Stop using 'anti-imperialism' as a veil for hating America
Be proud to be an American. Loving your country is not something to be ashamed of
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Today is the Fourth of July, and as is expected during these times, I’ve seen a deluge of anti-America posts flood social media channels. Some decry our country as “the engine of global imperialism”, while others view it as irredeemably marred by our existence as a “evil genocidal empire”.
I have written too much about politics lately (despite my intentions to keep this Substack more purely about social issues), and I’m also meeting my godparents for the holiday, so I’ll keep this as short as possible. I too am fairly anti-interventionist, especially now. But so much of this ‘anti-imperialist’ propaganda seems to be driven not by principled stances against intervention, and rather as a conceptual scapegoat for the problems we face today.
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American interventionism, in all of its faults, is not a fundamentally irredeemable philosophy. It was consensus for nearly a century because it kept budding aggressors at bay. The idea that the Soviets would’ve run the world any better forty years ago, or that China would do a better job today, is unintelligent.
That is not to say that there weren’t huge failures. The War on Terror was a failure. McNamara’s strategy towards Vietnam was a failure. Kissinger razing Laos and Cambodia was more than a failure. The intervention during the Second Libyan Civil War was probably a failure. For the sake of argument, America’s meddling policy towards Palestine is also a failure. There are lots of good arguments against America’s contemporary foreign policy, many of which I subscribe to.
But that also isn’t to say that there weren’t huge success cases. The progenitor of the interventionist model, World War II, saw an American-forged alliance defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Less than a decade later, American intervention in the Korean peninsula gave birth to the Republic of Korea, and saved some forty million people from having to live under Kim Il-Sung’s despotic juche regime. Bush 41’s ‘91 intervention during the First Gulf War stopped Saddam from brutalizing millions more. Clinton’s ‘99 intervention in Kosovo stopped a widely-recognized genocide at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs. For the sake of argument, directives like Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada were also a success.
The point I’m trying to make is simple. Like pretty much any major disagreement of political values, interventionism has valid arguments for and against. In my view, the against outweighs the for, but we can’t act like intervention is a function of pure evil. If you wanted to go band-for-band on good interventions and bad interventions, you could go for a while. Countless people owe their lives to American interventions, and (probably more) countless people lost their lives to them.
But the way that so many young people seem to frame intervention in their activism? It completely glosses over these somewhat-indeterminate conclusions, and pretends that America is a paragon of pure evil for the failed cases. It presumes an incredibly myopic view of diplomacy. It attempts to portray interventionists as only demon-spawn with blood on their hands, without looking at their own sins—the fact that those very tens of millions of Kosovars, Koreans, Kuwaitis, and so on would be dead if we absolutely assumed their philosophy.
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There are also plenty of structural arguments that favor intervention. I am playing devil’s advocate here, because I really don’t believe in intervention as it is currently exercised. But the most important one in global power politics is: if one state rejects power, what other state assumes it?
If America had not intervened in many parts of Asia back in the mid-twentieth century, the Soviets would have, under the guise of ‘liberating the global worker’. In reality, there is little evidence to show that Soviet control over Asia would’ve been better than American control. The same applies today—when America loosens its grip, China tightens its own. There is no evidence to show whether China would be any better at micromanaging the world.
So these childish social media calls for ‘revolution’ completely miss the forest for the trees. Stopping the United States from exercising military influence does not stop the rest of the world from doing so, and the presumptive case for interventionism relies on America being better-faith than other nations (which I think is true in cases like Palestine). But I won’t get deep into the weeds of realist theory, because that is not the point.
The point is: the most principled version of anti-interventionism is not intervening in most cases, but it is not absolute. There is a reason there is a distinction between anti-interventionists and non-aggressionists. To prove this, indulge me in a thought experiment. If there was a femicide in the scale of millions in Canada tomorrow, and there was a 99% chance you could stop it within two weeks, you would, right?
The problem with American foreign policy, thus, is not intervention itself, but rather the incredibly low threshold for interventionism that we’ve come to exercise. In too many cases, we bite off more than we can chew, intervene without enough cultural information, and try to do nation-building in places that are simply not compatible with liberalism. In the limited cases that do work, we work within consensus, maintain extremely narrow goals, and get out immediately after the military campaign ends. Anti-interventionism in its most useful form is thus rallying people to limit intervention to the latter.
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This brings us to the premise of this essay. The people posting today about how horrendous America is because of imperialism? They do not seem to have put much thought behind their ideals. If one takes the time to move beyond just Parenti-esque ideology and does some serious historical soul-searching, you would come to realize that there are good forms of anti-interventionism and bad forms.
