This is very controversial among Indians, but there are many among Indians who wish the British never left. The major builder of modern Delhi was a person named Sobha Singh. His son, Khushwant Singh, was a major writer/journalist in post-Independence India. The son has written a book about how when the British were in control, his father would sometimes gift fruit baskets to the British managers/bureaucrats (of the Delhi-building project), and they would accept the gifts, but they never asked for bribes (or fruit baskets). After the British left, and Indians (government bureaucrats/civil servants) took over the project, his father had to always pay them bribes to get movement on projects.
India had airplane factories (multiple) before and during WW2. They were all shut down after Nehru's nationalization of industries project. It took almost another hundred years until India made planes again (I use the word "made" loosely... they mostly assemble...).
Places like Hispaniola (Haiti/DR), Philippines, Cuba would be far, far ahead of where they are today if a benevolent USA still had them in her territories (of course, the "benevolent" is important here, it shouldn't be a vindictive, extractive power).
Reminds me how (iirc) Machiavelli observed that instability and dysfunction from class conflict and internal factionalism in Italian city-states often led to the people welcoming external authoritarian rule that brought stability.
The ones who arrived in 1800CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1000CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1500BCE? Or the ones who arrived in 15000BCE? Where do you draw the line?
I would think that there was a group of people who got there first and survived. All groups that followed them can be viewed as colonizers or conquerors I would think.
What if you just stated your actual point instead of asking stupid questions?
Look, I get that folks in the US and other colonial projects feel a-okay in genociding the folks who were living there previously. I also get that you can't understand the different connection to specific pieces of land that folks such as the Ute, Navajo, and Hopi folks I live around have compared to my own connections to place and people.
But you'd be way less annoying if you'd just state your (almost-certainly-inhuman-if-plainly-stated) argument instead of trying to "hah gottem"ing yourself.
My point, such as it is, is that trying to divide people into groups that are "good" or "evil", based on the actions of their ancestors is morally dubious at best.
It doesn't (should not) matter whether you are descended from "colonizers" or "colonized", even setting aside how hard those terms are to define in any reasonably way. What matters is your current situation, what you've personally done, and what society/government can do to help everyone.
People, especially on the left, really like to play oppression olympics where whoever can justify qualifying as the most oppressed is the winner and thus the arbiter of morality and gets to decide who is right and who is wrong.
You bring up the Navajo and Hopi and Ute, and I'm certainly willing to make a bet that the average person "born in that tribe" (using that term extremely loosely) is going to be, uh, "economically disadvantaged", to put it mildly.
And I would argue with all of my heart that those people deserve help (and, by context, need considerably more help than the equivalent person born in, dunno, the hamptons) but the reason the deserve help is because of things like being born to poor parents in poor towns who don't have access to affordable schools/training/food/whatever.
It doesn't matter, morally speaking, whether or not these people are descendents from american indians or india indians or irish or german or russian or whatever. What matters is what is happening right now.
I'm certainly open to the argument of "Yes that's all true but it's a lot easier to just select everyone currently from the Hopi tribe instead of trying to be more specific", in a similar way to race based affirmative action type policies for colleges, but lets keep in mind that nobody inherits the sins, or virtues, of their parents. We're all born fresh and it's important to keep that in mind.
> The economic performance of the states and territories still within the US compared to the nations we let go is evidence that American annexation has large positive effects.
“Economic performance” between states and territories though differ dramatically. Look up the GDP of the poorest US state and that of Puerto Rico. And then maybe for good measure a Western European country.
The thrust of the article is that the US made a strategic and moral error by dumping these territories.
Left unsaid is that the US collects moral errors like Pokemon cards. If there's a win-win that would mean some non-anglo people would be allowed to win, this US will set itself on fire to prevent it from happening.
To paraphrase a comment I read here recently: the greatest innovation of the republican party was realising that so many people prioritise hurting people who aren't like them. You might think that between "cut off everyone's nose" or "cut off nobody's nose" the latter would win, but a large percentage of people prefer the former, because it means people not like them will have their noses cut off. Now they just have to find a way to protect their wealthy donors' noses, because those people do care.
