Interesting connection is that Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. helped train both the Iranian national police and what later became SAVAK, and negotiated with the Shah to return to Iran... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Schwarzkopf_Sr.
His son was the American general that led the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm/Shield.
You can draw a line directly from the coup in 1953 to the revolution in 1979, so it's pretty fair to blame the US for the revolution and what came after.
I can recommend the documentary Coup 53 [0] on this subject. The rest of the episodes of End of Empire have kindly been uploaded to YouTube and are worth a watch.
Not just Iran, but also Egypt. ->https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_FF 70+ years of darned military junta rule. With a small 1 year break between July 2012 and July 2013.
I met an exiled Iranian in Paris 13 years ago, and spent multiple nights in his appartement, drinking and talking (and testing his weed shipment :/ ).
He told me his clan/family was from northeast Iran, with presence in Afghanistan. They were allied to the Shah in 53 (not for his first coup though), and allied to both US and UK. He told me his 'import export' businesses was family business since the 50s: the US actually furnished them with both equipments and weapons and started their drug operation. He said his clan used and was used by the US twice, once against Iran democracy, the second time against the USSR in Afghanistan, and both times they ended up with nothing but troubles.
They ended up exiling most of their clan to western capitals in the 90s. They still have land there I think.
It's interesting to see how the perspective on this is shifting in Iran to the point that nowadays, it became controversial to call this a coup. In the royalist version of events, it is Mosaddegh who attempted a coup. Mosaddegh had lost is parliamentary majority, but was still very popular. A held a referendum to dissolve parliament and give himself as prime minister the power to make law. The Shah responded by dismissing Mosaddegh. The Shah had the constitutional right to do this, because Parliament was not in session.
That's of course only part of the story, and it completely ignores the role of Britain and the US. But what is interesting to me is not so much what exactly happened, but how peoples' view on history changes with shifting political moods. A generation ago in Iran, basically everyone agreed that this was a coup by Western imperialist powers. Today, with growing opposition to the political system, comes a questioning of the "official" history as thought in schools. Young people are today looking for different (but equally one-sided) versions of the story in which the roles of good and bad get reversed.
So many Americans naively believe this fairy story about their country, when the reality is a lot darker and more brutal. The intervention in Iran was neither an isolated event, nor was even close to the first coup that the US perpetrated at the behest of business interests. Starting with Samoa and Hawaii in the 1800s, an extremely violent occupation of the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century, and interventions in Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, the US had a long history of this sort of behavior before Iran. Often undertaken under the guise of fighting communism or some other nebulous threat, these acts were in fact naked money grabs intended to secure the dominion of US corporate interests, established during colonialism, over land, labor and assets like oil, lumber and precious minerals in countries where local governments were attempting to seize back control of these assets, and in many cases grant them back to the often poor and rural communities that should have owned them in the first place.
Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes is a good overview of the many "interventions" the US undertook to replace regimes that threatened the economic domination of the West. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
It's a bizarre sort of internal contradiction that allows people to believe in the overwhelming power of the United States while refusing to accept that the exercise of that power has shaped pretty much everything about the modern world. From Korea, where the US propped up a puppet regime staffed by Japanese collaborators post-WW II, leading to a civil war and partition, to Iran, to Russia, which was bankrupted and impoverished by US interests after the end of the Cold War. Those same interests then hand-picked a certain Vladimir Putin as a successor to their man Yeltsin. Unfortunately, most Americans are entirely ignorant of what actually occurred during these events because they were either never reported in the news, or reported in the distorted and propagandistic fashion that the US media tends to adopt.
They've done it so many times at this point that they don't actually have to bother sending in the CIA, they just make their preference clear and let the "or else" remain unspoken.
Putin didn't have that kind of power nationally during the Yeltsin years. He was powerful in St. Petersburg, but he would never have risen to national prominence had Yeltsin not hand-picked him as his successor. Yeltsin, in turn, was propped by a coalition of Western interests who had helped him orchestrate a slate of "market based" reforms known as shock therapy, which in effect bankrupted the country while simultaneously conducting a fire sale of everything valuable to western business interests. People forget, but when Putin rose to power the American press lavished him with praise as "someone we could do business with", and Putin even broached the idea of joining NATO with President Clinton at one point. Had Bush not (needlessly) pulled out of ABM treaty a year later, the first in a series of utterly pointless provocations of a country we at that point viewed as a potential ally, our relationship with Russia might look very different today.
I've never seen any analysis of why the US was able to install stable, successful democratic governments in Japan and Germany, and generally failed to elsewhere.
With Germany, you are basically asking how they managed to install a stable Western government in a Western country with a history with similar forms of government and the institutions to support them. It was probably easier than convincing the Confederate States of the legitimacy of the US after the Civil War.
Germany had no history with stable democracy. The Weimar Republic was a short-lived, unstable disaster and before that Germany was ruled by the Kaiser (emperor, a word derived from Caesar).
The German Empire was a constitutional monarchy, like many European countries of the time. Even today, it's a common form of democratic government. Before the empire, most of the states that formed it were constitutional monarchies, while the free cities were republics. And while there were only three free cities left at the time, there used to be many more. In some cases, their republican form of government stretched back all the way to the middle ages, though usually in an oligarchic flavor.
Constitutional monarchy is a very broad term, covering everything from the present UK, where the monarch's power is purely theoretical or ceremonial, to Germany before 1918, where the monarch's power was almost unlimited. The Kaisar appointed the head of government, was the commander in chief, and could (and did) dissolve the parliament. The main limit on his power was his own incompetence.
Yes, some of the small states in the empire were democratic, but that only added to the instability of the whole after 1918 as the Weimar Republic struggled to unite people with very different histories.
Presidents have had similar powers in many presidential republics. For example, Finland was like that until ~30 years ago. Ultimately it doesn't matter much if the head of state is a king or a president. It doesn't even matter that much what they could do in exceptional situations, or whether they inherited their position or were elected to it.
What matters is the tradition of running a normal democracy. If the elections are fair, if the ones who lose their power step down gracefully, if there is a peaceful transition of power, and so on. If you have a tradition of that, adapting a different form of democratic government is not that hard.
The US also came into those countries with massive reconstruction funds. Injecting tons of money buys a certain amount of loyalty, especially from anyone in those countries who did not support the previous regime or had fallen out of love with it.
We also promised them protection and trade and for some reason generally made good on that.
We didn’t do that with Iran or any of those other countries we messed with during the Cold War. In fact we seemed to not even really care much what happened after the coup. The only objective was to contain communism, so as long as whatever thing took power was not communist it was fine. It didn’t matter if they were monsters or even if they were even more anti-American than the previous regime as long as there wasn’t a hint of Soviet ideology.
