Jason Y writes: Possibly the Democrats in the US need the US NAM’s for votes, but they don’t need NAM’s in other countries.
US foreign policy has always been far more reactionary than US domestic policy. This contrast is especially stark when looking at the Democratic Party.
The Cold War made this so much worse. The Republicans said any leader who liked labor unions or raised the minimum wage was a Soviet-supporting Communist who needed to be killed or removed via a coup. And many were killed and especially removed via coups.
At the same time, the Republicans spent most of the Cold War screaming at the Democrats for being Communists or at the very least Communist sympathizers or fellow travelers. The Democrats ran scared all through the Cold War, always terrified of being called “soft on Communism.” So they tried to out-Cold War the Republicans and bent to try to out-hate the USSR.
Hence, the Democrats went along with Jonathan Foster Dulles reactionary Containment Project he initiated in the late 1940’s. Foster Dulles was a very rich man who came from old East Coast money. He was also a very rightwing government official. US foreign policy followed Dulles dictum from the 1940’s on, so our foreign policy was molded on a template created by a reactionary from the ruling class.
When Reagan came in, he updated Containment with actual Rollback, and we got Contras, wars in Mozambique and Angola, etc. The Reaganites kept accusing the Democrats of being soft on Communism, and once again, the Democrats ran scared. The horrific Central American projects of the 1980’s, where the US government set up and helped run rightwing death squads that raged across the land, murdering tens of thousands of civilians, was mostly run by some of the most liberal men in Congress, especially the shameful super-liberal Alan Cranston of California and Chris Dodd, the very liberal Connecticut “Senator from Aetna.”
Keep in mind that US foreign policy was reactionary even before the Cold War.
FDR, one of our finest presidents, was a reactionary on foreign policy. He supported the murderous dictator Somoza in Nicaragua, and he made the famous comment, “Somoza may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
Liberal President Woodrow Wilson was not only a reactionary and a proto-humanitarian bomber, but he was also a very racist man domestically. In modern terms, Wilson would be a flat out White Supremacist out of American Renaissance.
The liberal reformer Teddy Roosevelt continued the Monroe Doctrine that declared all of Latin America to be effectively colonies of the US. His famous statement, “Walk softly but carry a big stick,” referred to his reactionary bullying, aggression and immiseration towards our quasi-colonies in Latin America.