This is, obviously, an incredibly complicated discussion and any attempt to predict what the world would look like now if we changed a decision made 200 years ago is doomed to failure.
That being said, as an American, I think we were in a somewhat unique position to allow other states to voluntarily join us but we've always shied away from fully implementing that, basically due to racism as far as I can tell. (For a while you had slave state vs free state dynamics at the federal level which is obviously predicated on slavery existing in the first place, then after that you just had, garden variety racism about brown immigrants and stuff)
I think, in general, America deserves some degree of credit for actually making reasonable attempts to "free" the foreign states it ended up in control of, particularly in the pacific region. Obviously, obviously there are many other sins America is guilty of, but as any parent knows, focusing purely on the negatives makes for a child unlikely to improve.
The Philippines is a fascinating example of a group of islands that was independent but not exactly a state, then became a colony of spain, then was conquered at least partly accidentally by America, which immediately implemented a long term plan to restore its independence, but didn't do so immediately a large variety of reasons, some of which counted as "paternalism" but others involved legitimate fears that they would just be reconquered by another european country (from memory germany and japan offered to purchase the islands from america after the war and american refusal was strongly influenced by the idea that being a german colony would suck just as much as being a spanish colony).
Of course, less than a year after this, America was fighting and killing Filipinos attempting to establish their own independent government (calling them Filipinos is a bit of a misnomer since "the Philippines" as a united state/country/entity certainly didn't exist at the time, so america was fighting one of the larger tribes who lived on the islands and thought they should be in charge of everyone else instead of america).
So after killing a whole bunch of native islanders who tried to get rid of americans, america spent the next 50 years basically setting up a system where the philippines would be a free and independent (hopefully democratic) country with no overt american control... at which point the japanese invaded. So america invaded the philippines again.
Roughly 75 years after that, the philippines are an independent semi-democratic country that is no more controlled by america than france is.
You can tell similar stories about places like cuba and a bunch of other islands, although this contrasts with, say, hawaii, which america invaded and then just kept. Not to mention the actual contiguous bits of the american mainland, like, say, all of it.
So, like I said, things are complicated and knowing what actually happened is important to understand why things are the way they are right now, but I also want to make a point about letting past injustices destroy your current life or your children's lives.
It is, presumably, easier for me to say, since as far as I know none of my ancestors have lived anywhere that's been conquered for the last 500+ years (although I honestly know basically nothing past my grandparents, so, who knows) but that doesn't mean I'm wrong when I say that people should move forward to what's best for everyone and the most likely thing to happen.
It's easier to understand when you know that the decisions that Americans and others have made over time were never designed to be covered and taught in a Capitalized Theory of A Particular Time Period academic subject.
Historians likes overarching themes and stories that make everything easier to understand, it does not like "History is just one damned thing after another."
This entire article is based on the false premise that the American empire was given up. If anything, it became more powerful and pernicious across the world following WWII, though its power is obviously waning right now.
I read the introduction as referring to the effects on those regions that gave up their status as members of the empire, rather than what you’re saying.
The article seems to regard some of these places as failures without examining _why_ things might be the way they are. Would life for Cubans have been better under American rule? Perhaps, but its not like life under Cuban rule was given much of a chance…
Like how is there a section on Cuba that does not mention the American embargo on Cuba for the past 50 years? How can we take this analysis seriously?
Of course, but the article writes as though the US just left these places to their own devices, even though they constantly meddled in these countries after the fact, and meddled in many more countries across the world. It's not like these countries were fully sovereign after the fact. The US backed dictators in every single one of the countries discussed: Marcos, Noriega, Batista, the Duvaliers (and of courses many others in different countries).
The author fails to understand that decolonization can be a pretext for continuing exploitation of foreign territories while abandoning the nominal moral obligation to develop them. In the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.
> n the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.
Since you state this so confidently, surely there's an example in our current timeline where it happened this way, right?
