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Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop
Whether one is for or against a sort of forced, crass American hegemony is not an indicator of broader ideology; there are Liberals and Conservatives for it (see, for example, neoconservatives), and Liberals and Conservatives against it (Paleoconservatives, for example)...
If you want a great example of some archconservatives who are against this crass Hegemony, look up the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan, etc...
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i realize this, and if this were a board full of ron paul supporters or some **** like that then i would've geared it towards them more. but my perception of this board is that leftist ideology tends to dominate here so i geared it towards that audience.
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WW2 did not have a clear aggressor in the European Theater. Britain and France made a promise to defend Polish Sovereignty; when Poland was invaded by the USSR and NSDAP, they only declared war on one of those countries for a reason.
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well, i didn't actually say ww2 had a clear aggressor, my point was more that based on modern liberal values, it's pretty easy to justify using the military to dismantle the fascist regimes of germany, italy and japan. you might say there's some moral dilemma in not targeting the soviets, but i guess that's where you have to apply a bit of realism and make due with the fact that a moral imperative with no pragmatic chance of being acted upon is on its own, pretty much meaningless.
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As to the notion that Roosevelt some how "egged on" Japan; that's bull****. Banning oil exports to Japan was not provocative in design or execution. It was, at worst, benign realpolitik; that Japan responded to a goddamned oil embargo with a military assault just revealed their idiotic, Fascistic agenda.
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here we'll just have to disagree. because the embargo basically left japan in an untenable position which, if you are being both intellectually honest and on-the-ball with regard to anticipating a rival's strategic response, you would expect that warfare would start to look like the most promising way forward. it's not like japan didn't make diplomatic attempts to get on better terms with the united states. those attempts were rejected. basically you gave them the choice of abandoning their basic strategic ambitions vs going to war. if that's not provocative, when dealing with imperial powers, then i really don't know what is, other than launching an outright attack.
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The notion that geopolitical powers act in their own self interest is not, at all, in conflict with the notion that the USA is overextended, over-involved, and over-invested in a seemingly never ending list of countries that are of little to no geopolitical significance.
Further, when considering that opinion, it is imperative you keep in mind that Democracies are not a singularity but a plurality. Whereas Dictatorships are able to, somewhat, focus their foreign policy agenda, the foreign policies of Democracies are almost inevitably piecemeal and contradictory. This is because of the reality of the mobility, organized efficiency, and plurality of various special interest groups - which includes groups who have as their focus environmental, cultural, foreign policy, and economic concerns. Consequently, we get cluster****s such as, say, the current MidEast policy (or lack thereof).
MidEast aside (as that's too easy), I'll give you an easy example of how this forced Hegemony is both counterproductive and harmful to the States' real interest - Korea. Economically, it makes no sense to both subsidize South Korea's military/government and provide a guarantee to their independence when they are directly competing with the USA in several key markets (see Automotive and the ****boxes that country is pumping out) while their main rival, North Korea, is economically and military irrelevant from an American perspective.
The real realpolitik perspective on Korea (and Japan, the RoC vs PRC debacle, etc.) isn't the ludicrous extension of post-cold war subsidies to these governments; it's recognizing that if Seoul got nuked by Pyongyang, the practical effects on the USA would be negligible at worst and actually beneficial to the States' economy if you want to be practical about it.
Unfortunately, various special interest groups have discovered that it's actually possible to get the USA to act against it's interests in this area. Why? Because Senators are cheap, and the American cultural acceptance of foreign entanglements as beneficial. Some groups sell these entanglements as beneficial to human rights to liberals; some groups sell these entanglements as better for america's naked interest.
I propose, alternatively, that these entanglements benefit a small subsection of American society, and that these entanglements represent the most visible, harmful, and accepted sort of corruption in our these united states. It takes some bizarre logic to compute how it makes sense for a GM Employee in, say, Flint Michigan is best served having taxes taken out of his paycheck to subsidize the governments of Japan, Korea, etc....
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TL R - how on earth is it in line with realpolitik to give your citizens money to a foreign nation, to help that nation buy and build a military and economy which competes with your own?
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well, tbh i think the way you're framing it, it sounds like you think i'm saying the united states govt is just dedicated to providing the best lifestyle for their citizens, which is clearly not the case. i mean just look at the way our country is run domestically.
now i won't lie, i don't know enough about the global economy to sit here and debate with you the pros and cons of subsidizing the korean economy from an ecnonomic pov, and i'm not even doubting that their are inefficiencies as a result of personal favors between certain powerful personalities etc. but all i see from what you're describing is the US basically sacrificing some domestic ambitions in trying to maintain military hegemony in a key part of the globe. which, as a military super power, is probably not a bad strategy.
basically what i'm saying is if you say we don't need to maintain this dominance and just let powers manifest as they will, then you are more likely to run into some actual rivals that can challenge your position. so from a strategic pov, it's better to maintain that hegemony. not that it will be better for every american or anything like that. to me thats just not the way the world works. people move and act on self interest. and since the military is basically the foundation on which a civilization is built, i think military strategy always a relevant consideration for any civilization.
edit - to expand a bit on the nuking of sk scenario... keep in mind what sk and nk represent... basically strategic relics of the cold war, when the US had an actual (almost) rival. so that situation manifested in that context, but now at this point there's no hope of diplomatic unity with nk so basically they have to continue to manage this little belligerent troll they helped create. but also they always want to have some decent leverage with japan and china. because those two countries, left on their own, each have some potential to become a strategic rival. so really the whole globalization of the economy, that interdependence that the united states, europe, and asia have with each other is decent platform for relative stability. and since ww2 i honestly think the nation states of the world have done a good job of providing just that, under US hegemonic/imperialistic rule. but let there come a situation where there is a serious military rival with conflicting interests that can't seem to be resolved diplomatically... and then we'll see how meaningful the UN actually is imo.