It's strange to me that the Venona Project, run by the NSA from the middle of WW2 until 1980 and not declassified until 1995, is not mentioned at all in the article. It would seem reasonable that AGLOSO and whatever the NSA discovered would have some relation.
Venona Project was a gold mine for sure. I think The Mitrokhin Archive (The Sword and the Shield in the US) had more revelations though. It was released around the same time, but not published until 1999. Something to keep in mind, the Russians were accomplished spy experts for decades before WW2. The US did not have a spy department. The Roosevelt administration had numerous Russian spies, which ultimately led to various assessments and heightened paranoia about the "red scare".
Venona confirmed the Rosenberg's affiliation with Russia. However, it also confirmed Theodore Hall provided the most detailed and complete information, including specifications for a complete device. Hall was never prosecuted. Hall's older brother Edward was the father of the inter continental ballistic missile (ICBM) program.
Charlie Chaplin ran into this. He associated with numerous communists, attended Russian social events, and was effectively deported from the US in 1952. His granddaughter, Oona Chaplin is a bit salty about this in her documentary "Hollywood Exiles", but the reality is he wasn't a US citizen so it probably wasn't a good idea to consort with the Russians while living the US.
McCarthy's activities did nothing in particular to improve the security of the US government, and retrospectively tarnished earlier investigations. But there certainly were Russian spies active in the US government earlier on, and since.
Since about the 1960s, most of the damaging spies have been in it for the money, not for ideology, or so it seems to me.
This is a good time to remind people of how naive Americans were of the reality of the Soviets. The best example being when in 1944 the sitting vice president of the United States literally visited multiple gulag camps that the NKVD dressed up as Potemkin communes and was fooled utterly:
Anti-Communism was intense and powerful as soon the October Revolution occurred. The USSR was invaded by seventeen nations including the US shortly afterwards and further suffered a trade blockade.
If the US was being nice to Stalin during WWII, it was because they needed Russia to defeat Hitler (Oh, and previously, they'd been nice to Hitler hoping he'd take out Stalin but ole Adolf had an inconvenient "I am a tricky military genius" complex and things didn't work out right).
Also, anti-communist campaigns somewhat abated in run-up to WWII because Stalin managed to turn the world's communist parties into extensions of Russian policy so they could be used to quash radical movements (in the US, the CP was far preferred over the anarchist IWW etc, In Vietnam CP supported the French going into WWII, etc).
And maybe a random US official was fooled by Stalinist theater but I'm pretty sure the situation of the US government was looking the other way in the same that any state looks the other way when a friendly state does something embarrassing.
Problem here, almost none of the the Lend Lease shipments arrived until after the Battle of Kursk, and they weren't enough to prop up the USSR like you claim above.
Had Hitler not gone forward with Operation Barbarossa, the entire outcome would have been differently.
Note that attack was on the Soviet Union was on 22 June 1941, long after most of the 'friendly dictatorships across Eurasia' were already established.
While US policies did cause lots of problems, the power for the US to prevent those happening is greatly overstated above.
There are several good books by Mark Harrison and others who explain while it may have shortened the war and help speed the recovery of their economy a tiny amount, it was a drop in the bucket.
As history shows, shorting the war was in the US's interests.
We forget that the US was an active participant in the Russian Civil War, and war-weariness from WWI was one of the reasons we lost that war, along with several after WWII.
The above also ignores the interwar politics like how the Irreconcilables blocked the US joining the League of Nations or the Neutrality Acts that were passed due to isolationism and non-interventionism.
While there were valid concerns that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh and almost certainly played into Hitlers ability to rise to power, isolationism and non-interventionism of the US didn't help.
The US recognizing the USSR in 1933 was during the depression, and during a period of Japanese expansionism, and far more complicated than some form of appeasement as suggested above.
The popular cultural myths are really just propaganda, the Lend Lease wasn't as large or as meaningful as is claimed.
The popular cultural myths are really just propaganda, the Lend Lease wasn't as large or as meaningful as is claimed.
