do wonder what we're doing in Venezuela.
Not much. We shot our wad in 2002, and don't really have anyone to support or anyway to support them right now.
The embrace between Venezuela and the US is fascinating. The US desperately needs Venezuelan oil to fuel its economy, and Venezuela (or Chávez, rather) desperately needs US dollars to pay for his aggressive (if largely ineffective) social policies.
There's no "Allende bullet" with Chávez's name on it.
It doesn't have to be the whole US presenting itself to itself. Or even a majority. Only enough people in deep enough denial, who can then form a coalition with those who aren't troubled in the least by hypocrisy. IMO, the Denialists are motivated in very substantial part by hatred of those who would question (or act to put in question) their faith, foreign or especially domestic.
We got into a discussion about this at work yesterday: the question was posed what additional evidence Judge Mukasey thinks he needs to see before he can say whether waterboarding is torture. That is, what is it in the classified file that could possibly make the difference. Obviously, though, (and it's obvious, because it was my position), the whole pose is a ruse to preserve deniability on the question whether the US tortures.
Like the tobacco industry in the 1970s. No one really believed there was doubt about the harmfulness of the stuff, at that point, but enough people needed just the smallest shred of ambiguity to maintain denial.
Works great. Sapiens is something of an overstatement.
34 -- Yeah but we have to pretend there is.
"Man, we're totally gonna have to be sneaky or we're going to look like hypocrites!"
I think the argument for taking action against Chavez, while going easy on Pakistan would look something like: "It's too late to do anything now about Musharraf--he has nukes. Which is exactly why we must keep Chavez from doing the same thing!"
It's a patently silly argument, of course, but it isn't very different from the argument that "permitting" Saddam to come to power obligated us to remove him.
Chavez, though, like Castro, seems to be a convenient boogie-man for the US. I'd be a little surprised if anyone did anything to him at all.
It does seem like Chile gets mentioned a lot on this blog.
Undoubtedly, the CIA was involved in fanning the flames of the trucker strike that was going on, and generally trying to put structural pressure on the government.
My mother-in-law lived in a small beach town in Chile in 1972, where she was well-known as the local gringa. One day during the famous trucker's strike, some of the truckers who had barricaded the highway came by her house and asked whether she might be able to trade Chilean money for some US$100 bills they had acquired somehow.
29: yes. Shouldn't it be "Kapitalpanik" or possibly "Kapitalismuspanik"?
And, yes, the logic is wobbly. Given that the US likes the Perv and dislikes the Chav, lawyers being beaten up by the Pervster mean that the US can't intervene overtly in Venezuela for ostensibly pro-democracy reasons without looking like hypocrites and/or idiots. So, he says, the US is now more likely to intervene covertly. But his brain has slipped a cog - his conclusion should be "the US, should it intervene, is now more likely to do so covertly" rather than "the US is now more likely to intervene, and will probably do so covertly".
34: Germany's biggest trading partner in 1914: France. France's biggest trading partner in 1914: Germany.
So by the 1990s, human rights had become much more important as a justification for intervention than before, thereby leaving anti-hypocrisy arguments in a better position than before.
I don't know. It looks like the justification that was balanced against human rights disappeared, but it's not clear to me--not only not an expert, but don't follow at all--that we acted in accordance with those arguments, or that we've been moved by anti-hypocrisy arguments on that score.
I couldn't really understand the argument either, for what it's worth. There is not much of an analogy to be drawn between Chávez and Allende, other than that they are both socialists severely out of favor in Washington.
I really am taken aback that anyone with even a passing familiarity with U.S. foreign policy could think, "Man, we're totally gonna have to be sneaky or we're going to look like hypocrites!"
Word.
But the language politicians and societies use definitely does have power to come back and bite them in the ass. A prime example is American anti-slavery and civil rights advocates from at least Frederick Douglas onwards...
Let's call this the Gunnar Myrdal theory, and acknowledge that it has some very limited utility in the analysis of domestic politics. Keep in mind, though, that attaining formal civil equality for African Americans took a full century after the emancipation proclamation, even though the contradiction between American principles and the ugly reality was apparent for any person with eyes to see.