We totally overreacted to communism to the point of actually building up more determined and ideologically consistent enemies.
Slightly alternative explanation for West Germany, combining what others have said:
- First stage: The allies under US leadership were running the country anyway, they did it well and there was sufficient cooperation by Germans, for whom the Germany that was defeated represented an entity utterly discredited on account of the most horrible crimes against humanity.
- Second stage: The feeling “the Americans are actually on our side – defeating us they have liberated us and then helped us to a new state in which we can live better than ever before, plus they are protecting us from the USSR” became more or less mainstream.
(The experience in East Germany was completely different of course.)
So I think the most important factor was that American victory and American predominance were associated with liberation and freedom.
Yes, but the Afghan "elite" did not commit to the reconstruction plan, they just behaved like to drain as much money as possible to their clans. Nothing serious was ever built and everything collapsed as soon as the withdrawal started.
Failed at installing democracies elsewhere? Aside from Afghanistan where has the US done that? More often the US has installed or propped up autocrats w/ varying degrees of success
Had the US not helped prop them up, and SK was conquered by North Korea and Taiwan conquered by China, I think they would have been doomed to remain autocracies indefinitely.
I don't believe defending Taiwan from China counts as propping it up. That phrase should be limited to helping the government suppress internal resistance.
But if it counts, then the US propped up every country in NATO by defending them from the USSR and Russia.
Taiwan/China, for the first few decades of their respective existences, were considered internal resistance by both the PRC (China) and the ROC (Taiwan), with the US backing the ROC. While sentiments about that are obviously pretty different in Taiwan today (although not in China!), I also think that the US/Taiwan relationship is still meaningfully different from, say, the US/UK relationship, and I think it counts as "propping up" to a greater extent than simply being a NATO member.
The island of Taiwan/Formosa did have people on it before the RoC fled there, but they were not Chinese, they were aboriginal.
Or Japanese, because the island was a Japanese colony until 1945. Rule of that island was hardly a Chinese internal matter, as it was in fact decided in 1945 by the United States (part of the surrender of Japan).
And the U.S. State Department's official position in 1959 was that Formosa was not a part of China as a country.
In short, the RoC lost the civil war completely and fled to new territory. After that, there was just the threat of the CCP pursuing the RoC beyond what were (certainly as recently as 1945) the borders of China.
Neither China nor Taiwan agreed that they were separate countries — China still doesn't, and Taiwan only changed its position in 1991 — and both considered it internal affairs. I'm not sure what aboriginal Taiwanese people have to do with this, as
1. they had been citizens of imperial China for hundreds of years during the Qing dynasty, until Japan briefly and brutally colonized the island in 1895. And,
2. Han Chinese had been the majority on Taiwan since the 1600s — and parts of Taiwan (the Penghu islands) had in fact been originally Han Chinese, and had been ruled by China since the early days of the Yuan Dynasty (and semi-unofficially settled by China since the Song dynasty). It simply isn't true that "The island of Taiwan/Formosa did have people on it before the RoC fled there, but they were not Chinese." They were majority Chinese even on the main island, and had been for many centuries, long before the PRC vs RoC civil war.
Taiwan was not "new territory" for China. If you're going to quote the State Department on whether Taiwan was originally part of China, then have a gander at their 1943 statement: "all the territories that Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Formosa and The Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Cairo_Declaration And while the U.S. claims that this was a statement of intent that was never fully implemented, it's still a statement of intent, and the RoC administered Taiwan post-WWII, and has never stopped.
The RoC didn't flee to new territory, they fled to the last remnants of the existing territory that they could defend in a civil war. And the U.S. propped them up, and continues to do so (in my opinion rightfully, but of course, I'm biased).
Also, this really isn't anything like the U.K. frankly.
Iraq is an artificial country created by western powers.
Kurdistan (parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) should probably be a sovereign country, separate from Iraq.
Sunnis and Shiites hated their swap of power roles after the 2003 invasion. Those who were elected to government post-2003 were too concerned with punishing the others rather than unifying the country.
Also, people lose their minds when basic security is lacking and the policy of debaathification in post-2003 turned out to create a brain drain from government, military, police, and utilities.
Sometimes I wonder if Iraq’s instability was caused by the US’s migration to high tech military, which reduces the need to have 5x the numbers of soldiers on the ground as happened in Japan and Germany.
> Sometimes I wonder if Iraq’s instability was caused by the US’s migration to high tech military, which reduces the need to have 5x the numbers of soldiers on the ground as happened in Japan and Germany.
This is squarely the fault of Donald Rumsfeld, who was given plans pre-war by General Eric Shinseki and the rest of the Joint Chiefs that involved significantly more forces. Instead, Rumsfeld pitched a fit and made them redo the OPLAN so it fit his whole high-tech "revolution in military affairs" crap.
I’m not defending Rumsfeld, but this is entirely too simplistic.
Rumsfeld was hired by Bush. Colin Powell sold the invasion to the US public and the UN. The US Congress overwhelmingly supported use of force. Who knows exactly the extent of Cheney’s involvement. Rumsfeld only had authority because of the chain of events before that.
Yes, the same Ukraine that is still actively at war for its existence after being invaded by a nuclear superpower. The capital is still being bombed, the democratically elected leadership is still under threat of assassination, so many of those infringements upon freedom are actually reasonable.
You don't seem to understand what an invasion does to a country. This is an existential fight. Any country fighting for swaths of its territory is forced into authoritarianism and hopefully bounces back once things stabilize, but don't blame them for trying to survive. Blame Russia for forcing this state of affairs.
You are talking about liberal democracy, right? Because regular democracy doesn't contain this important bit.
However, even in case of liberal democracy, there is exception from the rule in case of war, because SOMEONE WILL DIE ANYWAY.
If you think that liberal government cannot send a men X to the front line, then government must sent a men Y, or accept that woman or children Z will die. Someone will die anyway. Moreover, if the men Y sent to front line where he can die from enemy action, or woman or children Z dies from enemy action, why the men X should be exempt from that?
I share your disappointment at virtually every Western country no longer being democratic. Indeed, suppression of basic freedom of movement, speech, association, rights to earn one's living and even going as far as freezing one's assets and confining people to their homes, without them being convicted of any crime, proves conclusively countries like US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, etc. are no longer democracies. Ukraine would do well to follow example of democratic countries - but unfortunately, almost none left in existence.
“Is never okay” is not a rational argument in any philosophical or legal framework. You are projecting theoretically pure ideas into the real world where they don’t exist in any pure form.
