America is the world’s most powerful rogue state
- Every state murders and pillages to some extent, but when you are the hegemon, it’s called promoting democracy and freedom. After all, the victor writes the history
He is right; three incidents hardly count as “never”. Today, I have more space. Just a random example: the kind of bananas we get in supermarkets is a legacy due mostly to the United Fruit Company that turned numerous South American countries literally into “banana republics” with the help of the US military and Central Intelligence Agency up to the 1970s.
Still, the list of US subversions around the world is just too long. Stephen Kinzer’s 2007 Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, has a pretty full list. I still recall my life-changing experience of reading, in college, the two-volume Political Economy of Human Rights by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. Unfortunately, it’s dated, as it only runs up to 1979.
Also, they skip many US subversions against non-state actors, the only type of which you ever hear about are terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, rather than legitimate political parties, popular democratic movements, labour and socialist groups, and persecuted ethnic and peasant organisations, especially in South America.
On a less bloody note, The New York Times cited a 2016 study by Dov H. Levin, now an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, who found that the US carried out both covert and overt election manipulation operations in other countries 81 times between 1946 and 2000, against 36 by the Soviet Union. These were not outright regime change or military takeover, but “influence operations”, exactly what Washington had angrily denounced the Russians for doing during the 2016 American presidential election.