W/R/T foreign policy, only a tiny sliver of the population even knows who Hugo Chavez is, and most of them will make no connection between Venezuela and Pakistan, even assuming they could find the two countries on a map.
Krauthammer has grimly hilarious column in the Post today about how that democracy promotion stuff doesn't really apply in Pakistan.
Quote:
The blanket promise to always oppose dictatorship is inherently impossible to keep. It always requires considerations of local conditions and strategic necessity.
It's a shame this didn't occur to him five years ago - or last week - regarding Iraq.
Isn't there a famous FDR quip about the first of the Samozas being "a sun of a bitch, but our son of bitch?" This from someone who took the words and ideas of democracy seriously, and believed in them as few other men of such power have.
An example of bitten-ass, sometimes not recognized as such, is FDR's almost casual quotation of "unconditional surrender" as the war goal. Caused all kinds of trouble because of its use by bitter-enders in both Germany and Japan, and really tied our hands.
The phrase's meaning, from Grant's usage and coinage during the Civil War, essentially made WWII a total war in a different sense, because the complete end of the regimes we were fighting, the only way to resolve a civil war to preserve a union or defeat succession, was something we had never tried for before nor felt to be a legitimate war aim. It took things up a notch, and increased the stakes.
And it rattles and reverberates still. "Regime change," in Iraq, in Iran, in Venezuela, in No. Korea, are amazing goals for people in another country, a democracy, to arrogate to themselves. The extension of the concept outward from the civil war essentially makes all wars we are concerned with civil, i.e., asserts our total hegemony as a matter of principle.
6 is wrong to the extent it says 3 is wrong, 10 is wrong in conceding error. I can't actually find the source I'm looking for, but this is pretty close. Or a find on page for "307 Change of Views" in this document, an.
I sure wish today was still anonymous commenting day...
That said, let's take as given that we all believe in a moral foreign policy: that is, considerations of justice (human rights, self-determination) should influence a nation's foreign policy. So, in general, we will want on these grounds to oppose dictatorship. How does this actual play out in practice? No doubt we will in every case weigh the benefits of a particular act of opposition against the costs. And this will be true even if we admit no other concerns other than concerns of justice. A trade embargo against South Africa proved effective. This does not mean we should want a trade embargo against every immoral regime. If realpolitik has some weight (as it should) life gets even more complicated.
On the direct case, Alex above gets it just right:
I really have no idea what the argument is; after all, Musharraf isn't any kind of socialist and the reasons to take action against him have nothing to do with socialism. I'm not aware that capitalism itself is panicking, or paniking, about Hugo Chavez; it seems more worried about its crappy mortgage investments.
Chavez is a autocrat to be sure, and one likely, in my view, to immersirate his own people. But he doesn't have the bomb, he secret service doesn't have a history of supporting the Taliban, his cooperation does not aid any important American strategic or human rights objective. There's no compelling reason for the US to support him, but no compelling reason for much active opposition either.
An example of bitten-ass, sometimes not recognized as such, is FDR's almost casual quotation of "unconditional surrender" as the war goal. Caused all kinds of trouble because of its use by bitter-enders in both Germany and Japan, and really tied our hands.
I wouldn't go second-guessing FDR on this one. Both the Russians and the Western Allies mistrusted each other for obvious reasons, and the agreement on unconditional surrender as a war aim was consciously designed to assure both sides that the other wouldn't cut a "separate peace", as Russia did with Germany in WWI.
There were plenty of individuals in the German high command who did not take "unconditional surrender" at face value; several of them were convinced enough that they could negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies that they were willing to try to assassinate Hitler in April 1944.
On the Japanese side, is there any scholar who has seriously argued that the Japanese might have sued for a negotiated peace at any point before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If there is, I'm not familiar with him/her.
