Foreign Policy
HEGE Series
Foreign relations of the United States | Wikipedia
21st Century Statecraft
See —
Covert Action Magazine
John Pilger
Government, Military, Cold War, Politics, Conservatism, Liberalism
US Foreign Policy can be summed up as Anti-Communism from World War II to the end of the Cold War, and Liberal Hegemony ever since then.
“During the 1940s and 1950s, corrupt politicians championed the politics of anti-communism in order to divert attention from the growing nexus between organized crime, big business and government.”
— Jonathan Marshall
See — Michael Woodiwiss, John Loftus, Corporations, Capitalism, McCarthyism, “Creeping Socialism”
Foreign policy of the United States | Wikipedia
Criticism of United States foreign policy | Wikipedia
Americans' views of foreign policy —
In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp Divides in Both Partisan Coalitions | 2019 Pew Research Center
Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class
The United States Needs a New Foreign Policy
The History They Don’t Teach You in School: U.S. and Russia Have a Long History of Collaboration
U.S. Government and Politics in Principle and Practice Democracy, Rights, Freedoms and Empire | CUNY Chapter Six: Introduction to U.S. Foreign Policy Economic Interests Historically, the United States has intervened in sovereign nations culturally, diplomatically, covertly and militarily on behalf of U.S. businesses. U.S. corporations often influence U.S. foreign policy, with U.S. business leaders guiding the President’s actions. Historically, U.S. Presidents have depended on private businesses to arm U.S. troops and advise Presidents on regions where they have investments. Large corporations upset that they were losing profits contacted officials in the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to overthrow the progressive governments of Iran and Guatemala that were demanding more control over their own nations’ resources. U.S. corporations, the CIA and U.S. government officials pushed the U.S. media to cover these coups in a way that justified U.S. intervention. By and large, the media complied. President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala and Prime Minister Muhammed Mosaddegh of Iran, both intent on reclaiming their nation’s economic sovereignty, were replaced with dictators who made it their priority to protect U.S. financial interests, generally at the expense of their nation’s poor. ... Because of the United States’ status as the most powerful nation in the world, the foreign policy of the United States deeply impacts the global community. Unfortunately for much of the globe, U.S. foreign policy is generally guided by U.S. economic and geopolitical interests, as opposed to improving the lives of people around the world. [See — Albert E. Burke, Cuba: The Battle of America] Overtime social movements have been able to curb some of the ambitions of warmongers within the U.S. government. However, dissent in times of war has time and again been criminalized by the U.S. government, with activists punished for speaking out.
Modernization Theory
Modernization theory | Wikipedia
Lucian Pye | Wikipedia
The Jakarta Method
The Jakarta Method | Wikipedia
“The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World is a 2020 political history book by American journalist and author Vincent Bevins. It concerns U.S. government support for and complicity in anti-communist mass killings around the world and their aggregate consequences from the Cold War until the present era. The title is a reference to Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, during which an estimated one million people were killed in an effort to destroy the political left and movements for government reform in the country.>br>
The book goes on to describe subsequent replications of the strategy of mass murder, against government reform and economic reform movements in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. The killings in Indonesia by the American-backed Indonesian forces were so successful in culling the left and economic reform movements that the term "Jakarta" was later used to refer to the genocidal aspects of similar later plans implemented by other authoritarian capitalist regimes with the assistance of the United States.”
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World 2020 | Amazon
For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn't actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren't backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn't know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources. We played our own sports [at the 1963 GANEFO Games of the New Emerging Forces], put on our own dances. This was really an awakening for us. It felt like this was what the West had been trying so hard to keep down, for centuries, and it was finally revealed. — Francisca Pattipilohy, daughter of an Indonesian architect who experienced the colonial aggressions first of the Dutch and later the Japanese during World War II
America’s Cold War Crimes Abroad Are Still Shaping Our World
JFK
See — JFK Assassination, Conservatism
Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’État over Foreign Policy?
Liberal Hegemony
Legacy of Empire — Rome - Spain - Great Britain - USA They make a desolation and call it peace. Robbers of the world [the Romans], having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace. — Calgacus, ancient Scots chieftain (said of Roman Empire) Liberal hegemony | Wikipedia Support for liberal hegemonic strategies among major thinkers in both political parties helps explain the broad elite support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 intervention in Libya, even though U.S. military involvement in those conflicts had been initiated by presidents of different parties. The chief difference on foreign policy between Republican and Democratic proponents of liberal hegemony, according to Posen, is on support for international institutions as a means to achieving hegemony.
Liberal international order | Wikipedia
Why Liberal Hegemony?
“Liberal Hegemony” Is a Straw Man
— "Academic “realists” are guilty of intellectual overreach in their critique of international overreach."
"Straw Man" is a bit of overreach itself, but needed qualification of liberal hegemony is point taken. Nevertheless, in the end the point of liberal hegemony is much the same — international overreach.
North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) | Wikipedia
A New World Order Imagined: the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment's Invention of "Rogue States"
BRICS
a geopolitical bloc, intergovernmental economic organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, formed in 2010 by the addition of South Africa to its predecessor called BRIC, challenger to US global liberal hegemony
BRICS | Wikipedia
Meet the BRICS' "New Development Bank" | Corbett Report 089/29/2014
William Blum
No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine. — William Blum, Former US State Department employee
William Blum | Wikipedia
America's Deadliest Export: Democracy, the Truth About US Foreign Policy, and Everything Else
WilliamBlum.org
The Anti-Empire Report
Barry Posen
Barry Posen | Wikipedia
Primacy vs. selective engagement | Wikipedia
Barry Posen, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes the activist U.S. foreign policy that continues to define U.S. strategy in the twenty-first century is an "undisciplined, expensive, and bloody strategy" that has done more harm than good to U.S. national security. "It makes enemies almost as fast as it slays them, discourages allies from paying for their own defense, and convinces powerful states to band together and oppose Washington's plans, further raising the costs of carrying out its foreign policy." The United States was able to afford such adventurism during the 1990s, Posen argues, because American power projection was completely unchallenged. Over the last decade [2000-2010], however, American power has been relatively declining while the Pentagon continues to "depend on continuous infusions of cash simply to retain its current force structure—levels of spending that the Great Recession and the United States' ballooning debt have rendered unsustainable."
Stephen Walt
Stephen Walt | Wikipedia
America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy According to Stephen Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at HKS, both Democrats and Republicans have been misguided in their pursuit of liberal hegemony. What would better serve U.S. interests? How should the United States focus its military commitments?
There’s No Such Thing as Good Liberal Hegemony It’s not just that the United States has made mistakes—the very idea of U.S. global leadership is broken from the ground up.
John J. Mearsheimer
John Mearsheimer | Wikipedia
The False Promise of Liberal Hegemony | YouTube
The Roots of Liberal Hegemony | YouTube
Morris Berman
Adam Curtis
See — Adam Curtis -
The Power of Nightmares
The Trap
It Felt Like A Kiss
Bitter Lake