Don't know which claims you're referring to, but if you like you can take the matter up with Khrushchev, Zhukov and others directly:
I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were "discussing freely" among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war. ... He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so
Yes and it was also an era in which government was willingly made very large and had broad support for doing so. First was the expansion in response to the Great Depression, then again not a decade later for WWII. The fed as a portion of GDP was at its highest levels in our history (at or near 50% I believe). So the line between American economic liberty and communism was not nearly as sharp as it is today. Also there tends to be a misunderstanding among today’s political right that the current size of government is not the historical high point. In fact it is some 20 points short of that.
That the USSR was committing crimes against humanity were already known prior to Germany's invasion of Russia in 1941. Lend-Lease with the USSR formally began in 1941, but knowledge of Stalin's show trials, Gulag, the Holodomor, the partitioning of Poland, and the Winter War all preceded America's entrance into WWII.
Your account has been using HN primarily (or even exclusively) for political battle. That's not allowed here, and we have to ban accounts that do it, so it would be good if you would stop doing this. It's not compatible with the intended purpose of the site (intellectual curiosity), and in fact destroys it.
>Stalin was sent to Siberia by the czar, it was not an innovation of his. When he took power it was the turn of the car's supporters and Whites to go to Siberia
The Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps and its work-to-death policies were most certainly an innovation of Stalin's. Frenkel and Yagoda were Stalin's toadies and their recommendations were put into place by Stalin and the Communist Party, not the czar.
>Walter Duranty of the New York Times went to the Ukraine at the time and said stories of crop failures there were exaggerated. Only more recently have these old rumors been revived.
Walter Duranty was also a toady for Stalin that only wrote in response to Gareth Jones's reporting on the famine. Skepticism of his reporting dates back to the point of publication and has been repeatedly denounced.
Except McCarthyism was an utter failure in terms of rooting out spies. We sure did so great, blacklisting a bunch of hollywood actors and narcing on our coworkers who just wanted a union. God forbid we have free speech and association right?
Meanwhile the actual Manhattan project was chock full of soviets.
McCarthyism is just what happens when you listen to paranoid demagogues. It was literally a culture war against liberals. Gee, sounds familiar.
Manhattan Project was 1942 ~ 1946, while McCarthyism was 1947 ~ 1959.
Contributing to the rise of McCarthyism was:
>a growing obsession with perceived dangers posed by internal subversion in general and Soviet and Communist Party espionage in particular, fueled by reports, some public and some held within the government, of Russian spy operations in North America, accompanied by a new Communist "hard" line that echoed general Cold War tensions;
So, correct: The Manhattan Project(full of academics, some(many?) of whom happened to be liberal) was as you put it "chock full of soviets" and the natural reaction to that realization was to clamp down on liberals.
> which they used to help establish friendly dictatorships across Eurasia, from East Germany, to China (simultaneously, the US put an arms embargo on the legitimate government who were fighting the communists)
How did Russia establish a friendly communist government in Hungary in 1919 when it had no troops there? Actually England armed the Romanians to overthrow the Hungarian communist government.
Of course, the US, England etc. invaded Russia and fought the Red Army during/after World War I with the Polar Bear expedition etc.
Stalin dissolved the Comintern during World War II, and the Communist Party USA dissolved as a political party as well at that time.
With Albania and Yugoslavia, Red Army troops passed quickly through a small corner of Yugoslavia and offered little help to Tito.
Insofar as China, the Soviet ambassador as far as I know was the only one who accompanied Chiang Kai Shek to Taiwan. Mao took China back from the Japanese with little help.
Greece probably would have become communist after World War II, but for the Truman doctrine and US involvement, Russia did not get involved at all.
Moscow's lack of support helped in the breaks in relations - with Yugoslavia, Albania and the Sino-Soviet split.
The Russian people also paid a staggering price to defeat the Nazis in the East. The Soviet post WW2 occupation of Eastern Europe was also, in part, do to the paranoia of being invaded. Hence the response to Western activities in Ukraine in the 21st Century.
Clearly the price was not staggering enough if they still had enough soldiers and material to support aforementioned puppet governments. The western world missed a huge opportunity to bleed them dry.
But ur comment was rude. I have relatives who died fighting Nazis on the Western front. If not for the Russians doing the fighting and dying in the East many more relatives would have died on the Western Front.