Yeah, I've read that about FDRs declaration, but it's a myth. There were extensive talks between US and British reaching that decision, largely based on Russian demands and the Versailles legacy. Had it not been for the Allies, the Russians, having lost 20% of their population to the Nazis, would not have stopped at unconditional surrender.
The Japanese question is much trickier. Between the fall of Germany and Hiroshima/Nagasaki (summer '45), there were ongoing efforts by European-based Japanese military attaches to broker a settlement. There are many questions on whether these officials were subterfuge or politically influential, but there are credible arguments for settlement without nuclear attack.
47 and 48 are good answers, and I don't really disagree. As so much war rhetoric is, "Unconditional Surrender" was aimed at ourselves: at our allies, the British Commonwealth, who needed to believe in our earnest in order to make further demands on their own depleted and damaged resources for the war rather than look to themselves, at our co-belligerents, the Russians, who would do the bulk of the fighting but needed our earnest that we wouldn't double-cross them and take up at some point with the society they were in mortal combat with, when we had been immensely hostile always to the Soviet Regime and had many cultural and business ties with Germany, and with the American people, to make it plain that the war was about something worthwhile, that we were going to fix Europe, and Asian Colonialism, no matter whose, once and for all, and not need to do it again in twenty years.
At all this, it succeeded. And the Marshall Plan, and NATO, and the UN, were continuations of the policy, unimaginable without its total commitment.
As always with FDR, the achievement was awesome, yet the example and the legacy create other problems we don't know how to fix. The rhetorical legacy I referred to above; the national security state; the practices, of covert action and torture, that so haunt us today.
I suspect that the language people in power use is widely understood to be besides the point. It's a useful hook to draw attention to what is actually being done, though. Part of what's so strange about the speech of powerful people is that they strive to appear to be be saying something while actually saying nothing definite, with a retreat to generalities and principles as the basic tactic. Comments like mano negro's about mysterious US currency in Chile are great.
Manchester has some discussion of the various factions of the Japanese government toward the end of the war in his biography of MacArthur. He doesn't say anything definite about the possibility of suing for peace, but clearly suggests that Tojo had meaningful internal opposition. He also clearly indicates that the Japanese establishment was very surprised at how gently the US treated them.
Is the consensus on this thread that Chavez is bad? Because if so, you're all fucking morons.
Nah, the consensus is that the establishment thinks so, and whether they'll be inhibited by the situation from doing anything about it.
Personally, I'll buy from Citgo with a little extra satisfaction, because he sticks it to the man.
let's take as given that we all believe in a moral foreign policy: that is, considerations of justice (human rights, self-determination) should influence a nation's foreign policy
I think that the key word here is influence, not direct. It would be foolish foreign policy to demand "democracy" everywhere, because there really are some people who don't like us. As a goal, self determination is valid, but getting from here to there is not a straight line. "Sucks to be you" is not very diplomatic, even if it happens to be true.
It would be foolish foreign policy to demand "democracy" everywhere, because there really are some people who don't like us.
TLL- I agree with the part before the comma as long as some weight is put on demand, and I agree with the part after the comma, but I really don't see how the latter follows from the former. Do you mean anything more than "Given our limited diplomatic, economic, and military resources it is counterproductive to deploy them in ways which are likely to put in power groups which oppose the United States"? I ask because there's a possible reading of your comment as being positively in favor of a lack of democracy in areas where democracy would empower groups who would like to harm the United States, and I wonder if that's what you mean.
54: personally, I'd be mostly happy if US foreign policy just had a lot less to do with self interest at others expense.
Is Chavez good? He's sticking it to big oil, redistributing some wealth and importing doctors for medical care, so short-term good, but he doesn't seem especially competent or honest. Is this incorrect? What's a good source for reading about Peru, Ecuador, and Chile? I get my substantive news from the Economist and Le Monde, don't read Spanish.
positively in favor of a lack of democracy in areas where democracy would empower groups who would like to harm the United States
Fait accompli, Algeria 1991 eg. This is so deeply enmeshed in foreign diplomacy that taking a moral stand against it is noble but IMO futile. I guess the question, as originally posed, is where is the boundary. I think that it is largely driven by how visibly opposed to the US the small-country opposition is; no Islamists, ever, and no Marxists in the western hemisphere seem to be the bright lines for the US. Is Venezuela doing anything to help Ortega in Nicaragua?
