Illuminatus Primus wrote:Guardsman Bass wrote:If by "intervened" you mean "gave Benito Juarez and his government-in-exile shelter and sold them weapons."
And the rest? That's what I thought.
I wasn't justifying the Mexican-American War, although it was more complicated than "the US mugs Mexico for half its land" (California was in open revolt during the war and slightly before it, and not necessarily at US instigation).
Guardsman Bass wrote:The US pushed them towards NAFTA and greater liberalization, but realistically, what choice did Mexico have at the time? They had little capability for further spending after the crisis in 1982 (following a period in which they ran up a huge amount of debt borrowed against their oil reserves, which lost most of their value when the bottom fell out of the price on oil in the early 1980s). On top of that, the economic model that has worked pretty well for them after World War 2 - a version of Import Substitution Industrialization along with the ejido system in agriculture - had been stagnating for over a decade (which was a major reason as to why the Mexican government ramped up spending in the 1970s).
The rural communities, of course, didn't like it, because while they'd been impoverished under the ejido, they'd had some minimal form of sustenance plus some government pay-offs and funding. The Zapatistas liked it even less, for much the same reason.
All this just is about my point that only with great historical ignorance one can paint Mexico as grossly irresponsible purely on the back of its own responsibility, and then go on to advocate stuff like invasion and occupation as has been done in this thread. Furthermore, the liberalization policies promoted by the U.S. have been an outright failure throughout the developing world - the postwar success stories, Western Europe, the Asian Tigers, China, et al, all benefits from significant foriegn aid and protectionist policies. In many ways they reflected the opposite of the Washington Consensus. I don't think its unfair at all to suggest those policies exist for Western profits specifically at the expense of developing countries, more or less hapless before enormous market power by Western companies and overwhelming Western and specifically U.S. international political power.
Well, technically, the Mexican government
was grossly irresponsible in the 1970s with regards to their economy - they ran up a vast amount of debt borrowing against their oil reserves, which basically amounted to a faith that oil prices would never have a serious drop leaving them holding the bag. Western political power or not, they
were going to be stuck doing austerity measures in the 1980s one way or another if they didn't want to completely default on their debt.
As for the Washington Consensus, it's much easier in hindsight to point out that many of its precepts were wrong, and often cookie-cutter molds of ideas that were originally applied to help Latin America deal with the crisis of 1982 (Mexico wasn't the only country suffering issues with serious inflation, massive public debt, and highly inefficient state companies). But at the time, it wasn't totally obvious that Export-Led Industrialization was
the model, particularly since some of the big success stories - Japan and Western Europe after World War 2 - had other things going for them that might have explained the success.
I don't think they were intended solely to benefit western countries, but naturally, the western countries (and particularly the United States) believed they would benefit economically if the developing countries adopted these policies. That's to be expected, since business plays a role in shaping US foreign policy, and you usually can't entirely separate policies from the countries advocating them.
As for
Guardsman Bass wrote:We've done plenty of that (recognizing the Mexican right to self-determination), particularly after the 1930s (the US government, for example, did nothing when Cardenas nationalized the largely US company-owned oil industry in Mexico, against calls from said industry for intervention). There's been plenty of indirect influencing, but every nation does that with regards to its neighbors.
Its still hypocrisy when one nation is largely subject to the undesired influence of the other in a one way fashion for the wealthy powerful nation to squeal that the poor one should have developed better.
Not unless you believe that the bigger country's influence was negative, meaning that the bigger country was hobbling the smaller country and then blaming the latter for its failure. That varied before the 1930s between heavily negative and possibly good, but the US influence was, by and large, neutral or even beneficial to Mexico after that period until the 1980s (they basically let Mexico do their thing economically, with some US companies setting up local branches in Mexico, like Coca-Cola). After that, it's more debated, but as I pointed out, a lot of the policy Mexico adopted in the 1980s was stuff they were more or less stuck doing due to the mistakes they'd made earlier. NAFTA is a trickier issue as to whether or not it was good for Mexico, particularly since it wasn't the only trade liberalization that was affecting the Mexican economy (the rise of cheap Chinese imports had a major effect on the Mexican economy as well during much of the same period).
Illuminatus Primus wrote: How would the U.S. thereafter treat it if China sent troops to occupy a key port with the Chinese President declaring he'd teach them to elect good men? Can anyone even imagine how mainstream media or history narratives would treat such events if any other nation indulged them?
Are you saying that the US had no right to respond to actual attacks on its territory by one of the major factions in the Mexican civil war at the time? Like I said, this wasn't part of some greater conflict between the US and Mexico - Villa started it in the case of the Punitive Expedition, and then ran for it once he actually started to face consequences for those actions. It was not some retaliatory measure for the Veracruz Invasion, since Villa was a US ally at the time.
Illuminatus Primus wrote:1873-96 is not today.
You were the one who brought up grievances going back well over a century, to the Mexican-American War.
Illuminatus Primus wrote: The Korean War was not some sort of knight-in-shining armor rescue mission by the do-gooder U.S.
Who is pretending it was? It was the US backing up its client state in South Korea against the Soviet client state in the north. That said, the mission had wide-spread UN support outside of the Soviet bloc.
Illuminatus Primus wrote: The U.S. instituted a military occupation government that violently suppressed the indigenous resistance movements, and harshly imposed a military dictatorship with the aim of preventing reunification, and this process killed thousands of people before the outbreak of the Korean War.
So, basically you're bitching over the fact that the US wasn't exactly cotton on the idea of the South Korean government re-unifying with a Soviet-installed northern government when it would have meant a communist government, in a period when they were trying to prevent the spread of communism? What a shock. Not that the Soviets themselves were saints, seeing as how they set up a puppet government to push for a unified, communist country that would be a Soviet satellite.
The morality of those decisions at the time is, of course, not affected by the historical outcomes. That said, there's a reason why we distinguish between "brutal but probably beneficial in the long-term" and "unnecessarily brutal" in history - I think a strong argument can be made that in hindsight, the US actions were the former, since the result was far better than if the entire peninsula had ended up as a larger DPRK shithole.
Maybe you would like to explain Russia's interference into Georgia's affairs?