Yup. They traded hard power over some small area in return for soft power over the West. One would think this was a good trade, maintaining status without a whole lot of effort.
If they're really trying to colonize Venezuela, they're going to learn about the colonial unrest they (mostly) managed to avoid after WW II.
For some reason, modern americans dont seem to understand that there are other ways to control people than putting a gun to their head, and that is in fact one of the weakest forms of control.
The gun is there. It’s just pointed at that dictators’ heads. If a vassal gets too out of line, the US initiates “regime change” or there’s an assassination or there’s a color revolution.
Well, I'm certainly not in favor of empire... especially as an Alaskan I find the fact that I live in an oil/minerals/fisheries resource extraction colony somewhat distressing.
I will say that "Empire" in the "get land and make the people who live there your people" is probably better than "empire" as in "control resources of far flung distant lands and give the locals no say in the matter."
If you're from American Samoa, you're probably better off as a somewhat disjoint and weird (the relationship the US has with AmSam is kind of strange) colony than if you're from Samoa proper. At least from the standpoint of GDP. I haven't been to either to be clear (though I have significant amounts of friends who have and have lived there), by all accounts the conditions in AmSam are quite a bit better and I don't think that's just people mad at opposing Ali'is or whatever.
I don't know, but my big gripe as an Alaskan is that most of the land up here is owned by the feds or the state and is locked up and unavailable for development because of choices that people from the lower 48 make. People down south think they know what's "best" for us up here and it's infuriating. That said, at least I have a slight choice in who I vote for etc.
Compare that with say, Venezuela or Iraq or wherever. Those people are having their resource policies largely dictated to them and have exactly zero say in the matter. They're "free" to decide what they do with their area on paper, but not really. Does anyone here really live under the illusion that Panama could really decide to close the canal to American ships? Or just look at Cuba.
Empire is probably pretty bad, yeah, I ain't gonna dispute that, but "empire" with inclusion in the empire and some representation is probably (probably) better than having terms dictated to you from the imperial core and enforced by the barrel of a gun.
I don't know. I totally understand people not really wanting to be a part of the empire - hell, I don't even really consider myself an American as an Alaskan, so I get it, but also, when I travel I'm pretty glad I've got an American passport than say, a Russian one, or even an independent Alaska one...
I found it fascinating that, when people discuss the US in English there are 2 words that are never discussed and never understood, even if anyone mentions them.
On the other hand, if people discuss the US in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian or German, these 2 words are all over the discussion, even if no one says them: "imperialismo americano", "imperialisme américaine", "amerikanischer Imperialismus".
The funniest case is Canada: in the English speaking part no one understands the concept, in Quebéc everyone understands. Evidence: read the famous Mark Carney's speech in Davos, he never uses the words, although he was talking only about it. And their country was invaded twice by the Americans (1775 and 1812).
The craziest case is the US itself: because they can't even consider the idea they invent a lot of excuses and fantasies to hide: American Exceptionalism is the most pathetic one.
Edit: it is funny how every empire invents their own hypocrite excuses for their own imperialism. Romans used the "Pax Romana", Islamic Caliphate and Ottoman Empire used "jihad to convert the infidels", the Spaniards used "give savages the blessing of Catholicism", the British boasted about the "white man's burden". The Americans say "freedom".
you're completely wrong, (intelligent) Americans are completely aware of the concept and more-or-less think in those terms regularly.
You won't find the term in speeches but that's because in America speeches are essentially slop. Or at least, they are basically not written as a dialogue with well-informed/intelligent people.
Haiti and Cuba are epitomes of states who were "made examples of" for defying the economic order.
Haiti, firstly, for being the only successful slave revolt in human history(1791), was an international pariah precisely because slaveholders elsewhere didn't want to be similarly overthrown.
Cuba, likewise, became a target once the politically powerful came to fear that Communist insurgencies would spread through the nations of Latin America, as they had in Southeast Asia, expropriating private property.