AFAIK, the kleptocracy which preceded Chavez was so bad that it's not hard for Chavez to shine in comparison. His efforts combined with the steadily rising price of oil have significantly increased the standard of living for the common Venezuelan, but have not helped (and for all I know, have actually hurt) the upper crust of Venezuelans who speak English and have Internet access.
For news about Chile in English you can't do much better than Google News. Beware of The Santiago Times, the English-langauage Chilean web-newspaper -- I've seen some pretty egregious mistakes under their masthead. On the other hand, the best-respected newspaper in the country ran an article last year based on an old email forward about Bush's IQ, so the competition isn't that stiff.
"Given our limited diplomatic, economic, and military resources it is counterproductive to deploy them in ways which are likely to put in power groups which oppose the United States"?
Yes, this. I think that it is frequently overlooked by those who rightly claim that we have supported some assholes and upset applecarts that after WWII we were dealing with a power that really was trying to take over the rest of the world. The decision to back the coup in Iran, Allende, Samoza, was because the Russians were backing the other side. Now that we've won, it is common to look back and say "you shouldn't have done that, you nasty hypocrite". Well, had we not, the chances of speaking Russian while on vacation in Europe as opposed to English would be much higher.
Now that the Russian bear is back to sulking, we have a different set of problems, not the least of which is lingering resentment of what we "had" to do. I am afraid that it will take several generations to play this out, especially in parts of the world that have thousand year grievances.
Well, had we not, the chances of speaking Russian while on vacation in Europe as opposed to English would be much higher.
I think you're right about the motivation, wrong about the likely effects. After all, the communist takeover of Vietnam didn't do much to bring about Russian hegemony over Western Europe -- no real reason to think other countries where we supported dictators would have been different.
But LB, we have been chastised by the world for choosing to fight that war. The OSS backed Uncle Ho during WWII, but Eisenhower felt he had to back the Frogs for post war politics. Counterfactuals are by there nature impossible to prove, but had we not chosen to fight in Viet Nam, would the Russians have been bolder or no?
Dunno. Victory didn't seem to embolden them particularly.
Just as our victory in Iraq hasn't particularly emboldened us.
60: I think you're broadly correct on the soviet-US backstory, and that it will take a while to sort out.
But I also think:
`... deploying in ways which are likely to put into power groups which oppose the US'
is just muddy thinking. This isn't an either/or, and the US for damn sure doesn't have to have it's fingers in every pie. This wasn't even the case in the cold war years, and these days it's really risible. Once we start thinking that a friendly regime of any sort trumps a democracy that will tell us to fuck off and give sweetheart deals to someone else, we've lost any claim to moral high ground. Acting on it is mostly likely to leave the US wallowing in shit...
You've got mighty low standards for victory. If anyone stated goals for what they wanted Iraq to look like due to our intervention back in 2003, and we stopped fighting now, would there be any resemblance between the two beyond the absence of Saddam?
our victory in Iraq
Tell us another one.
The correct technical term for the result in Iraq is, I believe, `clusterfuck'
65. I couldn't agree more. Part of the problem is figuring out where intervention is important and where it is just fucking around. I mean it's not like we couldn't do anything in cuba if we really needed to, but just waiting for Castro to die seems to be working OK.
64. Should have put "victory". The Russians did like having the Cahm Rahn Bay after we had upgraded it. I seem to remember a quote that the Vietnamese thought the Russians were "just like Americans, but without money".
I think he was likening our Pyrrhic victory in Iraq to Russia's in Vietnam. But as for his apparently belief that Allende, had he been allowed to stay in power, would have somehow caused the Red Army to push to the Atlantic, I'm not gonna touch that one.