Ukraine was Soviet Socialist for most of the 20th century, so any positive democratic movement is an improvement. In 2014, the people overturned a highly Russia-aligned and corrupt government (for which Russia invaded Crimea and fomented a rebellion in the Donbas). Zelenskyy was elected on a populist anti-corruption platform (again, further movement towards democracy).
The party bans you mention happened within a month after Moscow invaded Ukraine with eyes on the capital. And every single banned party was Socialist-leaning + most likely closer aligned with Russia than Ukraine. Again, not exactly a huge regression when it comes to democracy. The sad fact is that Ukraine has never been highly democratic. The post-2014 trend is towards more individual freedom and less government corruption (as far as I can tell, not speaking the local language).
Your standards are a great example of “perfect should not be enemy of the good”, much like the original US Articles of Confederation, which only lasted a few years.
Ukraine is not democratic and never has been. We are talking about a spectrum where one end is fully democratic (values). 1991 to 2004 to 2008 to 2014 to 2019 to 2022 have been moving towards the democratic end of the spectrum (except perhaps 2008 to 2014, but the country remains heavily corrupt (the same reason the EU and NATO were not serious about accepting UA).
The 2014 coup was followed by massive popular protests. The voters demanded president Viktor Yanukovych leave office and significant government + constitutional change and more independence from being under Russian influence and oligarch control. Popular protests don’t happen just because foreign money is thrown at the issue.
You pretend like the pre-2014 elections were “Democratic” in any sense of fair elections. You should go back and read about the 2004 UA Presidential Election and the findings of the UA Supreme Court, which overturned the election and forced a redo.
The UK cancelled elections in 1940 due to WW2. Is the UK a dictatorship?
Even the EU has set policy standards for what conditions merit dissolution of specific political parties[1]. And when UA dissolves those parties, the dissolutions were upheld by the court (so the UA was not far off of EU standards for the same action.
Again, UA took some pretty extreme anti-democratic measures towards domestic political allies of RU after they were invaded by RU and after those same political parties had been supporting the violent rebellion in the Donbas region since 2014. I don’t think your standards are reasonable.
Yes. As happens in every single existential war because it is necessary to survive. It is truly a dark time when it's more important to suspend rights than to keep them, but that is what an invasion does. It shifts priority from more privileged things like having a good life, to trying to survive so that you can have a life in the first place. It might be hard to imagine coming from a life of peace, but this is one of the many reasons why war is despicable and why Russia should never have started it. The blame falls squarely on Russia's shoulders imo.
Democracy (as in will of the people) doesn’t really exist during wars on domestic soil. Martial Law declarations are at least the honest admission of that.
And the democracy / republic pedantry is tiresome. We are a Democratic Republic (and also a Constitutional Republic). They are not mutually exclusive.
> And the democracy / republic pedantry is tiresome. We are a Democratic Republic
We’re a functionally plutocratic federal republic with some very loosely representative-democratic elements. Ironically, as a result of federal rules imposed on the states but not on the federal government itself, like one-person, one-vote, the states, while still more than a little plutocratic in practice, do a better job of approximating representative democracy in their formal structures (and many also have elements of direct democracy.)
This is some bizarre nonsense about Ukraine: in what way did the US "try to install democracy" there, let alone "failed"?
The only sizable presence of anything of the US origin in Ukraine were Protestant missionaries, unlikely supported or directed by the US government. Everything else was there in such low numbers that it was, essentially, unnoticeable. If anything, the US didn't really pay attention to this part of the world...
well i’m not going to change that with my guessing but i’d wager that it has more to do with the values of the populace, the willingness of the people to engage in and be ruled by democracy, and the regional stability at the time than anything the US did or didn’t do
I’d argue the US government/military involvement was crucial in both Japan and West Germany. The US military ran their governments for a few years, eliminated their domestic politics from being involved in war/defense decisions, restructured their governments, made excellent choices when it came to social, education, healthcare, transportation, and industrial policies.
I would argue that local values played a part, but an emphasis on education, long term planning, and a lack of US political dysfunction were much more impactful.
Also worth mentioning that the wins over Japan and Germany weee pretty decisive. 1960s South Vietnam, 2001 Afghanistan, and 2003 Iraq (and potentially 1991 Russia) were all pretty ham fisted efforts and there was no US consensus about what to do with the country.
I don’t know enough about 1951 S Korea to say anything useful, except it was a military autocracy until the 1980s, at which point it made an incredible shift towards democracy and the economic growth story was one of the world’s most amazing.
> it was a military autocracy until the 1980s, at which point it made an incredible shift towards democracy and the economic growth story was one of the world’s most amazing
The economic growth, or at least the seeds thereof, largely came during Park Chung Hee's dictatorship, which ended in 1979 with his assassination. GDP per capita increased over tenfold during his tenure. The shift towards democracy afterwards was tumultuous for a while, with the first real civilian presidency being Kim Young-sam's in the 90s.
You're definitely right that the growth story is one of the most amazing in history. It's a country roughly the size of Indiana with no natural resources to speak of, and over 50 million people (over 10 million more than California, the most populous state) crammed into the few flatlands it has, being a very mountainous country. Yet it was able to go from an agrarian society to a highly developed nation, with the 12th largest GDP, home to feats like building a third of the world's tonnage of ships. It's absolutely wild.
China really only started prospering after the creation of special economic zones, no? And today while there heavy state influence at the largest firms, the rest of the country pretty much operates in a market system, or do you disagree?
The Marshall Plan was targeted towards friendly countries that were destroyed during WW2 as a hedge against the USSR. I’m aware that Germany benefitted, but not sure about Japan.
TBF the big shots have been putting their mouths into Iran much earlier than that. The British and USSR even had a plan to invade Iran because they were close to Germany back in the day. Of course German posing itself as the liberator because it wants the oil but Britain was blocking it from do so.
The British and Soviet Union did invade and occupy Iran during the war. It was focused on controlling the railroads, but it led to the then Shah to abdicate.
Interesting aside about Germany from that time, but the word “Iran” is a reference to a people called Aryans that lived there, and the latter remains a not-uncommon name there. As a Westerner I found this a bit confusing since I don’t associate Iran with the kind of people over here that would use the term Aryan
That's because you don't know any esoteric nazis (lucky you). Look into Savitri Devi. It's a common trope to think that neo-nazis only like caucasaians to the exclusion of everyone else; in reality a lot of them are into ethno-pluralism as long as its combined with separatism and oppression of 'inferior' ethnic groups. The same people that grumble about race mixing being degenerate (by other people) will also endorse scientific selective breeding for the production of superior genetic stock (by themselves). A lot of political extremism is rooted in reproductive frustration.
