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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Was it really wise to hector the Saudis about LGBT continuously?

Is the hectoring of foreign governments on behalf of sexual minorities beneficial to US policy objectives anywhere? It doesn't seem to be winning many friends in Africa or Asia either, except for vocal degenerates. I've thought this was signaling for domestic alphabet people and their allies.

progressive PMC types

Domestic alphabet people, and their allies.

There were a number of reasons not to prop-up the English, anti-colonialism may have been one. For Suez wanting to avoid escalation and Soviet involvement certainly pictured.

I was happier when our PMC were pushing, free enterprise, free speech and freedom of religion.

alphabet people

In both ways even.

It’s the same reason that people like Eisenhower refused to prop up the British or French empires after WW2, because they genuinely believed that America, as a former colony itself, must be on the “anti colonial” side.

Sometimes the west does stuff for ideological reasons, though just as or more often because of realpolitik. To pettily focus on just one part of your post, having just read his biography, Eisenhower (and the mid-century foreign policy blob in general) really didn't side against Britain and France in Suez for ideological reasons, but rather because:

1: He didn't want to lose undecided countries to become Soviet allies following the terrible PR of the invasion getting condemned everywhere.

2: To diffuse a situation that at worst could have spiraled towards nuclear war following the Soviet Union threatening to do anything to get them out - and the USSR was genuinely desperate to rehabilitate it's anti-imperialist credentials right after all the bad press they were getting from crushing the Hungarian uprising

3: Britain and France lied to the US about their intentions and plans and had their diplomats intentionally deceive ours while launching a military strategy we had expressly forbidden. If you're gonna be the hegemon you can't be tolerating that.

As for Vietnam, America just didn't want another Korean War.

Remember, this is the same guy who signed orders to coup anti-colonial leaders in between rounds of golf, he didn't identify with their movement.

Completely agreed Roosevelt had an unusual commitment to decolonization, but what about Nixon stands out to you? (past like the same kind of empty-but-supportive debate rhetoric that Kennedy also made when they were first running - and Kennedy of course went on to write up the interventions against the DR and Brazil later launched under LBJ). Insofar as Nixon's policies wrt colonization are memorable to me it's in the "Tar Baby" strategy of supporting the colonial-relic white minority governments in Southern Africa, even against growing domestic public sentiment in the US. His posture there feels like the opposite of "ideological impulse rather than practicality as necessary or if necessary".

Otherwise no huge objection - America did want to end colonialism and contributed somewhat towards hastening its end, I just don't think it was really all that important to us? The strongest direct actions I think we took were opposing Salazar and threatening to boot the Netherlands out of the Marshall plan if they didn't leave Indonesia - the rest was just not directly getting involved in the Empires' counter-revolutionary wars, which I think is too tall an ask for America fresh out of several wars.

Sometimes we ignored colonialism, sometimes we supported it in ways (sending Britain funds in Malaya and France materiel in Vietnam). When and where we did oppose colonialism feels for me less driven by ideology than by the same issues of Suez repeated elsewhere: weakening potential rivals and bolstering our credentials with the various non-aligned countries during the Cold War. If we truly felt ourselves to be kindred spirits with the other colonies, it's a little strange that we didn't feel dissonance putting those kindred spirits under new dictators that replicated the worst aspects of colonial rule - as long as they now reported back to us. As in, there might have been people that felt motivated by ideology, but it was a an ideology of such a self-serving sort that it's hard to distinguish from what someone would have done motivated by realpolitik alone.

I will read your link though (it may have answered my questions), I'm just trying to find a non-jstor version of it.