I think that one US goal in invading Iraq was exactly the same as UBL's goal: to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia. WMD's were a total distraction, and it's unclear whether people in the US military believed that the aging Iraqi jets and tanks were a real threat. But rearranging effective foreign forces threatening oil wells and oil revenue was clearly part of the point.
Who knows what the people that think this way make of Pakistan's "accidental" sharing of nuclear technology; I haven't read enough about who actually passed what to whom yet.
Ok, I will now unpack my tortured reasoning wrt speaking Russian in Paris. The reason that English is the Lingua Franca of business is because after WWII the US was 1/2 of the world economy and the sun was just starting to set on the British Empire. Our position has eroded from that artificial state, but for the most part we are dealing with a hangover from that period. Had we not pursued a policy of containment, and had the Russian proxies taken over in France and Italy we would be in a different world. I really didn't mean that the Ortega victory was the signal for 3rd Red Army to charge through the Fulda Gap.
This is flat ignorance -- there may be a perfectly good answer -- but what makes Vietnam a Pyrrhic victory for Russia? I don't actually know how much aid Russia supplied Vietnam with, but there certainly wasn't much in the way of Russian troops there, was there? So, not crazy amounts of pain for them. And then after the war ended, there was a stable communist government there; again, I don't know how tightly affiliated it stayed with Russia, but it wasn't a problem for Russia, was it?
72. What happened after the communist invasion and final victory in Viet Nam? The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that's what. Pretty bold if you ask me.
70: This is probably true, but none of it gels with the idea that there is any sort of moral basis for what's being done there. We'd all be better off if the official rhetoric was close to reality in these cases.
71: This is again, broadly correct, I believe. And if Russia wasn't so damaged defeating Germany it probably would have happened anyway (the european bits).
While the erosion of the post-war economic/industrial dominance is both natural and unavoidable, I believe that in some ways it has been handle badly, far more so that was plausibly the case. I suspect that there is enough residual resentment of that to cause real damage in the coming decades.
Oh, and for what it's worth I think the Vietnam was a mistake as a whole, but can see the arguments that got people believing it was needed. This is vastly different than Iraq, for example.
45 is right to the extent that Douglass disagreed with other abolitionists as to the meaning of the Constitution. He didn't burn it, for example, and claim it was pro-slavery. 45 is wrong to the extent that it implies that it was the Constitution, rather than the Declaration of Independence that abolitionists first and Lincoln later made a significant part of American politics.
I don't have any reason to think that "Russia's" "victory" in "Vietnam" was particularly Pyrrhic, I was just trying to understand TLL's comment.
On the Japanese side, is there any scholar who has seriously argued that the Japanese might have sued for a negotiated peace at any point before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If there is, I'm not familiar with him/her.
If I recall correctly, not only has this been seriously argued but it is historical fact. Meaning the Japanese tabled an offer of exactly the terms eventually accepted (unconditional except for immunity for the emperor) a few weeks before the bombings. My understanding was that the only controversy was about the ability for this to stick, and the authority it was offered under.
I could be misremembering, it's not like I know much about the history.
Wait show of hands, who thinks the Soviet Union was meaningfully committed to taking over the rest of the world. Or that not overthrowing the Iranian and Chiliean Government meant that the Soviet Union would "rule" these countries.
77. More to the point, we showed the Ruskies in both the Korean and Viet Nam wars that we would be willing to fight when push came to shove, or even nudge. One hopes that that showed that we would in fact defend Europe by all means necessary.
79. Raises hand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
I'm a bit biased about the cold war, (my earliest memory is the airport to flee a Russian invasion) but the Russians were a real threat. McCarthy was nuts, but the spy identified in the Venona papers likely was Hiss. Kim Philby was real. When did the rift between Stalin and Mao become well-known?
Toppling Allende was nuts. Mossadegh deserved better treatment than he received, certainly, but an intellectual centrist in an oil-rich unaligned country would have had to be very capable indeed to maintain independence.
The US response was often clumsy and brutal (what else do you expect from a big country?), but there was a real opponent, yes.