The formula is simple: deliberately kneecap the nation economically, then use that as evidence that its economic situation is a consequence of its ideological differences. It's a poor smoke screen for, "we would stand to lose our wealth," yet I'm sure I'll see responses to this that willingly repeat propaganda for property owners to spite themselves.
The US and Europeans did not make decisions to "keep" countries under subjugation - they were tossed out - in Ireland, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Vietnam, Indonesia and so on.
The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
> The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
This is just ridiculous on multiple levels.
The US fought a war to prevent north vietnam from conquering south vietnam. You mention 50,000 US deaths during that war. The south vietnamese lost easily 10 times that many soldiers (and another 10 times that many civilians murdered) and at no point were they some kind of slave soldiers who had no choice about fighting.
There's a decent chance that if North Vietnam had just waited 20-30 years the country would have reunified through a vote, but it turns out quite a few vietnamese did not, in fact, want to be ruled by a communist dictatorship and north vietnam decided the best way to get what they wanted was a war of conquest.
You can argue that vietnam shouldn't have been split up in the first place, which is perfectly reasonable, or that america didn't benefit from helping south vietnam fight north vietnam, which is probably true, or that the south vietnamese government at the time was by no means a shining bastion of perfect democracy, which is definitely true.
None of that justifies north vietnam (and china/russia) from launching an invasion.
While on the subject of alternative colonialism:
This is very controversial among Indians, but there are many among Indians who wish the British never left. The major builder of modern Delhi was a person named Sobha Singh. His son, Khushwant Singh, was a major writer/journalist in post-Independence India. The son has written a book about how when the British were in control, his father would sometimes gift fruit baskets to the British managers/bureaucrats (of the Delhi-building project), and they would accept the gifts, but they never asked for bribes (or fruit baskets). After the British left, and Indians (government bureaucrats/civil servants) took over the project, his father had to always pay them bribes to get movement on projects.
India had airplane factories (multiple) before and during WW2. They were all shut down after Nehru's nationalization of industries project. It took almost another hundred years until India made planes again (I use the word "made" loosely... they mostly assemble...).
Places like Hispaniola (Haiti/DR), Philippines, Cuba would be far, far ahead of where they are today if a benevolent USA still had them in her territories (of course, the "benevolent" is important here, it shouldn't be a vindictive, extractive power).
Reminds me how (iirc) Machiavelli observed that instability and dysfunction from class conflict and internal factionalism in Italian city-states often led to the people welcoming external authoritarian rule that brought stability.
“Only an extreme blood-and-soil nationalist would prefer indigenous anarchy or tyranny to imperial democracy, prosperity, and rule of law.”
This sentence is extremely funny in the context of actual ethnographic research on “indigenous anarchy.”
And whatever they imagine "imperial democracy" is. They should ask some indigenous people.
As if there was such a thing as a universal definition of indigenous people and everyone who met that definition had the same behaviour.
How about "They were there before the first colonizers got there"?
The ones who arrived in 1800CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1000CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1500BCE? Or the ones who arrived in 15000BCE? Where do you draw the line?
I would think that there was a group of people who got there first and survived. All groups that followed them can be viewed as colonizers or conquerors I would think.
What if they left for a while then wanted to come back?
What if you just stated your actual point instead of asking stupid questions?
Look, I get that folks in the US and other colonial projects feel a-okay in genociding the folks who were living there previously. I also get that you can't understand the different connection to specific pieces of land that folks such as the Ute, Navajo, and Hopi folks I live around have compared to my own connections to place and people.
But you'd be way less annoying if you'd just state your (almost-certainly-inhuman-if-plainly-stated) argument instead of trying to "hah gottem"ing yourself.
My point, such as it is, is that trying to divide people into groups that are "good" or "evil", based on the actions of their ancestors is morally dubious at best.
It doesn't (should not) matter whether you are descended from "colonizers" or "colonized", even setting aside how hard those terms are to define in any reasonably way. What matters is your current situation, what you've personally done, and what society/government can do to help everyone.
