Stop me if you've heard this one.
One of the problems with US foreign policy is that it is far too closely tied to US economic interests (in this case, reacting to a nationalization of Iran's oil industry), and thus acts on their behalf, not on behalf of any ideals or considered interests in the matter.
The answer is not to withdraw from the world, of course — that path just allows genocide, if nothing else. But our engagement with the world needs to be something more thougthful than it is. It's not that being the world's policeman is a problem — if we were really acting on behalf of international law and order — but that we're more often the world's mall cop, kicking people around because the shop owners don't like them there. Not surprisingly, that rarely ends well.
Embedded Link
Sixty years later, CIA admits role in Iran coup – The Hill’s Global Affairs
The National Security Archive on Monday published evidence of the CIA’s long-known role in the 1953 Iran coup that helped pave the way for the Islamic revolution 26 years later. The newly declassified material is believed to contain the CIA’s first public acknowledgment of its role in deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq after he nationalized the country’s oil industry.
I'm a huge fan of the US returning to the decade of Isolationism we experienced in the 1930s.
Bring the troops home. Spend the reduced DoD budget to retrain them as engineers and as "people who build the things what engineers engineer". Spend DoD budget commensurate with protecting our borders from invasion by Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and (digitally) China.
Yes, genocide will happen.
But it's happening today, and we're not doing much about it. We're very, very focused on places where genocide isn't happening, though.
Given how that decade of isolation ended, I'm not sure I can agree with you, +Jonathon Barton. There has to be a middle ground between isolationism and imperialism.
I don't really see the causal connection between the two things, however.
If we apply current US doctrine to that situation, in the '40's we more likely would have let Germany have their little genocide party, and would have been heavily invested in overthrowing legitimate governments of European client nations in a path of African and South American expansion, where our economic growth interests lie.
It's hard retconning present policy to the circumstances of seventy years ago — but while I have distinct problems with modern US foreign policy, I think the US would be somewhat more likely today to intervene in a clear genocide than it was then, and certainly to halt an aggressive European war (for the sake of economic security).