I'm reasonably familiar with Venona, but having a advanced covert-operation/spying program is a far cry from being meaningfully committed to taking over the rest of the world. It's not like we didn't.
Wait: or are you arguing that the United States and Russia were essentially engaged in the same game (take over the rest of the world) while containing the other-side to their main spheres of influence, and we won and they lost. That I might agree with, but I'm still hard pressed to see why letting Vietnam overthrow it's colonial overlords, or let Chile have a democracy, would of been critical blows to this plan. (Personally I reconcile this, because I don't think it's why we engaged in either operation).
I should note, I'm not arguing Russia wasn't a threat to US interests (of course how much of this *they* saw as being defensive due to our very real threat to their interests is another story), I'm arguing that I'd like to see some evidence they we're ever planning conquering the west any more seriously than we were planning an invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
83. Part two if you mean by the US taking over the world having people in other countries buy Cokes and Fords and IBM mainframes and Microsoft products and watch John Wayne movies (in English with subtitles) and play baseball and get used to Bronze medals at the Olympics.
85: the essential part of 83 is "the United States and Russia were essentially engaged in the same game" so if you think Russia had essentially the same goals the rest of the world buying Russian cars, and watching Russian movies, while replacing pro-western third world country dictators and governments with Russian-backed dictators. Then I see where your coming from.
If your arguing that their goals were meaningfully greater, I respectfully ask for better evidence than a spying program that looked a lot like ours.
86. Hungary, Czechoslovakia?
Vietnam? Algeria? (those weren't even in our core-sphere)
Both of your examples of countries in the Soviet sphere that elected governments that looked like they were going to switch sides. What would we of done if Canada went communist in 1968, or France or Japan in 1956. We wouldn't of used military force to restore the previous regime.
Is Germany included as part of the West? The Russians were certainly very interested in destabilizing W Germany. An invasion of central Europe was not in fact necessary to displace the Russian troops stationed there.
As a consequence, Budapest has left a number of buildings as they where when the Russian tanks shelled them. Go see.
While a rhetorical game of equivalent motives can be set up, it's pretty superficial; which occupied countries have Russians treated the way the US treated Japan or the Philippines? The US has treated central America and Indonesia pretty poorly, other places not so badly. I think Cuba is the only Russian client state that has maintained cordial relations, coincidentally the only place that was not robbed blind during Russian occupation.
More to the point, we showed the Ruskies in both the Korean and Viet Nam wars that we would be willing to fight when push came to shove, or even nudge.
Joseph Heller once summarized this logic essentially as: "If we are going to prove we are willing to fight where are vital interests are at stake, we must be willing to fight in all those instances where are vital interests are not at stake."
This isn't an argument about who was nicer, both sides were "clumsy and brutal", but really what can you expect from such big countries, but an argument if Russia was really commited to ruling the rest of the world in a way that we weren't.
Ok I have to go, and am going to self-ban my self for a few hours anyways for trolling. I think what set me off was 60, which seemed to come out of the narrative that: "Russia was irrational, and sadly, we had to do all these awful things that killed millions of people, but we only did them in necessary reaction to Russia's evil aggression. (this might not really be what TLL was saying, but it's what it sounded like to me)
A narrative I run into a lot on the "right", and which is completely self-serving, and as a factual matter, mostly wrong.
Don't worry about the trolling -- you didn't sound trolly at all.
92. Russia was irrational
No, rational to their own motives, and yes, we certainly were trying to destabilize their system of government, which would make the normally paranoid Russians even more so. I have no idea how to evaluate who was more "aggressive", or why that makes a difference. But if you have to pick a white or black hat I think the record speaks for itself.
[T]he Japanese tabled an offer of exactly the terms eventually accepted (unconditional except for immunity for the emperor) a few weeks before the bombings. My understanding was that the only controversy was about the ability for this to stick, and the authority it was offered under.
Well, that's pretty much the whole ball game, isn't it?
