It is a truism that you can judge the quality of someone’s character by those they choose to be their friends. Does this hold true for nations also? It appears to be the case that it does when we take a good look at which nations the USA has decided to adopt as friends and allies in recent times.
The USA is none too choosy at times when it comes to aligning itself with others. Dictators and regimes using military violence against their populations have featured highly among those it selects. There is a veritable litany of ugly monsters in Latin America that it has picked out to help gain and maintain power there. Ronald Reagan even found ingenious ways to send financial support to arguably the most bloodthirsty death squad the world has ever had the misfortune to know in Nicaragua, the Contras.
‘During their war against the Nicaraguan government, there were Contras that committed human rights violations and used terrorist tactics. Many of these actions were reported to be carried out systematically as a part of the strategy of the Contras. Supporters of the Contras tried to downplay these violations, particularly the Reagan administration in the U.S., which engaged in a campaign of white propaganda to alter public opinion in favor of the Contras, while covertly encouraging the Contras to attack civilian targets.’ (Wikipedia)
On September 11 1973 the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende was murdered in a military coup with the assistance of the USA. There followed years of state terror by Augusto Pinochet the dictator the USA could “do business with”.
‘The work that Secretary Henry Kissinger’s State Department had put into the coup — which at one point involved staging a hit on a Chilean diplomat in Washington, D.C. — paid off as soon as Pinochet took power. A huge book of new economic laws called “the brick” fell on Chilean bureaucrats’ desks the morning after the coup, outlining a new capitalist agenda for the country.
Security officials herded labor leaders and other troublemakers into the National Soccer Stadium and forced them to sit in the stands while military police took them down by ones and twos to the field and shot them. Pinochet dispatched Allende ally General Ramos in a helicopter “Caravan of Death” to the north, where he had tens of thousands of “leftists” rounded up and disappeared.
Throughout this period, Chileans could even get arrested and shot for protesting a massive hike in bus fares, as forming a protest group appeared to be “collectivist” behavior. To this day, nobody really knows what happened to the nearly 50,000 people killed by Pinochet’s orderlies.’
https://allthatsinteresting.com/us-dictator-alliances/2
In 2002 the U.S. that had befriended the dictators of the Saudi Arabia monarchy assisted their military campaign against one of the most poverty-stricken nations in the entire world, Yemen. This one-sided operation has resulted in a massive death toll over the years but this has not deterred the USA and its allies providing military assistance of every kind to the Saudis. Ironically, in recent times the Saudis have almost completely disassociated themselves from its former “friend”, sought peace in Yemen and joined the BRICS group.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/9/yemens-war-explained-in-maps-and-charts-interactive
When Saddam Hussein was a convenient friend against America’s enemy Iran they provided every possible assistance including chemical weapons to him. He had provided useful service to the CIA and U.S. administration of an earlier time in arranging the assassination of the
‘While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.’
‘Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with [the] . . . ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
South America in what has been called ‘America’s backyard’ has been a primary area for U.S. operations to prop up and befriend murderous dictators over the years and its Operation Condor facilitated their rise to power and the continuance of that power by all possible means.
‘Operation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coup d'états, as well as assassinations of left-wing socialist leaders in South America from 1968 to 1989. Operation Condor was officially and formally implemented in November 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America.
Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. Some estimates are that at least 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor,[8] with up to 30,000 of these in Argentina. The Archives of Terror list 50,000 killed, 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 imprisoned.’ (Wikipedia)
The current example, apart from the many others that have almost zero democratic credentials that the U.S. has befriended over the years, is Ukraine. Ukraine has a president that has jailed political opponents and shut down media outlets that offer criticism of him and his policies or who merely use the Russian language in their programming. This friend of the U.S. and its allies has made every attempt to disenfranchise all its Russian speakers and eliminate the language they have spoken for generations.
In addition to the oppression of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine the precursor to the current Ukrainian regime was brought to power through the ouster of the democratically elected president and government of Ukraine in 2014 through a violent, U.S.-supported insurrection. Activists from the extreme right-wing political party that had lent its full support for the insurrection gained important positions in the illegal regime set up with the help of Victoria Nuland (then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State) and Geoffrey Pyatt (then U.S. Ambassador in Kiev).
The hordes of neo-Nazi militants who had taken over the insurrection on Kiev’s Maidan and killed up to 17 largely unarmed policemen in their successful attempt to overthrow the democratic system of governance in Ukraine have since that time been assimilated into the Ukrainian army. All with the active support and encouragement of the USA and its allies. Subsequent to their involvement in the attack upon the civilian population of the predominantly Russian-speaking region of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine more than 15,000 have died.
On the 24th of February 2022, after seven years where Russia sought to gain security for the Donbass and an end to NATO expansion to its borders and with no movement toward peace and security for either the people of the Donbass or for Russia, Russia began its Special Military Operation to stop the ongoing war against the Russian-speaking population and end the threat to it from NATO.
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‘Over the last century, the United States government has often provided, and continues to provide today, financial assistance, education, arms, military training and technical support to numerous authoritarian regimes across the world. A variety of reasons have been provided to justify the apparent contradictions between support for dictators and the democratic ideals expressed in the United States Constitution.’ (Wikipedia)
The following list has 71 entries:
List of authoritarian regimes supported by the United States.
https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_authoritarian_regimes_supported_by_the_United_States
We can see from all of the above that the often stated dedication of the USA and its allies to the ideals of democracy, freedom and human rights represents only a public relations patina designed in an attempt to hide the true ambitions involved regarding their national self-interest and maximising the power and collective influence that western world can exercise over others.
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