It’s a whole thing with white supremacy in general to try to claim direct lineage with these early civilizations that are considered great as a proof of superiority [1][2]. Unfortunately much of the conceptual framework of race was not at all limited to Nazis at the time; generally Western anthropologists assumed racial superiority of whites and claimed Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc as white civilizations and evidence for that belief [3].
That's because Hitler co-opted the term "Aryan" to refer not to an Indic people but to his preferred Nordic blonde white archetype. Since then the word has been closely associated with Nazi ideals of racial superiority in the west.
it was interesting to see a documentary on World War II recently, and a key summit of Allied leadership was a meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in Tehran. They used the royal palace there for photo ops quite a lot.
I, showing my lack of education, first learned of the conference from reading 'War and Remembrance', Herman Wouk. It's amazing how much legitimate history he crammed into it and its prequel, 'The Winds of War.'
Sure among the elite in Tehran, but the rest of the country was still significantly conservative. You can see this in blockbuster movies from Iran in that era such as Qeysar [0] and Tangsir [1], as well as with Iranian thinkers with a mixed traditional and western educational background such as Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and Ali Shariati preaching about Gharbzadegi as a reaction to the rapid modernization the Shah used.
> Iran was actually rich in the 1970s
But extremely unequal. The earliest Gini coefficient I could find for Iran (1984) was at 0.47, so roughly similar to Venezuela during that era. It also appeared that Tehran's household expenditures (and thus salaries) were 4x those of the rest of the country [2].
There's a reason why Islamic Socialism is the primary political philosophy within Iran, with the key intellectuals of the Iranian Revolution being influenced by a mix of Islamic Reformism, Third Worldism a la Frantz Fannon and the Algerian Revolution, and Marxist thought.
Basically, an Islamic version of Liberation Theology that was popular in South America and the Solidarity Movement in Poland, and directly influenced Pope Francis
you can also thank the US for the coup d'etat that overthrew a democratically elected PM and installed a pro-western dictator who executed dissidents, eventually leading to a student revolution that was hijacked by religious hardliners. but the women didn't have to wear veils, though, right?
I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic. That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence. The British were imperialistic and they were actually kind of good at it.
It was sheer idiocy, an exercise in spending massive amounts of money to build up our own enemies and negate our own supposed values, turning billions away from Western democracy and toward backward totalitarian ideologies that are in the end more hostile to us than the USSR was.
Like I said in another reply it was mostly driven by paranoid overreaction to communism.
The "leaked" document that this entire article is based on has never been backed by anything. I can "leak" a document that includes wild claims. In absence of actual evidence, this is all conspiracy theories.
> I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic.
US has been imperialistic from birth. Heck the revolutionary war was fought to secure our right to be imperialists and commit genocide against the natives. Our reason for existence is imperialism. Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world.
> That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence.
From a ragtag group of 13 colonies, we've taken over the world. Not only that, we've taken over the world while having the world believe we are the liberators. There are idiots all over the world who legitimate look to the US as saviors and liberators. Doesn't get any machiavellian than that.
> turning billions away from Western democracy and toward backward totalitarian ideologies that are in the end more hostile to us than the USSR was.
'Western democracy' was the excuse invented to invade and murder tens of millions across the world in the 20th century. Whereas the brits advocated 'white man's burden' in the 19th century to murder and steal. We came up with democracy. Nothing more imperialistic than the cause of spreading democracy.
> Like I said in another reply it was mostly driven by paranoid overreaction to communism.
No. Communism was just an excuse to continue our imperialism. If communism never existed, we'd make up another excuse. What's our problem with Iran now? The USSR has been gone for 30 years and our relations with Iran is as bad as ever?
Stop accepting what dumb historians on TV or news tell you. Try to think for yourself and see if an assertion makes any sense.
> Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world.
While this is logically inconsistent, it is not without a historical precedent. Ancient Athens, during the classical Greek period of the Peloponnesian War when Athens had its empire in the form of the Delian League, was one of the major slaver societies of the entire era, rivaling perhaps even Sparta in the magnitude of slave ownership (though Sparta's slavery was of a very unique form). This is all the while they were decrying Persia's imperial ambitions and touting their fight for liberty against the oppressor. Consider that ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy, and had one of the purest forms of democracy for what is considered an advanced civilization, to a fault — generals were getting executed for breaking the protocol on burial after the battle they had won (probably how they ended up losing the war). Given all that, one would be right to ask how they could justify promoting liberty and democracy on one hand, and being a slavery-based society on the other. The answer is always that a group of slavers simply does not consider the group that gets enslaved as worthy of having that liberty extended to them — that is the privilege of the "worthy" citizen class. In-group vs the out-group, tribalism and all that.
To go back to the sentence this comment replied to, it is unfortunately entirely believable that a group of racist slavers can be busy promoting liberty for people like themselves while enslaving those who they (conveniently choose to) see as lower than human. Logical consistency and evidence is not required, they are simply different in some way, and thus all is justified.
It’s easy to see what’s wrong with this if you apply it to others.
Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too? Did the Pharoahs believe in their mortuary cult or did they just make that stuff up to con people into stacking up big rocks?
One thing I’ve learned in my time around here is that most people actually do believe what they say they believe and if you listen they will tell you who they are.
The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world, and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was. They thought they were bringing them the light and saving their souls. Made perfect sense to them at the time given their beliefs. Pharaoh really thought a big pile of rocks would make him immortal.
The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes. Some people do that, but most don’t. The real problem is that a whole lot of what we believe is deeply flawed and we aren’t smart or experienced or objective enough to see it. We get caught up in self reinforcing ideologies and in systems that become ends in themselves. We also get ridden around by our brain stems and driven by emotions and urges that we rationalize so well we con ourselves.
Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Conspiratorial models of history are comforting. It’s more comforting to believe it’s all just evil sociopathy since that suggests that if we can just get good people in there they can give us some kind of utopia. The reality is that if we get good people in there they will fuck up, be corrupted by power, or delude themselves. We know this because we’ve already tried many times.
We are just not that smart.
Most car accidents are not the result of homicidal maniacs trying to run people down. Most of them happen because we are bad at driving cars. We are even worse at setting grand historical visions to create utopias.
This is why the best systems we’ve come up with are full of checks and balances and are designed to be deliberative and cautious. It’s a way of protecting us from ourselves.
Getting back to US foreign policy, the real problem is that while our country’s founders did a good job creating such a system for domestic affairs they left foreign policy under specified. This left it as a domain where “good” people high on their own supply could embark on adventures without appropriate peer review.
Government of all things with its monopoly on force should be as boring and bureaucratic as possible. Adventuring should be allowed in limited consensual domains only.
> Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too?