The good forms, as mentioned, involve taking a nuanced look at history so that we can reduce suffering across the world. By advocating for far greater reservation in foreign policy, America heads in a better direction. This is pretty reasonable. The bad forms are bitching on Twitter and Instagram about how horrible America is all the time, and how we need to overthrow imperialism with revolution (good luck to you with overthrowing basically every nation-state in the world, by the way).
And with the bad forms comes a more vicious hatred. By focusing on such a myopic, historically inaccurate set of failures, we forget what America has given all of us. We start to burrow ourselves into a hole that we cannot see out of, when we get swept along into thinking America is evil. I am surely biased. I have been a notable beneficiary of the American Dream, in an era where it is becoming more and more elusive. My early childhood was in rural Korea, and the opportunities I’ve had here are universes apart from my previous life.
But I think some things are undeniable. Yes, we’ve all seen the smug, Sorkin-written Newsroom monologue. The one that goes:
“And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about?! Yosemite?!”
— HBO’s The Newsroom, written by Aaron Sorkin, delivered by Jeff Daniels
What this glosses over is why other nations were able to advance so quickly. The reason why America gets beat in education? Because we funded the development of virtually every nation ahead of us now—c.f. us completely rebuilding Japan and South Korea. The reason why other nations have higher incomes than us? The decades of global supply security ensured by American forces. The reason why other nations are even able to do scientific research? Advancements in American computing. The reason half of the world’s developing nations are developing? The purchasing power of the American consumer market.
These are very narrow examples for a much broader trend. The reason America is the greatest country in the history of the world comes down to one thing. Our system has been so permissive to positive, creative, and rational experimentation across all sectors of society. Politically, America is the birthplace of contemporary democracy—evidenced by our existence as the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Socially, we forged the path for the egalitarian attitudes that define the world today—no other nation in the world has dared to take on the gravity of the multicultural experiment that we did. Technologically, our markets have produced everything from the personal computer to the smartphone, and we have the greatest system of higher education to back it.
The list goes on, but the principle remains: as easy and as convenient as it is to hate America, there’s a reason some people live in sticks and rubble, and why we don’t. The willingness to get it right, no matter how long it takes, and the ability to set up institutions that get us there, is why American exceptionalism exists. No other nation on Earth has contributed as much as us to modern humanity, and there is no doubt about that. It is easy to live in a homogenous society that remains stagnant. It is brave to see what you can do beyond that. That bravery is why America is still the world’s most desired destination among prospective immigrants, by threefold.
And even if I’m wrong? It doesn’t matter. My family lives here. My closest friends live here. My future wife lives here, and my children will grow up here. We get but one country, and we better try our damnedest to make the best of it.
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It’s not difficult to understand why young people feel so much resentment. America-hating is the easy catch-all to the past two decades of policy failures. I was two when Bush 43 surged Iraq. I was three when the Great Recession swept the middle class’s feet from underneath us. By the time he left office, the downward spiral took root.
The Obama years were a placid stopgap, with a redeemable figurehead but little meaningful change in a rapidly-changing world. The first major event I remember is Sandy Hook, because we talked about it in my second grade class. The Tea Party Movement had its rapid ascent, destroyed the American social safety net, and then had its rapid descent. By the time he left, he left a trail of broken promises. The state was playing catch-up against the forces of globalization and capitalist opportunism.
The Trump and Biden years did nothing to change this. Their two terms bleed into one in my mind—both irredeemable figureheads with no sense of direction. It started with a poor response to a global pandemic. It was followed up by race riots across the nation. Afghanistan collapsed. The Capitol got stormed. We lost control of the Israel-Palestine question. It ended in circles, literally, with their rematch set four months from now.
If you were to isolate these past two decades of American history, say, a century from now, you’d probably label it as unpleasant. By all historic measures, the state does not have many victories to claim—no major military wins, no institutional advances, and worst of all, an ever-growing sense that it’s not getting better. And for many of us, these past two decades are all we’ve been alive for.
But American history does not start and stop between the years 2000 and 2024. If the past is any indication of the future, the political thunderstorms will pass. And American exceptionalism, as hard as it is to believe right now, will live to see better days.
— SJY, 07.04.24
Birthplace of jazz and constitutional democracy. That's not bad. Of course, we should be free to criticize and try to improve the US, but let's acknowledge that there are good, redeeming features.
I think people sometimes conflate loving America with not being able to criticize America. On the right, if someone sees you criticizing American imperialism, you'll be accused of hating America. On the other hand, you can freely criticize American imperialism but then it's sometimes implicitly assumed you hate America (or at least it's unfashionable to say you still love America).
Overall though, the only point I would additionally make is that the vast majority of covert action in American history is negative. CIA backed coups and/or groups in Iran, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Congo, Haiti, Brazil did a lot of damage to those countries.... and those are only the ones we know about. I will concede though that American intervention where we actively deploy troops has typically seen higher rates of success (with the exception of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan).