Despite some notable bumps in the road, it’s fair to characterize American foreign policy since roughly 1933 as pro-democracy. The nearly simultaneous ascent of Franklin Roosevelt here and Adolf Hitler in Germany in that year meant that the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy would be anti-despotic, even though the arena in which those values underpinned our policy was primarily Europe, and not always even there, as America’s refusal to engage in the Spanish Civil War made lamentably clear. After 1945, fascism
didn’t pose a significant threat to non-Iberian Europe, but the Soviet model of communism surely did, and our alliance with Europe’s democracies was the basis of our foreign policy. The competition with Russia even compelled us to become more democratic at home, as we could hardly win the allegiance of the Global South so long as our domestic South was governed on overtly racist lines. Generations of American children have been schooled in democratic values, and when the U.S. has appeared to deviate from those values, its domestic critics have invariably contrasted our conduct with
those values we profess to uphold. The left has made this point when we’ve (all too frequently) supported right-wing autocrats in the developing world; the right has made this point in opposing communism, though the right usually labels anything even slightly social democratic as communist, too, though social democracy is actually a profoundly democratic condition. In any event, all that is now old news. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve now changed sides. Democracy is out; autocracy is in, though President Trump has made this switch on what we might term semi- or sub-ideological
grounds.
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