People, especially on the left, really like to play oppression olympics where whoever can justify qualifying as the most oppressed is the winner and thus the arbiter of morality and gets to decide who is right and who is wrong.
You bring up the Navajo and Hopi and Ute, and I'm certainly willing to make a bet that the average person "born in that tribe" (using that term extremely loosely) is going to be, uh, "economically disadvantaged", to put it mildly.
And I would argue with all of my heart that those people deserve help (and, by context, need considerably more help than the equivalent person born in, dunno, the hamptons) but the reason the deserve help is because of things like being born to poor parents in poor towns who don't have access to affordable schools/training/food/whatever.
It doesn't matter, morally speaking, whether or not these people are descendents from american indians or india indians or irish or german or russian or whatever. What matters is what is happening right now.
I'm certainly open to the argument of "Yes that's all true but it's a lot easier to just select everyone currently from the Hopi tribe instead of trying to be more specific", in a similar way to race based affirmative action type policies for colleges, but lets keep in mind that nobody inherits the sins, or virtues, of their parents. We're all born fresh and it's important to keep that in mind.
Say more?
> The economic performance of the states and territories still within the US compared to the nations we let go is evidence that American annexation has large positive effects.
“Economic performance” between states and territories though differ dramatically. Look up the GDP of the poorest US state and that of Puerto Rico. And then maybe for good measure a Western European country.
I know, GDP is a rotten proxy
The thrust of the article is that the US made a strategic and moral error by dumping these territories.
Left unsaid is that the US collects moral errors like Pokemon cards. If there's a win-win that would mean some non-anglo people would be allowed to win, this US will set itself on fire to prevent it from happening.
To paraphrase a comment I read here recently: the greatest innovation of the republican party was realising that so many people prioritise hurting people who aren't like them. You might think that between "cut off everyone's nose" or "cut off nobody's nose" the latter would win, but a large percentage of people prefer the former, because it means people not like them will have their noses cut off. Now they just have to find a way to protect their wealthy donors' noses, because those people do care.
if only we could have held onto our casinos in cuba, things would have been totally completely different
This is, obviously, an incredibly complicated discussion and any attempt to predict what the world would look like now if we changed a decision made 200 years ago is doomed to failure.
That being said, as an American, I think we were in a somewhat unique position to allow other states to voluntarily join us but we've always shied away from fully implementing that, basically due to racism as far as I can tell. (For a while you had slave state vs free state dynamics at the federal level which is obviously predicated on slavery existing in the first place, then after that you just had, garden variety racism about brown immigrants and stuff)
I think, in general, America deserves some degree of credit for actually making reasonable attempts to "free" the foreign states it ended up in control of, particularly in the pacific region. Obviously, obviously there are many other sins America is guilty of, but as any parent knows, focusing purely on the negatives makes for a child unlikely to improve.
The Philippines is a fascinating example of a group of islands that was independent but not exactly a state, then became a colony of spain, then was conquered at least partly accidentally by America, which immediately implemented a long term plan to restore its independence, but didn't do so immediately a large variety of reasons, some of which counted as "paternalism" but others involved legitimate fears that they would just be reconquered by another european country (from memory germany and japan offered to purchase the islands from america after the war and american refusal was strongly influenced by the idea that being a german colony would suck just as much as being a spanish colony).
Of course, less than a year after this, America was fighting and killing Filipinos attempting to establish their own independent government (calling them Filipinos is a bit of a misnomer since "the Philippines" as a united state/country/entity certainly didn't exist at the time, so america was fighting one of the larger tribes who lived on the islands and thought they should be in charge of everyone else instead of america).
So after killing a whole bunch of native islanders who tried to get rid of americans, america spent the next 50 years basically setting up a system where the philippines would be a free and independent (hopefully democratic) country with no overt american control... at which point the japanese invaded. So america invaded the philippines again.
Roughly 75 years after that, the philippines are an independent semi-democratic country that is no more controlled by america than france is.
You can tell similar stories about places like cuba and a bunch of other islands, although this contrasts with, say, hawaii, which america invaded and then just kept. Not to mention the actual contiguous bits of the american mainland, like, say, all of it.