The real prelude to McCarthyism (aka the second Red Scare) is at the very least the first Red Scare immediately following 1917's October Revolution in Russia. See for instance the Sacco and Vanzetti trials. We actually put troops on the ground in Russia to at least force the Russians back into WWI, and potentially to topple the communist government entirely (although the latter was more of a British ambition, and American troops were more or less strong-armed into helping). Arguably, the seeds for McCarthyism were planted as far back as the Paris Commune in 1871.
Its also worth understanding that the Red Scares were largely fanned by a widespread fear that the labor classes might rise up and seize the means of production, a fear fully justified by the Coal Wars starting in the 1890s. That the USSR and the CCP eventually supported labor organizations with a revolutionary bent is no real surprise, but a lot of these organizations exhibited such a bent well before Bolsheviks ruled Russia, or Maoists ruled China.
The parent should clarify exactly which "legitimate" governments experienced arms embargoes while trying to fight communists. If they're referring to the failure of the western powers to support the KMT, they should really look into what the KMT stood for in the 1920s. It was not the pro-capitalist, pro-colonialist movement that the western powers wanted in the region (see, for instance, the causes of the Boxer Rebellion for an illustration of what those powers did want); they explicitly called out foreign profiteering as a grievance in need of redress. Is it any wonder that those same western powers did not support a revolution which held as one of its aims the expulsion of their agents?
See for instance feedforward's sibling comment to mine.
The parent is a good example of a Gish Gallop, where there is so much false and misleading information in a short period of time that a good faith debater gets bogged down explaining how each and every little bit is wrong.
while I'm not a big fan of US hegemony, I think it is preferable to most (all?) other contenders to the title of global hegemon. And I don't think a multi-polar world is any better, it'd just lead to more global instability.
All North Korea and China have to do is convince the people of South Korea and Taiwan of the enormous benefits of being annexed. If they're unable to pull off even that, then they only have themselves to blame.
Many Americans pre-WW2 didn't want their country to get involved, either. At the end of the day, it was dragged into that war anyway. Perfect isolationism is not sustainable; you have to be smart about picking your battles, yes, but if you keep running away from them on foreign ground, you will eventually have to fight them on your own.
Ehh...many people love to say things like "America shouldn't be the world police", but then when something bad happens in the world, it becomes "Why aren't we doing anything??? We're complicit!"
I think the biggest recent example is the Russian war in Ukraine. Usually it is liberal-types arguing against American forays into the business of other countries, but they are the same group demanding more money and weapons be sent to Ukraine.
Yes and no; the warmongers put a lot of money into persuading people who neither know nor care much about what is happening to support policies they don't take much of an interest in. We saw something similar in the 2000s where the right-wing types were very supportive of wars that in hindsight made them really angry at the Republican leadership for lying/facilitating them into several disastrous conflicts. I expect we'll see something for the left in a few years assuming we don't see a full WWIII escalation (or maybe even if we do). At some point the lack of any possible upside from or reason for US involvement in eastern Europe will be decisive.
The pro-war types don't have the numbers - US elections follow a consistent though imperfect principle that whoever is advocating for peace wins the election. They rely mainly on short term plays leveraging hysteria.
It's strange to me that the Venona Project, run by the NSA from the middle of WW2 until 1980 and not declassified until 1995, is not mentioned at all in the article. It would seem reasonable that AGLOSO and whatever the NSA discovered would have some relation.
Venona Project was a gold mine for sure. I think The Mitrokhin Archive (The Sword and the Shield in the US) had more revelations though. It was released around the same time, but not published until 1999. Something to keep in mind, the Russians were accomplished spy experts for decades before WW2. The US did not have a spy department. The Roosevelt administration had numerous Russian spies, which ultimately led to various assessments and heightened paranoia about the "red scare".
Venona confirmed the Rosenberg's affiliation with Russia. However, it also confirmed Theodore Hall provided the most detailed and complete information, including specifications for a complete device. Hall was never prosecuted. Hall's older brother Edward was the father of the inter continental ballistic missile (ICBM) program.