Who cares? Your example has no relevance to my assertion. The difference is that the soviets and mullahs started out as marxists and muslims. The british empire didn't start off 'to civilize the world'? For hundreds of years, the brits were stealing land, transporting african slaves, invading countries before they started peddling the 'civilize the world' propaganda.
> The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world
No they didn't. They made that up that nonsense in order to justify or rationalize their barbarity. Stealing is bad. Killing is bad. Even the brits understood that. It's only after a few hundred years of murder and theft that the brits invented the 'civilize the world' or 'white man's burden' nonsense.
> and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was.
Nope. We never believed that nonsense. The city on a hill nonsense is justification to hide our own greed and imperialism. We knew what we were doing to the natives. Just like we knew what we were doing to the slaves was bad. We did it anyway because of our selfish interests.
> The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes
No. It's not that we are sociopaths. It's that we are greedy. It's all too human and it's all too mundane.
> Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
That's the point. There was never any good intentions. You act like the brits started their empire to do good in the world. No. The british empire, for the first 200 years, was looting, stealing land and transporting african slaves. It was all greed. It's hundreds of years into their empire(s) that the brits invented the 'white man's burden' nonsense.
Not to be a cynic, but what have the people with good intentions actually achieved? The only thing I can think of is rights that were fought for as concessions from those in power. Building something new from scratch, it's failed every time.
Sad to see what Iran has become - no in small part thanks to the US/UK's meddling and installing a crazed theocratic government. The Iranian people deserve so much better - they are a nation of really smart people and would be a beacon in the Middle East if it wasn't for a bunch of religious reactionaries holding power.
Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were expat Iranians who left and have no intention of going back there.
The young generation of Iran doesn't buy into the whole blaming the US thing for something that happened 70 years (1 generation!!) ago - which the US tried to install a more westernized leader. A lot of anti-US people with agenda wants the world to think otherwise. Case in point:
> which the US tried to install a more westernized leader
Taking issue with your use of "westernized" here - it's either misleading or deliberately ambiguous. The US just wanted a less "socialist" leader, similar to how they favored autocrats in Central and South America over communist/socialist leaders, democracy be damned.
US foreign policy has not deviated from this same kind of practice one iota as Freedom of Information Act releases continue to confirm. We only find out long after the guilty administrations have moved on, except if leaked by Snowdens, Mannings, or Winners sooner.
In the US, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations are long out of power. Most Americans alive at the time this happened are dead now. Certainly the ones who were in power at the time.
I didn't say that. The question was, what's the difference between the relationships between the Nazis and the contemporary nation of Germany, and the Americans who committed crimes of imperialism in the 20th century and the contemporary nation of America. That's the difference.
The US and UK assisted a nationalist and westernized monarch retain and consolidate power. They did not install a theocratic government. The current theocratic government came into power as a reaction against the Shah the British and US had helped.
'retain'. He was democratically booted of Iran, and his first coup failed.
The democratically elected president had even more western values and his only flaw was that he was a bit too socialist for the local elites, who couldn't have thrown him off without US pushing for cooperation.
> Sad to see what Iran has become - no in small part thanks to the US/UK's meddling and installing a crazed theocratic government.
This is some tinfoil-hatted nonsense. I'll be charitable and assume you're unfamiliar with the history, as opposed to a conspiracy theorist who thinks the CIA is behind everything you think is wrong with the world.
Rightly or wrongly, the US and UK went after Mossadegh precisely because the Shah was pro-Western, anti-Soviet, and a staunch ally of the US. Similar in some respects to why the Saudis have been a US ally for so long, although that is starting to fray. Both were authoritarian governments which nevertheless closely aligned themselves with US foreign policy in the region, and got some of our best gear and support in return . . . this is why Iran to this day flies so many 1960s-late 1970s Western platforms in its Air Force such as F-4s, F-5s, and F-14s. They are the only nation we ever sold the Tomcat to, and the Shah personally picked it over the F-15 Eagle, which was also on the table.
The Ayatollahs hated the Shah and have hated the US since the beginning. They call us the Great Satan. If you aren't familiar with the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the consequences that had on US history, then you're talking out the wrong end of your alimentary canal about anything Iran- or Middle East-related. The Carter administration attempted Operation Eagle Claw, a do-or-die hostage rescue attempt using special operations forces which went horribly wrong. The storming of the embassy and the failure of Eagle Claw were a national embarrassment. They fed into an overall narrative that Jimmy Carter was a weak, ineffectual, and bumbling President, and were a key driver in Ronald Reagan winning the Presidency in 1980. As a final stick in the eye, the Ayatollahs waited until Reagan had been sworn in to release the Embassy hostages.
So no, the US and UK didn't "install" a bunch of theocrats. They opposed this, and the results of that opposition had historic consequences throughout the 70s and 80s and beyond to the present day.
Was it not as follows? Mossadegh wanted the control over Iranian oil back, therefore the US and UK got rid of him which allowed Pahlavī to become dictator and he was supported by them to gain influence, oil, and defense against the Soviet Union. Especially with weapons. But the way he treated the people eventually made them unite behind Chomeini and that was the end for the Shah. This was of course not good, so the USA supported Hussein in his war against Iran. He became the enemy when he decided that Kuwait would be an easier target than Iran.
The argument was made that the US/UK "installed" the Khomeini regime, which is an utter absurdity. They supported the Shah for realpolitik reasons during the Cold War. Hussein got spanked in 1991 not just because he invaded Kuwait, but because he was also making noises about going after Saudi Arabia.
And as much as some people on the Internet think this is a Very Bad Thing, oil is and was a critical part of the global economy. An unstable dictator being able to play games with the world's oil supply isn't just a Very Bad Thing for imaginary mustache-twirling capitalists in their monocles and top hats. It's a Very Bad Thing for anyone who has a job or who relies on global trade. Which is, well, everyone. Which is why a multinational coalition under UN authority, which included several other Arab countries, put Saddam back in his place.
The argument was made that the US/UK "installed" the Khomeini regime [...]
Fair point, I missed installing or did not read it carefully enough, this was at best an unintended consequences. But even without intention, there is still responsibility, at least to some extent.
Which is why a multinational coalition under UN authority, which included several other Arab countries, put Saddam back in his place.
Sure, even if oil was not involved, the invasion of Kuwait or any other country should generally not be tolerated. I mentioned this just to point out how quickly and in some sense arbitrarily judgments can change, Iran is also a major oil producer and there Hussein got support for the invasion. The 2003 invasion on the other hand was simply a crime.
The coup most definitely did not install a theocratic government, an autocratic one quite likely but lets not pretend that the western secular Iran of the 60’s people seem to be so fond off wasn’t there predominantly because of the Shah not despite of him.
The Islamic Revolution didn’t succeed power by chance, whilst the Shah was opposed by many factions form secular communists to religious fanatics the reason why the mullahs came on top was because the majority of the population was a bunch of illiterate religious nut jobs.
This is also why Turkey has regressed so much, the secular metropolitan elite that followed Ataturk’s legacy was and is out numbered by the rural masses at least 3 to 1. At some point something had to give which is now why you have decades of Erdogan.
>At some point something had to give which is now why you have decades of Erdogan.
What gave was the usual brilliance of Brussels. The generals were plotting to kill him on national TV as they usually did, but around 2005-6 EU leaders started pearl clutching about religious freedom and how Turkey would never enter EU if not human rights or similar bullshit - so Turkey is still outside of EU, no chance of getting in, but they enjoy serious regress in freedoms, Islamization and a monkey with a wrench in charge of their economy.
It’s laughable that people blame the EU for Turkey’s regression. 2nd the 3rd generation Turks in the EU are amongst Erdogan’s most radical supporters, Erdogan got a far greater share of the overseas ballots from EU member states than he did back in Turkey, in fact the only two countries where the opposition had a lead were the UK and US.
Turkey always had a demographic problem, just like Iran does, it’s not in the EU because it could not resolve its own demographic problem not that it’s demographic problem was somehow due to the EU closing the door on Turkey’s membership.
It was about EU meddling in Turkey affairs. If the army had dealt with Erdogan in the early 00s the secular faction of Turkish society would still be on top.
Of course the EU votes would go to Erdogan - the people that moved to Germany were from his power base demographic.
A cold hard look at US (and UK) policy to Iran leads to the conclusion that we have worked very hard to create an enemy where one need not actually exist...
>The next day, on August 19, 1953, with the aid of “rented” crowds widely believed to have been arranged with CIA assistance, the coup succeeded
I searched the article and its reference for any details on the mechanics of this "coup."
Zilch.
WSJ has an article today, in fact, about it. Mossadegh was not "democratically elected." There was massive opposition to him inside Iran. The UK was opposed to him, of course.
> IRAN 1953: MI6 PLOTS WITH ISLAMISTS TO OVERTHROW DEMOCRACY
> Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ah right, because 3 years later the UK couldn't mount an actual military operation in Egypt, without the assistance of the USA, there's no way that they and the US could have helped a coup take place in 1953.
That coup allowed a liberal society to flourish in Iran... now look where they are. I'd rather have US coups than any type of Iran-Russian autocratic regime.
One of the main reasons religion grows very strong in Iran eventually leading to the revolution was the Shah oppression of religious beliefs. Women were beaten in the streets if they had a scarf covering their heads. He was unpopular dictator, but of course the west like friendly dictators.
Iran was "liberal" even before the coup, if liberal for you means ladies dressed in thigh-length skirts prancing about the big cities (mostly Teheran though).
Iran outside the big cities was still extremely religious and conservative. And dirt poor. Which is why the socialist Mossadegh government was popular, and why the Shah wasn't, and why the Islamic Revolution ultimately succeeded.
There's a certain strain of political outlook exemplified by an article like this, commonly categorized as "post-colonial", that ironically morphs itself into increasingly complex and implausible shapes to explain why all of the bad things are caused by the "first world" and nobody else has or will ever have any autonomy as an agent in the world.
The other aspect of irony to this is that this worldview is cultivated uniquely in bourgeoisie Western spheres to be championed by chosen avatars of the parasitized people completely Westernized outside their disdain for Western culture.
What we really need is a Canada-infused Iranian with a Western worldview telling us what the Iranian people truly want -- how absurd.
The final and greatest absurd irony latent here is that in the minds of proponents of these conspiracy theories, the US and other Western powers go from bumbling buffoons that can't socially engineer their way out of a paper bag when you can see/prove it (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) to master machivellian puppeteers when you can't.
As someone who left Canada for the “3rd world” and sees people crying about how awful it is in the happiest country on earth, let me just say it’s as awful as everyone says, please don’t come here or help us we certainly aren’t happy leave us to our misery.
the US and other Western powers go from bumbling buffoons that can't socially engineer their way out of a paper bag when you can see/prove it (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) to master machivellian puppeteers when you can't.
Asinine argument. Colonial/aggressive powers do well at first because seizing the initiative gives them the advantage of surprise and dismayed targets take time to catch up. The same approaches work less well later because counterparties are wiser to the dynamics and the initiative is harder to seize. Same reason 9/11 only worked once and subsequent large-scale operations by Al Qaeda failed.
You have failed to understand the point. The Taliban are running Afghanistan again because they learned the lessons of previous conflicts. It's not that the US is clueless as GP avers, but that others have caught up and tactics which previously worked no longer give the S the edge that they used to. GP was suggesting that the US can't bear responsibility for previous actions because it has bumbled in more recent times, an elaboration of the 'I'm baby' defense.
The Shah couldn't have taken the power without US help. It's one of the US few success, Pinochet being the second.
Obviously it's easier when you have internal support.
Basically the Iranian conservatives were divided. The Shah was unlikeable (or untrustworthy I think, if I remember correctly), so the old feudal/clannish/agrarian society wouldn't really support him. The industrialists liked him better, and the islamistes didn't respect him.
He had one advantage: a semi-legitimate claim that a majority would recognize.
He promised the 3 guarantees once in power, and since he had the political acumen of a 12 yo, the Cia handed the negociations for him (this is a 3rd-hand story). The coup worked, but he gave too much of his power after that, and basically handed the state to islamists (his political acumen didn't improve with the years).
That's the story I heard from an Iranian. I choose to believe it until all is declassified.
> The Shah couldn't have taken the power without US help. It's one of the US few success, Pinochet being the second.
Can you explain this? I wouldn’t call Iran’s situation or Pinochet good outcomes at all, but are you meaning that the US achieved what it intended too, so was therefore successful?
I mean, i often argue with a friend who think that the CIA best operations are those we don't know, but imho it's conspiracy thinking, and the CIA was caught, many, many times. Also there was no real proof for the Shah that the CIA was this involved (until like 5 years ago when the CIA just declassified and admitted it), which to me is quite impressive.
The people clearly support the Iranian government.
Whether or not you or I have anything to say about that is pretty irrelevant as I am not an Iranian citizen, and you are unlikely to be one.
von Mises once said that every government is fundamentally democratic because even the most autarchic government requires the governing consent of its people. This is clearly true.
This whole "people in the West get to decide whether or not a government is valid, but also they are evil bad guys" thing is really getting old.
This is absurd nihilism. If we change the meanings of words then any sentence can mean anything and stating "every government is democratic" is a clear example of that.
