You meddle too much

Posted by Bob Janova at 1:50pm Mar 9 '13
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You think that 'freedom and democracy' means 'free market capitalism and American presidential democracy', and you go into countries that aren't doing things the way you think they should be done, and force them to change. You don't realise that your viewpoint, particularly on economics, is right at the fringe of global opinion (pretty much every other developed country in the world has a more leftist view of the role of free markets and the state than you do).

You are also extremely hypocritical. You like to say that you "oppose human rights violators", and yet you prop up states like Saudi Arabia, you do business with Kyrgystan and Turkmenistan, you protect Israel from international opinion, you reject the right of the Chagos islanders to have their home back because you want a base there, and you support the opening up of markets in water, electricity and other services in foreign countries so that your own companies can profit from them, negatively affecting the people in question. Your actions appear only ever to be for your own interests, and you use your allies to further them, only rarely doing anything to help your allies where it does not directly help yourselves too.

Here in Britain a particularly sore point is the long term unwillingness of the US to cooperate regarding our one serious security threat, the IRA in Northern Ireland – a lot of its funding came from Americans, who are still protected from being prosecuted for supporting terrorism. More recently you threw the rulebook at BP over the Deepwater Horizon incident, even though the US companies Transocean and Halliburton were equally, or more, at fault.

Even at home, you don't subscribe to the human rights agenda: you execute people (something that you frequently criticise the likes of Iran for) and you still have institutional disenfranchisement of minorities (albeit not formalised any more).

You preach free trade and open markets, demanding them in exchange for investment, yet you subsidise your own industries, and erect import tariffs to protect your own market. You demand access to the business market in other countries, allowing you to take over and wreck companies like Cadbury, and yet it is almost impossible for foreigners to run a company in the US.

Most people elsewhere in the world don't buy the good/evil line that comes out of US politics. (Do Americans actually believe that stuff?) There is always nuance in situations like Syria. The US always seems to have a worringly simplistic view of the rest of the world, leading it to make poor decisions or misread the situation: remember Iraq and "Mission Accomplished"? The US position on Cuba and leftist states in South America is widely seen to be ridiculous (particularly given your support for more dictatorial regimes elsewhere; see first paragraph), and that on Iran and North Korea to be unhelpfully extreme and dogmatic (and hypocritical, as you say nothing about the WMD already possessed by Israel, Pakistan and India, never mind the established nuclear powers).

I agree with both the others that you are not the sole superpower. China may not be being loud about it, but it is emerging to that status; the EU, when it acts in a coordinated fashion, would be another. (You might think that is ridiculous but economically speaking it is close to the truth; most of it has a unified currency, it negotiates trade deals as a bloc, and the economies of all states are strongly linked.)

I think our cooperation with the US should either be less, or more two way. At the moment we cooperate with you all the time, and you with us only when you feel like it – e.g. the extradition treaty and your attempt to extradite people who hacked your systems in ways that aren't even illegal here, but refusing extradition of IRA funders; or you holding Brits in Guantanamo; or you buying up and asset stripping our companies.

The US is broadly seen as being a positive thing, but nowhere near as positive as it should be, and with no guarantee that they will continue to help if it doesn't benefit them.

I should clarify that I am what Tem would call a 'Guardianista lefty' so not everyone is as negative as me about the US.
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