Charlie Chaplin ran into this. He associated with numerous communists, attended Russian social events, and was effectively deported from the US in 1952. His granddaughter, Oona Chaplin is a bit salty about this in her documentary "Hollywood Exiles", but the reality is he wasn't a US citizen so it probably wasn't a good idea to consort with the Russians while living the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#1939%E2%80%931...
McCarthy's activities did nothing in particular to improve the security of the US government, and retrospectively tarnished earlier investigations. But there certainly were Russian spies active in the US government earlier on, and since.
Since about the 1960s, most of the damaging spies have been in it for the money, not for ideology, or so it seems to me.
Seems timely, given that HR 9495 just passed the House last week.
Buckle up. The next few years are gonna be wild.
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Please don't start ideological flamewars on HN, even in response to an article like this one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a good time to remind people of how naive Americans were of the reality of the Soviets. The best example being when in 1944 the sitting vice president of the United States literally visited multiple gulag camps that the NKVD dressed up as Potemkin communes and was fooled utterly:
https://www.rbth.com/history/327846-henry-wallace-magadan-ko...
Anti-Communism was intense and powerful as soon the October Revolution occurred. The USSR was invaded by seventeen nations including the US shortly afterwards and further suffered a trade blockade.
If the US was being nice to Stalin during WWII, it was because they needed Russia to defeat Hitler (Oh, and previously, they'd been nice to Hitler hoping he'd take out Stalin but ole Adolf had an inconvenient "I am a tricky military genius" complex and things didn't work out right).
Also, anti-communist campaigns somewhat abated in run-up to WWII because Stalin managed to turn the world's communist parties into extensions of Russian policy so they could be used to quash radical movements (in the US, the CP was far preferred over the anarchist IWW etc, In Vietnam CP supported the French going into WWII, etc).
And maybe a random US official was fooled by Stalinist theater but I'm pretty sure the situation of the US government was looking the other way in the same that any state looks the other way when a friendly state does something embarrassing.
The USSR was invaded by seventeen nations including the US shortly afterwards and further suffered a trade blockade.
Which had precisely nothing to do with the mass repressions in the years following.
Problem here, almost none of the the Lend Lease shipments arrived until after the Battle of Kursk, and they weren't enough to prop up the USSR like you claim above.
Had Hitler not gone forward with Operation Barbarossa, the entire outcome would have been differently.
Note that attack was on the Soviet Union was on 22 June 1941, long after most of the 'friendly dictatorships across Eurasia' were already established.
While US policies did cause lots of problems, the power for the US to prevent those happening is greatly overstated above.
There are several good books by Mark Harrison and others who explain while it may have shortened the war and help speed the recovery of their economy a tiny amount, it was a drop in the bucket.
As history shows, shorting the war was in the US's interests.
We forget that the US was an active participant in the Russian Civil War, and war-weariness from WWI was one of the reasons we lost that war, along with several after WWII.
The above also ignores the interwar politics like how the Irreconcilables blocked the US joining the League of Nations or the Neutrality Acts that were passed due to isolationism and non-interventionism.
While there were valid concerns that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh and almost certainly played into Hitlers ability to rise to power, isolationism and non-interventionism of the US didn't help.
The US recognizing the USSR in 1933 was during the depression, and during a period of Japanese expansionism, and far more complicated than some form of appeasement as suggested above.
The popular cultural myths are really just propaganda, the Lend Lease wasn't as large or as meaningful as is claimed.
The popular cultural myths are really just propaganda, the Lend Lease wasn't as large or as meaningful as is claimed.
Don't know which claims you're referring to, but if you like you can take the matter up with Khrushchev, Zhukov and others directly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Significance_of_Len...Yes and it was also an era in which government was willingly made very large and had broad support for doing so. First was the expansion in response to the Great Depression, then again not a decade later for WWII. The fed as a portion of GDP was at its highest levels in our history (at or near 50% I believe). So the line between American economic liberty and communism was not nearly as sharp as it is today. Also there tends to be a misunderstanding among today’s political right that the current size of government is not the historical high point. In fact it is some 20 points short of that.
Both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia had many sympathizers in the west before their giant crimes against humanity were revealed.
That the USSR was committing crimes against humanity were already known prior to Germany's invasion of Russia in 1941. Lend-Lease with the USSR formally began in 1941, but knowledge of Stalin's show trials, Gulag, the Holodomor, the partitioning of Poland, and the Winter War all preceded America's entrance into WWII.
