[BelenusMordred]

Can you provide some examples? Are Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos better off because of US interventionism in the 70's?

You can't walk around Cambodia without seeing a bunch of legless people who stepped on landmines. Huge swathes of land is unusable because the country has the most unexploded ordinance on Earth from a war that never existed on the books and certainly not in the minds of the public.

The sheer arrogance of enforcing your morals and telling people what is best for themselves with the barrel of a gun. None of this stuff is about democracy or western values, it's all about money and power.

[slashdev]

It was never about democracy really, it was all about containing Soviet influence and the spread of communism. Which had little to do with democracy directly and a lot to do with drawing battle lines and trying to keep the other side from gaining too much power.

In hindsight it is easy to say it was pointless, because the USSR imploded. However, at the time with the USSR looking strong and expanding influence rapidly internationally, that was not at all clear.

And I imagine you don't think it would have been best to allow the USSR to gain a strategic advantage over the West.

[1986]

I would urge you to read Legacy of Ashes, if you haven't, to get a sense of just how poor US intelligence on the USSR was at the time, and how that impacted policy. One gets the sense that the vast majority of these secret or undeclared wars were driven by a few die hard anti communists who manipulated or manufactured evidence to support their crusade - and to a large extent the USSR "looked strong" largely because it suited them for it to look strong, not because it really was.

[slashdev]

Whether that's true or not, the way they were spreading communism throughout Asia and Africa was alarming. The US policy of containment was definitely not the right one in hindsight, but it's very difficult to make the case that it was clearly the wrong thing to do at the time - and decisions are not not made with the benefit of hindsight, nor is it fair to judge them that way.

It's very common to say later, that decision I made was a mistake, but if I was in that same situation with the knowledge I had at the time, I'd still make the mistake.

[BelenusMordred]

And yet Wahhabism is being blatantly pushed across the globe by the Saudis with not a word from the US or it's allies?

I like to hope they are actually doing something in the shadows to stop the spread of such extreme ideologies but there's a part of me that thinks the Western world has no problem with it occurring. Just another war and another enemy to fight down the track.

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