The Potsdam declaration was unambiguously rejected by the Japanese government barely a week before Hiroshima. Even after the bombing of Nagasaki, the war cabinet split 3-3 on the question of whether to accept unconditional surrender or seek more conciliatory terms.
eb, I thought you were denying that Douglass used the Constitution as part of his anti-slavery rhetoric and I remembered having read something of his where he did so use it (because it's excerpted in a casebook I had in law school), so I thought I'd mention that. On the other hand, I am willing to concede that your knowledge of Douglass in particular and abolitionist history is much greater than mine in general (since I've basically exhausted it), so I'll probably end up pwned if this discussion continues.
No, you're right to point that out. I was making a shortcut, and while I was writing "substitute the Declaration of Independence for the Constitution" I was thinking, "well, it would be more accurate to Douglass to say 'add' since he was for the Constitution as an anti-slavery document, but at the same time among the abolitionists this was a point of dispute and anyway one of his famous orations is a Fourth of July speech and the abolitionists in general were instrumental in bringing the Declaration into mainstream politics" so I simplified and said "substitute."
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that's what. Pretty bold if you ask me.
Or real desperate. The Soviets pwned Afghanistan until a coup by Amin in 1978. Soviets still then pwned it, but Amin was successfully militaristic and began developing his own forces rather than relying on the Soviets. Naturally, the Soviets had a problem with this and invaded the next year to try to keep this piece of its empire.
The point being, when the felt they needed to, the Soviets rolled out the tanks. You're not saying that Amin was CIA backed are you?
79
"Wait show of hands, who thinks the Soviet Union was meaningfully committed to taking over the rest of the world. ..."
Initially the Soviet Union was run by true believer communists who wanted to convert the world to communism just as militant Cristians want to convert the world to Christianity. As time went by the Russians ceased to believe and their motivation switched to more typical nationalism before collapsing completely.
The point being, when the felt they needed to, the Soviets rolled out the tanks.
Disastrously, though. And not just in hindsight: Zbigniew Brezhinsky claimed that he privately celebrated the Soviet invasion ("Now they will get their Vietnam", or something like that), even though it effectively meant another nail in the coffin of Carter's re-election prospects. That the Soviets felt vulnerable enough to objectively not-that-threatening events on their southern border to jump headfirst into that tarpit--I'm not sure you can interpret that as a sign of confidence.
72
Nothing about Vietnam specifically was a Pyrrhic victory for Russia (as oppsed to China) but the general strain of the Cold War likely contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet regime.
Yeah, I was responding to 69 which confused me to no end.
99- No, I'm not saying that. Just asserting that Afghan invasion was not one of strength.
Well, that's pretty much the whole ball game, isn't it?
Sort of. My understanding was the only sticky point was the emperor, which we (allies) gave them in the end, anyway. And I didn't mean the controversy then, I meant now. You asked:
is there any scholar who has seriously argued that the Japanese might have sued for a negotiated peace at any point before Hiroshima
and my understanding is not only might they have, but they actually did. The single negotion being the disposition of the Emperor. So that's all I was responding to.
KR- way back up in 79 Asteele asked for more proof that the USSR was committed to "world domination" than their extensive intelligence gathering. Three actual invasions seemed to fit the bill. Whether these invasions were helpful to their cause is certainly debatable. My IR prof in 1980 was of the opinion that Afganistan would be like Viet Nam in that "They will win there, too." He was wrong.
Upon re-reading my original comment, I concede that I overstated the case considerably. So point taken.
My understanding is that Japanese diplomats outside of Japan, who recognized the full dimensions of the catastrophe, sought and sometimes received authorization to send out feelers through intermediaries about a settlement, and that a faction of the government favored this course as a way to salvage something from defeat, but that the faction seeking a final confrontation prevailed right up until the very end, when Hirohito intervened after Nagasaki and accepted unconditional surrender.
It's the same logic that says we must've won in Iraq because the Islamofascists haven't nuked Tulsa.
the Islamofascists haven't nuked Tulsa.
Until they overthrow old Perv and have him upside down on the lamp post.