It's a metaphor meant to help you understand that the conceits with which you have been raised, namely that Democracy is a sacred system held only teneuously by a few Western states and that the narrative that there are oppressed peoples that are held hostage by their state and we must help them are geopolitical lies you've fallen for.
Really smart people frequently use these metaphors that bust unquestioned cultural mores. Comparison is a very powerful tool.
Western countries are not run on direct democracy, because it is known to fail quicker. They're representative systems.
What you are essentially talking about is mob rule (direct democracy) which is a risk for any government, but for it to really manifest in a way that threatens the state it has to fail to balance the basic needs of the people and also become out of touch with any of their strong expectations which go beyond the basic needs.
If people have low expectations and have adapted to their environment, then it's not that much of a threat. This gets further solidified by punishing anyone that goes against the state and censoring any information that is inconvenient.
Many authoritarian governments have failed to be comprehensive in handling those aspects, but increasingly the oppression and control of people is becoming perfected.
The assumption that all people everywhere have sufficient opportunity, free communication, education and numbers to successfully push back against their government and thus it is always their fault that their government exists seems like a result of overlooking the very long study of imbalances in power between people and government. You cannot leave this to an assumption as an uncontestable law, which is precisely why the United States is setup the way it is to make sure the people have power and communication in order to check the government.
Relative to anarchy, sure. The problem with this construction is it deterministically leads to anarchy, from time to time, which is miserable not only for the people involved but also for all of their neighbours. The point of peaceful transitions of power is avoiding that interregnal anarchy.
I don't accept your premise, the idea that Democracy is particularly good or special isn't so obvious to me, but it's such a contentious discussion given that the US has armed itself to the teeth with the concept that it is democratic propagandistically that I can't belabor it.
Largely, I would caution you to regain the wisdom of the West's greatest forebears and arm yourself with the knowledge that you don't actually know very much at all.
> the US has armed itself to the teeth with the concept that it is democratic
Pure democracy turns into majoritarian, partisan anarchy. We’ve known this since Athens. But it’s forgotten by modern Americans, for whom more democracy is seen as good for its own sake, and that leads to foreign policy mistakes by our elites.
That said: countries with democratic elements have clear advantages in economic development, scientific output and tendency towards peace (as well as effective warmaking). We should want more democracy, for moral and self-interested reasons. But your narrow point, that simply promoting more democracy everywhere, all the time is counterproductive, is accurate.
I'm not happy with your explanation because I feel it demonstrates that even an ostensibly smart, reflective person isn't outside their own cultural bias.
I can disprove your conception in about a half of a second by citing the economic, social, political and technological miracle, that no democracy has even come close to replication thereof, that was
... 1930s Germany. FDR was also inspired himself by similar autarchic methods of government, and saw the US through a devastating conflict with a fierce (and even technically and strategically superior) enemy.
Then we trip the programming and conversation goes buck wild.
Suffice it to say, merely because the West is exemplary and it happens to be in the current thrall of a political order doesn't mean this political order can be credited with the Wests exemplary status.
> the economic, social, political and technological miracle, that no democracy has even come close to replication thereof, that was ... 1930s Germany
And then what happened? It’s almost a given that autocracies outperform in the short run, given a good leader.
Across history, balanced political systems have been at the core of great civilisations. In the West, but also in China (oligarchies), the Indus Valley (actual democracies) and in North America (mostly oligarchies). When strong emperors reigned, the civilisations were flashes in the pan.
I was hoping you weren't going to step on this landmine, the fallacy that literal might makes right.
The "inevitability of the defeated" is very provincial. Its tempting as you become a great sage and prognosticator simply because you can look at any historical event and say "this was a predictable nd inherently just outcome".
History was on the razor's edge as WW2 Germany blitzed through the defenses of most of Europe single-handedly. It was a feat enabled by fierce technical superiority, organizational superiority, even ideological superiority as the people were souped up on national identity. The autarchic form of government in play was a powerful cocktail that enabled Germany to accomplish outsize things in a very short period of time. A similar argument can be made for FDR"s America, as a lesser for would have been defeated at Pearl Harbor.
Note that I am not interested in a moral discussion of their government because that is a quick way to cut off critical thought. Obviously, I don't support the murders of any government.
So.. what's your argument here? That the coup didn't happen? That it wasn't backed by the US and Britain? That is was good actually?
this is the general strategy of people who don't want to face up to factual terrible things that contradict their ideology. They speak in generalities to avoid confronting any inconvenient truths.
Right, also while we're at it let's not blame Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, etc. for their deeds but instead blame whatever happened 2 generations before them. Maybe even sainthood for those fine gentlemen, right?
This article is so biased and wreaks of Iranian state funded propaganda I'm going to need a shower to wash the stink off after reading it. Give me a break. This si not HN material.
"His government came under scrutiny for ending the 1952 election before rural votes could be fully counted.[6] According to historian Ervand Abrahamian: "Realizing that the opposition would take the vast majority of the provincial seats, Mosaddegh stopped the voting as soon as 79 deputies—just enough to form a parliamentary quorum—had been elected."
Iran was many things, but not a utopia, nor even leagal here. Doesn't excuse any actions - and the cold war is one big example of be careful fighting monsters, lest you become one - but the storylines around Iran and Cuba don't hold up once the russiana propaganda bots disappear for a bit.
So I'm basically reading this as putting blame for Iran's reprehensible regime and its crackdown on its citizen yearning for freedom on Britain and the US.
No… let's stop with this rewriting of history. The only party to blame for the awfulness in Iran is their evil regime.
All war boils down to the ability to access, control or set pricing for a natural resource
The perennial Iran/Iraq conflicts originated from disputes about access to the Shatt al-Arab River starting in the 16th century - once the industrial revolution hit, then of course oil was the key resource for growth
The Overthrow of the Shah then, was based on the requirement to not be beholden to anyone but the west when pricing Oil, to ensure the west had unmitigated control of how the largest oil property set prices.
Old school conquest of territory post WWII is considered gauche, so the 21st century approach to resource conflict is to find "other means" to have the same effect of guaranteeing access to someone else's property.
I think this extremely rare peaceful period of "orthogonal conflict" that was notably devoid of multiple widespread bloodshed in war (~1975-Today) might actually come to an end in the next few decades as state capitalism crumbles under it's own weight and no coherent alternative exists.
The US and UK didn't overthrow the Shah, they helped him stop from being overthrown. If you can't even get the basics of the historical events we're talking about correct, you shouldn't be making broad generalizations about all of history.
They put him in power on 53,they didn't 'stop' him from being overthrown. He failed his first coup and had originally too few local/regional supporters to succeed his second one.
