By David Brooks on August 15, 2022
photo: Evo Morales
The White House’s Western Hemisphere envoy told a forum in Cartagena last week that “40 years ago the United States would have done everything possible to prevent the election of Gustavo Petro,” and once someone like him was in power, “it would have done almost everything possible to sabotage his government. But those were Cold War policies, he argued, and today for the U.S. government, “ideology no longer matters”… but only if a government is “democratically elected and governs democratically”.
Some highlighted the “honesty” of Juan Gonzalez’s statement and welcomed the message that Washington will no longer seek to intervene in other countries because of “ideological” differences. But for others, it only confirmed that Washington continues to proclaim that it is judge and jury on who is democratic or not, and behind that, it maintains its implicit right to intervene.
And in fact, the United States not only continues to intervene around the world but, if we are talking only about military interventions, it is doing so more frequently than ever in the post-Cold War era, that is, in the last 40 years.
The United States has made nearly 400 military interventions-defined as those that include both deployments and threats of force, covert and other low-profile operations-from 1776 to the present. Half of those interventions occurred between 1950 and 2019, and more than a quarter of the total occurred since the end of the Cold War according to new research from the Military Intervention Project (MIP) at Tufts University summarized in Responsible Statecraft.
Of the total military interventions, 34 percent were against Latin American and Caribbean countries, according to MIP. The directors of that project point out that “with the end of the Cold War era, it was expected that the United States would have reduced its military interventions abroad… but these patterns reveal the opposite. The United States has increased its military involvement abroad.” (https://sites.tufts.edu/css/mip-research/)
All this does not include other traditional forms of intervention in other countries such as intelligence operations, and projects to support opposition forces within other countries that, under various justifications and disguises, use Washington funds not only to influence the internal politics of their countries, but in the fully documented cases of Cuba and Venezuela, among others, in order to promote “regime change” to this day.
Would Washington accept programs promoted by other governments to influence their internal politics, including encouraging political dissidence and even direct actions for the purpose of promoting “regime change”? Would it accept that other countries invest millions of dollars in new centers and NGOs within their territory dedicated to judging and promoting changes in their Constitution, in their justice system, in civil and human rights issues? Perhaps direct assistance should be offered to the United States for the defense of its democracy which is now under existential threat.
Perhaps it is time for opponents of interventionism around the world to reconnect with anti-imperialist figures and forces within the United States throughout its history, including the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who spoke out against the war against Mexico in the mid-19th century; Mark Twain, who helped found the Anti-Imperialist League at the end of that century, followed by Emma Goldman, Helen Keller and socialist leader Eugene Debs against the imperial game of World War I, and decades later with anti-imperialist Martin Luther King during Vietnam, and more recently the countless opponents of U.S. interventions in South and Central America, the Middle East and Africa over the past 40 years, and thereby together proclaiming that the judges of democracy must be the people, not those with the most dollars and guns.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US