I don't find Potsdam in no clash with Yalta concessoins. In fact, the declaration exactly left no room for the Japanese to save face for the Emperor, which is why it was not taken. Suppose they had taken it though, the bombs would have found another place to drop. The trigger finger was itching for a pull. You cant' just sit on a brand new toy like that.

Lend-Lease sure was important for the soviet war effort, but so was the soviets own effort. The US put many boots on the feet of soviet soldiers, and a lot of tnt in their shells, but the SU built the tanks that drove to Berlin, and they still did all the dying while the US looked on. Effective, well they won the war. A single german tank could take on four soviet ones and still win, but as Stalin put it, quantity has a quality of it's own. In the end what matters is your ability to use the resources you have to achieve the goals you have.

Do not think that i find the SU to be the bees knees, to the contrary. But one has to give credit where credit is due, otherwise you cannot learn from it.

If your country has a hostile adversary is exactly the greater evil I mentioned.

As to the world police, you cannot still believe this in 2026? Look around to what the US does, it goes around the world destroying one country after another, sometimes because they wanted to do something the US did not like, sometimes just for the heck of it. The world bully is more apt.

Yeah, that was kinda my point, that he was cherry picking, or possibly, didn't think this through, or didn't even know that there was more to it. For example I've met British people who have literally no idea what it means they had an Empire, and cannot figure out why you would invent such insane things to attack ol' Blighty... I don't know about the British school curricula in particular, but it's not very usual for a country to teach their dark side in schools, so that might be part of it. Maybe like the US, that has to tackle the problem of slavery, because black people are everywhere, but can ignore the problem of the founding of the nation, that is the native american genocide, because there's not much of them around to stare in your face.

It was a successful attempt. Before the coup the role of the monarch in Iran was similar to Great Britain, although the shah had started to change that. But in the coup the government was overthrown, democracy died, and Pahlavi took the reigns and started to persecute the people with a secret police, relying heavily on the US to stay in power. While in his return to the country after the coup he was mostly cheered, by the time of the revolution the country was overwhelmingly happy to get rid of him.

Importantly for the GB and US, the oil stayed theirs, and flowing. Also importantly for the US, the success of the coup laid the groundwork for the CIA to become one of the most important tools of US foreign policy. Since then, Chomsky has counted over 80 US coups in Latin America alone, but that's another story.

Well I suppose you can argue this on the technicality of my wording, but Operation Ajax was very much a real thing.

Japan was nuked because the US wanted to scare Stalin into concessions in Yalta, and it worked, I might add. SU did all the heavy lifting to win the war, yet the US got to pick the winnings. But there was no military need for the nukes, Japan was all but razed to the ground by regular bombing already. There was only two cities left to bomb, and this is where the nukes went. So Japan was ready to surrender and was only looking for a way to save face for the Emperor while doing it. The nukes took care of that problem for them, i guess.

Boots on the ground are not just for changing regimes, they are also for maintaining them. As witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first can be easy, but the second not so much.

Korea was a success in that the US got their hands on half of it, and managed to keep it. Do remember that the US inherited from Japan the plan to divide up Korea with the Russians. So after the war the SU was still good and took their half, and the US took their half. To my knowledge history is hazy about where the idea for a reunification came from, but it seems the Russians were okay with it and the Chinese were not against it, so the North almost got hold of all of Korea before the US got in war gear. And the North Korean experience of being razed to the ground and losing 1/8 of the population yet surviving in the resulting Korean War is also where the still standing animosity between NK and the US comes from.

And as to the Phillippines, they sure are not known for smart leadership. But the dumbest thing one can do is to outsource their defence, because the cost of that is always losing your suzerainty, if not sovereignity. As is also witnessed by the foreign policy of every country that did so surprisingly lining up like clockwork with US foreign policy. One would expect independent countries to have their own opinions about things; surprisingly enough, only countries that take care of their own defence do. So it's a move one does only by having their hand forced, whether it's because they're not in a position to say no, or they have an even greater evil to worry about.

Venezuela was changing, they were in no means perfect, but ever since Chavez kicked out the US they had been getting better, and the people know by experience that their own imperfect government is still better than a US one. Now they're back to square one again, with the puppet government having to run the country for the advancement of US interest again.

As to the boots, I'm not aware of no boots on the ground ever having worked. Japan still has US boots on the ground, so does South Korea. In fact, one might argue they are still occupied. Interestingly it was Philippines, sometimes considered to be the 51st state, that sent the US army back home.

Also forgot to add. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, everything south of US is a victim of the US Empire, not the Spanish one.

Take a look at the map and behold, most of the Empire is not in fact doing too good: https://www.britannica.com/pla....

An Empire is a machine of violence with the sole purpose of transferring wealth created by other people back to the motherland. Rarely does anyone do good as a subject nation of the empire, and if that happens, it's only because the Empire was otherwise engaged with more important matters.

Venezuela will play out like it has already played out before. The US puppet regime will not care about the people, and because of that will get ousted sooner or later.

50 years ago Iran was still ruled by the US-installed shah, who got put there after Iran had decided to nationalize their oil, that is, Iranian oil should probably belong to Iran and not the British as the former colonists would want.

It was the ousting of the widely unpopular puppet shah by the Islamic Revolution that put Iran to the US enemies list, where it remains to this day. Much like how Cuba got to be on the list when they ousted their own US regime.

See a pattern there?

There's another pattern to look out for. US success in waging wars in the Middle East. Nothing good is going to come out of this.

Agreed. My observation is descriptive, not prescriptive.

My point is not so much about the integrity of the Anthropic people, but about the habitual ability of the US govt to make offers that can't be refused. And Europe doesn't exactly have a track record of standing up to the US. In fact, the only countries that do have a track record of standing up the the US are called the axis of evil. So there's that.

Everyone else has fallen in line. Anthropic will, too.

Thank you, kind stranger.

It does seem in this discussion that people really have no idea what neoliberalism is. So it is a far cry indeed to then go talk about how both US parties are functionally neoliberal with only a different layer of rhetoric on top.

In general, I find there's two important rules to get voted up in political discussions here.

Do not speak ill of the Democrats, and do not speak ill of the US. If you pay the proper lip service to demonstrate you are on the right side, you can do some critique, but as a whole they are untouchable. Most everyone here can agree that the Republicans are rotten, and many can agree that some Democrats are, but the idea that everything is rotten is too much to bear for most people. Even as millions of people are homeless, two thirds of the country is one hospital visit away from joining them, with more and more people having to work two jobs to support their families, with rentier capitalism wreaking havoc on the people and financialization on the economy, with the next generation never going to able to afford homes and kids, with the country having more than enough money to fix any problem it has yet under both parties choosing to ignore them, and with brownshirts now roaming the streets... the basic makeup of the mighty US is still in immutably good shape, it's just temporarily inconvenienced. One at a time, you can get people to admit every single problem the country has, but you are forbidden to draw the conclusion that things are fucked.

The worse things get, the more people need good things to cling to. We have a very base need to be the good guys, to be part of the good guys, and to live in a society that is run justly by the good guys. In any situation where we lack any of these, our first instinct is to find someone or something to be the good guys, and to join them in support. In the real world, more often than we'd like to admit, it happens there is no good guys. So what do people do? They pick a side, and rationalize themselves to believe this is the good guys side, and rationalize every bad thing their side does as good in the bigger picture. Well, this time, the other side was stronger... well, this time, we had to give up on this thing to get another thing... well, this time we did something bad, but we had to, you see, and it's not all bad, right? Yet whichever team has the wheel, the direction remains the same.. well, at least we are not the other guys, those guys are the worst.