re: #8 Barefoot Grin

Okay, I’m being obliquely pissy so I should just say this plainly:

No, American foreign policy has never been anything like what Albright or Biden says.

We encourage democracy…when we don’t like the existing leader because they won’t give us what they want. We’re fine with various forms of autocracy as long as the leader plays ball. We like a rules-based order…except that we’re the top of the hegemonic pile and regularly just change the rules when it’s convenient, and just don’t enforce rules when that fucks with the money. Hence our deep friendship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

et cetera, et cetera

Our relationship with the KSA is just the synedoche for what we actually do in foreign policy: what we overlook, who we’ll sell guns to, how our CIA operations keep propping up dictators that eventually screw us over, how our short Red Scare reflexes make us hand power to reactionaries, how comfortbale we are with mass killing as long as it’s anti-Communist, et cetera, et cetera.