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It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.
If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.
It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.
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