[noduerme]

> warlords needing to seize power

Really? They needed to? And if these individuals needed to destroy their country in order to save it, that is also the West's fault for providing the population some encouragement to overthrow the last warlord?

[s1artibartfast]

I think that is a very interesting question. Do you have any moral culpability if you encourage people two points there are country into chaos and messed up, but for a noble cause. If you encourage people to revolt and they all die, is that blood on your hands or should you pat yourself on the back

[noduerme]

Well, they didn't die because they revolted. They're dying because two guys are conducting a street to street war.

Which is more condescending and neocolonial: To believe (hopefully) that a country may be able to hold onto a democracy, or to think they're incapable and will inevitably fall into chaos?

My only original point was simply that this chaos wasn't the aim of the West - nor does it benefit anyone. But I always find these arguments that the West is responsible deny agency to the actors on the ground. Surely these two men realize that house to house fighting is not good for the people they wish to rule, and they don't give a flying fuck. To say their "need" to wage war is just a secondary or tertiary result of Western interference is to say thay all their actions are merely reactions, and has overtones of the worst colonial racism. At least the American policy of promoting democracy relies on hope for a more prosperous life, which is powerful enough on an individual level to overcome fear.

To answer your question, a polity can only do its best to promote its position and try to gain friends and allies. The American revolutionary cry of "Liberty or Death" goes a fair way toward absolving us of hypocrisy in promoting popular revolution in service of self government. People don't have popular revolutions without believing in what they're fighting for; the North Vietnamese didn't, nor did the Potemkin sailors.

One of our most shameful hours was failing to defend the uprising we promoted in Hungary in 1956. Yet if we had, the narrative against us would have been that we intervened with arms against some wildly popular communism we had fomented some fascists to fight against. We get no credit for the ones we won, that are thriving in their independence, like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, all of Western Europe.

Hah. I'm ranting.

Like your username btw.

[amw]

The West invests money in things that it expects to see generate a return. Sometimes this results in the Marshall Plan, a massive development effort whose main strategic goal was to isolate newly allied Russia and China in the post-WWII era, and gave the foundation forward strongholds for capitalism could use to thrive at the doorstep of the powers challenging our assertion of a ruling world order.

(Never mind what Chiang Kai-Shek was doing to the citizens under his government-in-exile. Never mind that killing some 200k people in a nuclear conflagration in Japan was already known to be unnecessary, and that those people died as a simple show of force against the USSR. Never mind that the Korean War that devastated that country didn't have to ever be fought in the first place. The Bad Communists™ must be fought.)

Usually, the investments don't have those happy endings--I don't think anyone who frequents this site could be completely blind to the abysmal record US interventions have for world stability and economic development, that three relative successes in that mass of bloody failure counts as barely a drop in the bucket.

Finally, I think taking statements about the CIA or NED or the Open Society Foundation or Radio Free Asia or VOC (etc, etc, etc) doing the work they do as statements that "remove local agency" misunderstand how the "West" works: Nobody in the countries that color revolutions happen in has to be given orders from the CIA to make their own country a horrible place to live, the investment is always structured as finding the people _most_ willing to seek an extreme solution and amplifying their voice and reach further than it would get on its own, if left to itself in the local context. We always propagandize this as "supporting democracy", but we absolutely know that a reverse effort of a theoretical CPC-affiliated NGO funding some adventurist Commie group with millions in ad funding and logistical support would be treated as an enemy attack against our government, and that that treatment would _be correct_.