Quote (bogie160 @ Jan 29 2024 04:02pm)
How did rapprochement with China work out in the long run, though? Peaceful coexistence might well be impossible. I will settle for a foreign policy that unapologetically pursues American interests.
I'd say it worked out pretty well. Instead of a world where China's population boom turned it into a hostile superpower in a nuclear military alliance with Russia, opposing America, it became the backbone of our economy and all our cheap manufacturing and a passive world power that seeks dominance in a peaceful world order instead of threatening nuclear annihilation. Doesn't take much imagination to envision a world where American interests weren't served as well. I mean, what's China's biggest fear right now? Its not being invaded by Joe Biden, its their population aging.
This is actually an irony of neoliberalism in geopolitics. When it comes to outsourcing or spycraft or tariffs they want to argue that free trade is a positive sum game and we're served by cooperating with China, but they're constantly willing to escalate tensions and use military threats which provoke reciprocal escalation and destabilize the world. We saw it with Hillary Clinton pushing Obama to send warships right off the coast of Bejing. If we could go another 80 years without a world war but still manage to
win the peace by economic competition that would serve our interests, but even if we're losing the peace its better than the fallout timeline
Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 29 2024 10:53am)
There are still independent courts and a free press standing in the way, things you don't have in Iran. And as far as I know, the Guardian Council in Iran will bar all non-conformist candidates with any kind of name recognition. And again: in the US, the vast majority of power is subject to elections while all the true power in Iran isn't.
Sure, no real country will ever score a 100/100 on the theoretical democracy-scale, but the US, for all its flaws, still scores magnitudes higher than Iran or Russia. Your propensity for defending authoritarian regimes and dictatorships is irritating.
Who knows, Iran hasn't had free and fair elections in 45 years, nor is there free opinion polling. What we do know is that there is civil unrest every couple of years which the regime quells with naked violence. The will of the more liberal- and secular-minded parts of Iran's population has barely any democratic representation, the regime only ever makes as few concessions (how much hair may be shown in public etc) as necessary to prevent their anger from boiling over.
All of that is fundamentally different from the liberal democracies of the West, where there are institutionalized minority rights, the political opposition gets its fair share of power and governments can be voted out of office.
A world in which Putin, Xi and the Mullahs are given free reign will not be a peaceful world. :rolleyes: Nor will the world of the neocons in which the US desperately tries to maintain global hegemony by waging wars around the globe. The neocon path being wrong doesn't imply that the correct way forward is to go in the diametrically opposed direction and roll over to every dictator.
Again the question is- what's the metric we use to judge their democracy? They're competing directly with a country that's a theocratic monarch with no press or dissidents at all, where palace intrigue usually involves the mass purging and execution of the opposition. And that's
our ally. More of an authoritarian dictatorship than any of the others. Iran still has reasonably free
local elections even if the guardian council handpicks the presidency, especially in 2021, so they're getting some say in the running of their country.
How
does it compare to the west, though? Do we have free and fair elections, do the authorities crush peaceful protests with oppressive force, do regimes outlaw the opposition and try to disqualify candidates from the ballot? Trudeau's freedom convoy, the AfD, January 6th, Trump 2024 and Bernie 2016 all come to mind. If I wanted to listen to the pro-Russian news sources, how would I even go about doing that? They've all been censored. How many journalists have been locked up by America for their reporting in the past few years- including raiding a home in the middle of the night with storm troopers and seizing his confidential source lists. Is it not a fact that there is a prison wing filled almost exclusively with political prisoners, given trumped up sentences by DC courts?
We're out here being the first to throw stones. If we're judging Iran by the standards of a middle eastern democracy in the Arab/Persian world then its a shining beacon of freedom and sovereign self-determination. If we're judging Iran by western ideals and our founding father's concept of a liberal republic, then we best look to our own sins.