Then this sentence makes absolutely no sense: "The Overthrow of the Shah then, was based on the requirement to not be beholden to anyone but the west when pricing Oil, to ensure the west had unmitigated control of how the largest oil property set prices."
It depends on which one you refer to because both had some relation to Alsace-Lorraine.
However, the first one broke out after a complicated system of alliances together with a non compromising attitude towards nationalism (assasination ultimatum). I file that under ideology and honor.
The second one broke out due to a really insane ideology, that although talked about resources, time and time again took resources from the war itself for its death apparatus
TL;DR: throughout history several countries got super wealthy by stealing other countries' shit at gunpoint, which went out of fashion after WW2, and then had to find other avenues for less obvious colonial-like theft, usually involving toppling leaders thorough coups and installing their own puppets in place who would gladly sign off on their country's resources for pennies to large western corporations
> stealing other countries' shit at gunpoint, which went out of fashion after WW2
It didn’t go out of fashion. Industrialization made wars of conquest unprofitable by 1890-1910 or so, and it took the world that long to get a clue. (Russia, notably, still hasn’t figured it out.) If you build one factory, you make money; if you build an army to steal your neighbor’s factory, most likely you both get zero factories.
in the long and interesting book "The Taking of Getty Oil" and partly in a second book "History of International Corporations in the 20th Century" (title?) they specifically talk about a post-colonial approach to oil contracts, specifically the formation of Aaramco (sp?) the National Oil of Saudi Arabia.. the US and the US Intelligence Agencies exactly and specifically created agreements with local rulers to avoid the British methods from a century earlier. This is not to say that the same US Intelligence supported local democracy, or the established rulers, without conditions -- instead the perception of the agreement, and the levers of control, and where the money went in what proportions, where changed knowingly.
You never start a war to gain some bombed-to-shit factories or barren deserts, you start wars to gain control of valuable land with resources and more easily defensible borders, get control of lucrative trade routes, and gain workers(slaves) and natural resources for your own factories.
Of course, it's much easier and cheaper these days to use your intelligence services to stage a coup in that country so that your corporations can get their bananas for free, or, planting fake WMD intelligence at the UN so you can justify going in guns blazing and your corporations can make money through weapons sales, oil extraction, logistics and reconstruction on the back of taxpayers and the intelligence services by running heroin to fund their black ops.
> you start wars to gain control of valuable land with resources and more easily defensible borders, get control of lucrative trade routes, and gain workers(slaves) and natural resources for your own factories
In modern warfare, you don’t get these for free. If you’re trying to yoink from a fellow nation-state, you risk your own factories being bombed. If you’re up against a less sophisticated foe, you still sacrifice industrial production and diplomatic goodwill in excess of any base resource gains.
It’s cheaper and more fruitful to trade for those goods than it is to steal them. (Coups are no exception. They disrupt the economy and jeopardise the security situation. Much simpler to trade with Tehran than try for a coup that doesn’t result in civil war or blowback.)
Which tends to have effects similar to what you've described. Land that isn't near a potential threat can be invested in much more heavily. Borders are easier to defend, etc.
But improvement to existing resources tends to be more attractive to those with the most resources already.
Other sibling comments have answered this one better, but I’ll just add: one TSMC fab is worth more than the entire natural resources of some countries. And those “slaves” you mention are also called an insurgency, which is very expensive to deal with.
> Industrialization made wars of conquest unprofitable by 1890-1910 or so, and it took the world that long to get a clue
To wit:
“…much of [balance-of-power politics] theory was based on agrarian states or early industrial states. And one of the features of agrarian interstate relations was that returns to war outpaced returns to capital, which is a fancy way of saying you could get richer, faster by conquest than by development. Under those sorts of conditions, most powers were going to be, in some form, ‘revisionist’ powers because most powers would have something to gain by attacking a weaker neighbor and seizing their resources (mostly arable land and peasant farmers to be taxed). Indeed that basic interaction creates much of the ‘churn’ of interstate anarchy: everyone has an incentive to prey on their neighbors, creating the dog-eat-dog brutality of interstate interactions. The only countries without such an interest would be countries that were very small and weak, seeking to avoid being absorbed themselves.
But, as we’ve discussed, industrialization changes all of this: the net returns to war are decreased (because industrial war is so destructive and lethal) while the returns to capital investment get much higher due to rising productivity. In the pre-industrial past, fighting a war to get productive land was many times more effective than investing in irrigation and capital improvements to your own land, assuming you won the war. But in the industrial world, fighting a war to get a factory is many, many less times more effective than just building a new factory at home, especially since the war is very likely to destroy the factory in the first place. This was not always the case! The great wealth of many countries and indeed industrialization itself was built on resources acquired through imperial expansion; now the cost of that acquisition is higher than simply buying the stuff. War is no longer a means to profit, but an emergency response to avoid otherwise certain extreme losses.
So whereas in the old system, almost every power except potentially the hegemon, had something to potentially gain by upending the stability of the system, the economics of modern production means that quite a lot of countries will have absolutely nothing to gain from a war, even a successful one. Now that dispassionate calculation has arguably been true for more than a century; the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery, slaughter and destruction of a major power war. Subsequent conflicts have reinforced this lesson again and again, yet conflicts continue to occur. Azar Gat argues in part that this is because humans are both evolved in our biology (and thus patterns of thinking and emotion) as well as our social institutions, for warfare and aggression. We have to unlearn those instincts and redesign those institutions and this process is slow and uneven.”
In every war, someone gains something, but War on Terror was detrimental to the US as a whole, and the American population understands that - which is why the hawks are really unpopular right now. The defeat of H.C. in 2016 can at least partly be explained by the fact that she was considered a foreign policy hawk.
Compare this to wars of Ancient Rome which were actually popular, because they brought home visible wealth.
> yet the "war on terror" happened. US companies gained a lot from that even if the average taxpayer didn't
The War on Terror, and invasion of Iraq, were massive American policy failures. (The article I quoted says as much.) Had Xi not become a dictator and Putin not invaded Crimea and then the rest of Ukraine, American hegemony would be on a downturn as a result of those fumbles.
The stockholders who have seen a third against since 2006?
You’re dragging a red herring. In the past, conquest was popular because it made the conqueror as a whole rich. Today, you’re limited to scratching out whatabouts with one-off and dated examples like Halliburton. The circle of net beneficiaries rivals that of botched aid operations.
Industry has made war, proper war, almost universally stupid for advanced societies.
Extra points if your colonialism exploits an internecine conflict such that it appears that internal problems of the country, rather than exogenous meddling with state or tribal sovereignty, led to it's failure to govern (reinforcing how "correct" your form of government is)
His son was the American general that led the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm/Shield.