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Your account has been using HN primarily (or even exclusively) for political battle. That's not allowed here, and we have to ban accounts that do it, so it would be good if you would stop doing this. It's not compatible with the intended purpose of the site (intellectual curiosity), and in fact destroys it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm from Ukraine. My great-grandfather died from hunger. Source: my grandfather (who was born in the 1920's).
Walter Duranty of the New York Times went to the Ukraine at the time and said stories of crop failures there were exaggerated.
Which was exposed as denialist propaganda, even in its own time.
>Stalin was sent to Siberia by the czar, it was not an innovation of his. When he took power it was the turn of the car's supporters and Whites to go to Siberia
The Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps and its work-to-death policies were most certainly an innovation of Stalin's. Frenkel and Yagoda were Stalin's toadies and their recommendations were put into place by Stalin and the Communist Party, not the czar.
>Walter Duranty of the New York Times went to the Ukraine at the time and said stories of crop failures there were exaggerated. Only more recently have these old rumors been revived.
Walter Duranty was also a toady for Stalin that only wrote in response to Gareth Jones's reporting on the famine. Skepticism of his reporting dates back to the point of publication and has been repeatedly denounced.
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They were right about communists sympathizers spying for the USSR within the government too - eg Alger Hiss and Harry White.
Except McCarthyism was an utter failure in terms of rooting out spies. We sure did so great, blacklisting a bunch of hollywood actors and narcing on our coworkers who just wanted a union. God forbid we have free speech and association right?
Meanwhile the actual Manhattan project was chock full of soviets.
McCarthyism is just what happens when you listen to paranoid demagogues. It was literally a culture war against liberals. Gee, sounds familiar.
Wasn't the blacklist unilaterally implemented by the heads of studios? It's not like Congress disallowed those people from working.
Manhattan Project was 1942 ~ 1946, while McCarthyism was 1947 ~ 1959.
Contributing to the rise of McCarthyism was: >a growing obsession with perceived dangers posed by internal subversion in general and Soviet and Communist Party espionage in particular, fueled by reports, some public and some held within the government, of Russian spy operations in North America, accompanied by a new Communist "hard" line that echoed general Cold War tensions;
So, correct: The Manhattan Project(full of academics, some(many?) of whom happened to be liberal) was as you put it "chock full of soviets" and the natural reaction to that realization was to clamp down on liberals.
Where could I read more about this?
Start with Lend Lease
> which they used to help establish friendly dictatorships across Eurasia, from East Germany, to China (simultaneously, the US put an arms embargo on the legitimate government who were fighting the communists)
How did Russia establish a friendly communist government in Hungary in 1919 when it had no troops there? Actually England armed the Romanians to overthrow the Hungarian communist government.
Of course, the US, England etc. invaded Russia and fought the Red Army during/after World War I with the Polar Bear expedition etc.
Stalin dissolved the Comintern during World War II, and the Communist Party USA dissolved as a political party as well at that time.
With Albania and Yugoslavia, Red Army troops passed quickly through a small corner of Yugoslavia and offered little help to Tito.
Insofar as China, the Soviet ambassador as far as I know was the only one who accompanied Chiang Kai Shek to Taiwan. Mao took China back from the Japanese with little help.
Greece probably would have become communist after World War II, but for the Truman doctrine and US involvement, Russia did not get involved at all.
Moscow's lack of support helped in the breaks in relations - with Yugoslavia, Albania and the Sino-Soviet split.
What you're saying is rather ahistorical.
The Russian people also paid a staggering price to defeat the Nazis in the East. The Soviet post WW2 occupation of Eastern Europe was also, in part, do to the paranoia of being invaded. Hence the response to Western activities in Ukraine in the 21st Century.
Clearly the price was not staggering enough if they still had enough soldiers and material to support aforementioned puppet governments. The western world missed a huge opportunity to bleed them dry.
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That's a bit rude - I"m also on bluesky and linkedin.
But ur comment was rude. I have relatives who died fighting Nazis on the Western front. If not for the Russians doing the fighting and dying in the East many more relatives would have died on the Western Front.