So, like I said, things are complicated and knowing what actually happened is important to understand why things are the way they are right now, but I also want to make a point about letting past injustices destroy your current life or your children's lives.
It is, presumably, easier for me to say, since as far as I know none of my ancestors have lived anywhere that's been conquered for the last 500+ years (although I honestly know basically nothing past my grandparents, so, who knows) but that doesn't mean I'm wrong when I say that people should move forward to what's best for everyone and the most likely thing to happen.
It's easier to understand when you know that the decisions that Americans and others have made over time were never designed to be covered and taught in a Capitalized Theory of A Particular Time Period academic subject.
Historians likes overarching themes and stories that make everything easier to understand, it does not like "History is just one damned thing after another."
This entire article is based on the false premise that the American empire was given up. If anything, it became more powerful and pernicious across the world following WWII, though its power is obviously waning right now.
I read the introduction as referring to the effects on those regions that gave up their status as members of the empire, rather than what you’re saying.
The article seems to regard some of these places as failures without examining _why_ things might be the way they are. Would life for Cubans have been better under American rule? Perhaps, but its not like life under Cuban rule was given much of a chance…
Like how is there a section on Cuba that does not mention the American embargo on Cuba for the past 50 years? How can we take this analysis seriously?
Of course, but the article writes as though the US just left these places to their own devices, even though they constantly meddled in these countries after the fact, and meddled in many more countries across the world. It's not like these countries were fully sovereign after the fact. The US backed dictators in every single one of the countries discussed: Marcos, Noriega, Batista, the Duvaliers (and of courses many others in different countries).
The author fails to understand that decolonization can be a pretext for continuing exploitation of foreign territories while abandoning the nominal moral obligation to develop them. In the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.
> n the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.
Since you state this so confidently, surely there's an example in our current timeline where it happened this way, right?
Yup. They traded hard power over some small area in return for soft power over the West. One would think this was a good trade, maintaining status without a whole lot of effort.
If they're really trying to colonize Venezuela, they're going to learn about the colonial unrest they (mostly) managed to avoid after WW II.
For some reason, modern americans dont seem to understand that there are other ways to control people than putting a gun to their head, and that is in fact one of the weakest forms of control.
The gun is there. It’s just pointed at that dictators’ heads. If a vassal gets too out of line, the US initiates “regime change” or there’s an assassination or there’s a color revolution.
Well, I'm certainly not in favor of empire... especially as an Alaskan I find the fact that I live in an oil/minerals/fisheries resource extraction colony somewhat distressing.
I will say that "Empire" in the "get land and make the people who live there your people" is probably better than "empire" as in "control resources of far flung distant lands and give the locals no say in the matter."
If you're from American Samoa, you're probably better off as a somewhat disjoint and weird (the relationship the US has with AmSam is kind of strange) colony than if you're from Samoa proper. At least from the standpoint of GDP. I haven't been to either to be clear (though I have significant amounts of friends who have and have lived there), by all accounts the conditions in AmSam are quite a bit better and I don't think that's just people mad at opposing Ali'is or whatever.
I don't know, but my big gripe as an Alaskan is that most of the land up here is owned by the feds or the state and is locked up and unavailable for development because of choices that people from the lower 48 make. People down south think they know what's "best" for us up here and it's infuriating. That said, at least I have a slight choice in who I vote for etc.
Compare that with say, Venezuela or Iraq or wherever. Those people are having their resource policies largely dictated to them and have exactly zero say in the matter. They're "free" to decide what they do with their area on paper, but not really. Does anyone here really live under the illusion that Panama could really decide to close the canal to American ships? Or just look at Cuba.
Empire is probably pretty bad, yeah, I ain't gonna dispute that, but "empire" with inclusion in the empire and some representation is probably (probably) better than having terms dictated to you from the imperial core and enforced by the barrel of a gun.