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This is a discussion forum. Putting things into words is the purpose of commenting. If you can’t, then maybe you shouldn’t.
But if you insist...
The real prelude to McCarthyism (aka the second Red Scare) is at the very least the first Red Scare immediately following 1917's October Revolution in Russia. See for instance the Sacco and Vanzetti trials. We actually put troops on the ground in Russia to at least force the Russians back into WWI, and potentially to topple the communist government entirely (although the latter was more of a British ambition, and American troops were more or less strong-armed into helping). Arguably, the seeds for McCarthyism were planted as far back as the Paris Commune in 1871.
Its also worth understanding that the Red Scares were largely fanned by a widespread fear that the labor classes might rise up and seize the means of production, a fear fully justified by the Coal Wars starting in the 1890s. That the USSR and the CCP eventually supported labor organizations with a revolutionary bent is no real surprise, but a lot of these organizations exhibited such a bent well before Bolsheviks ruled Russia, or Maoists ruled China.
The parent should clarify exactly which "legitimate" governments experienced arms embargoes while trying to fight communists. If they're referring to the failure of the western powers to support the KMT, they should really look into what the KMT stood for in the 1920s. It was not the pro-capitalist, pro-colonialist movement that the western powers wanted in the region (see, for instance, the causes of the Boxer Rebellion for an illustration of what those powers did want); they explicitly called out foreign profiteering as a grievance in need of redress. Is it any wonder that those same western powers did not support a revolution which held as one of its aims the expulsion of their agents?
See for instance feedforward's sibling comment to mine.
The parent is a good example of a Gish Gallop, where there is so much false and misleading information in a short period of time that a good faith debater gets bogged down explaining how each and every little bit is wrong.
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while I'm not a big fan of US hegemony, I think it is preferable to most (all?) other contenders to the title of global hegemon. And I don't think a multi-polar world is any better, it'd just lead to more global instability.
All North Korea and China have to do is convince the people of South Korea and Taiwan of the enormous benefits of being annexed. If they're unable to pull off even that, then they only have themselves to blame.
They can't really do it all their efforts will be blocked and censored. And "western capitalist" propaganda is no different from the other side.
You realize that many Americans don't want our country meddling in the affairs of others, right? We are powerless to stop it.
Many Americans pre-WW2 didn't want their country to get involved, either. At the end of the day, it was dragged into that war anyway. Perfect isolationism is not sustainable; you have to be smart about picking your battles, yes, but if you keep running away from them on foreign ground, you will eventually have to fight them on your own.
Russia and China are directly meddling in US domestic matters. The best defense is a good offense.
There are no Hermit Kingdoms.
Ehh...many people love to say things like "America shouldn't be the world police", but then when something bad happens in the world, it becomes "Why aren't we doing anything??? We're complicit!"
I would say those are two separate groups of people. At the very least, I personally do not say the latter.
I think the biggest recent example is the Russian war in Ukraine. Usually it is liberal-types arguing against American forays into the business of other countries, but they are the same group demanding more money and weapons be sent to Ukraine.
Yes and no; the warmongers put a lot of money into persuading people who neither know nor care much about what is happening to support policies they don't take much of an interest in. We saw something similar in the 2000s where the right-wing types were very supportive of wars that in hindsight made them really angry at the Republican leadership for lying/facilitating them into several disastrous conflicts. I expect we'll see something for the left in a few years assuming we don't see a full WWIII escalation (or maybe even if we do). At some point the lack of any possible upside from or reason for US involvement in eastern Europe will be decisive.
The pro-war types don't have the numbers - US elections follow a consistent though imperfect principle that whoever is advocating for peace wins the election. They rely mainly on short term plays leveraging hysteria.
When something bad happens, we were usually already involved in some way or other, often by funding or arming one of the sides.
I think the US have done an admirable job at being world police in the Asia Pacific.
Middle East and Europe post-USSR the track record is much worse.
that happens exactly because the US is the world police to its own benefit, not for the greater good which some US americans are still deluded
Agreed.
But this why the Elites are meddling: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Nr85irW3g0
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Completely honest observation, but I can’t tell if this comment was meant to be parody.