I don't know. I totally understand people not really wanting to be a part of the empire - hell, I don't even really consider myself an American as an Alaskan, so I get it, but also, when I travel I'm pretty glad I've got an American passport than say, a Russian one, or even an independent Alaska one...
I found it fascinating that, when people discuss the US in English there are 2 words that are never discussed and never understood, even if anyone mentions them.
On the other hand, if people discuss the US in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian or German, these 2 words are all over the discussion, even if no one says them: "imperialismo americano", "imperialisme américaine", "amerikanischer Imperialismus".
The funniest case is Canada: in the English speaking part no one understands the concept, in Quebéc everyone understands. Evidence: read the famous Mark Carney's speech in Davos, he never uses the words, although he was talking only about it. And their country was invaded twice by the Americans (1775 and 1812).
The craziest case is the US itself: because they can't even consider the idea they invent a lot of excuses and fantasies to hide: American Exceptionalism is the most pathetic one.
Edit: it is funny how every empire invents their own hypocrite excuses for their own imperialism. Romans used the "Pax Romana", Islamic Caliphate and Ottoman Empire used "jihad to convert the infidels", the Spaniards used "give savages the blessing of Catholicism", the British boasted about the "white man's burden". The Americans say "freedom".
I've heard the term imperialism used in context with the US plenty. It is very, very common online.
> It is very, very common online.
Because there are a lot of non-Americans in the internet, including me.
America literally delayed joining both world wars because of how strong the desire not to be involved with other countries was.
Such is the version of history the US wrote, yes.
You can literally read the campaign speeches, senate debates, newspaper articles. It wasn't that long ago.
Do you imagine that people in the US aren't familiar with the concept? We've been debating it since the time of Teddy Roosevelt.
you're completely wrong, (intelligent) Americans are completely aware of the concept and more-or-less think in those terms regularly.
You won't find the term in speeches but that's because in America speeches are essentially slop. Or at least, they are basically not written as a dialogue with well-informed/intelligent people.
> Haiti and Cuba are extreme examples of failure.
Haiti and Cuba are epitomes of states who were "made examples of" for defying the economic order.
Haiti, firstly, for being the only successful slave revolt in human history(1791), was an international pariah precisely because slaveholders elsewhere didn't want to be similarly overthrown.
Cuba, likewise, became a target once the politically powerful came to fear that Communist insurgencies would spread through the nations of Latin America, as they had in Southeast Asia, expropriating private property.
The formula is simple: deliberately kneecap the nation economically, then use that as evidence that its economic situation is a consequence of its ideological differences. It's a poor smoke screen for, "we would stand to lose our wealth," yet I'm sure I'll see responses to this that willingly repeat propaganda for property owners to spite themselves.
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The US and Europeans did not make decisions to "keep" countries under subjugation - they were tossed out - in Ireland, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Vietnam, Indonesia and so on.
The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
The countries listed here, they largely did make those decisions and were not kicked out.
The US could have pretty easily annexed Cuba in 1902 or held onto the Philippines.
While many countries kicked out colonizers violently, it's not a universal, many countries were decolonized without violence.
Turkey is also an odd choice here, given they were an empire who was kicked out of many of their possessions.
> The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
This is just ridiculous on multiple levels.
The US fought a war to prevent north vietnam from conquering south vietnam. You mention 50,000 US deaths during that war. The south vietnamese lost easily 10 times that many soldiers (and another 10 times that many civilians murdered) and at no point were they some kind of slave soldiers who had no choice about fighting.
There's a decent chance that if North Vietnam had just waited 20-30 years the country would have reunified through a vote, but it turns out quite a few vietnamese did not, in fact, want to be ruled by a communist dictatorship and north vietnam decided the best way to get what they wanted was a war of conquest.
You can argue that vietnam shouldn't have been split up in the first place, which is perfectly reasonable, or that america didn't benefit from helping south vietnam fight north vietnam, which is probably true, or that the south vietnamese government at the time was by no means a shining bastion of perfect democracy, which is definitely true.
None of that justifies north vietnam (and china/russia) from launching an invasion.