Thread by @lymanstoneky

you bet they did

10/10 would do again, it worked very well and was highly effective and probably contributed meaningfully to the fall of communism, unlike like ya know the CIA's entire Latin American portfolio, which was probably worthless.

https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/1382718249637404675

things intelligence agencies should do:

provide material support to actual live, existing "enemy of my enemy" folks who are willing to actually fight wars that serve our interests

things intelligence agencies should not do:

alienate millions of people in our backyard by toppling elected leaders simply because they advocate for bad policies despite the fact they pose zero strategic threat to the US

wildly enough there's a plausible argument that not only was the domino effect theory wrong, it was *literally backwards*: the US stopping the first domino falling often meant neighboring countries had no motive to bandwagon together against communism!

had the US just said, "we will oppose any act of intervention, and also we will impose tariffs on a sliding scale based on democratic participation and the prevalence of deaths due to violence" and just not screwed with Latin America at all we'd probably have been better off

also, obviously, the people of Latin America would have been better off.

as a bonus we could be like "and if you get democracy high enough and murder low enough we will also give you $$$ and special visa programs and other goodies" if you're really craving some BOLD ACTIONS

by the way, this is actually what we should be doing today as well. it's not just a communism thing. just be like, "we impose tariffs, capital controls, and sanctions based on violent deaths, non-democracy, and the share of employment in state-owned enterprises"

the more murder, the less political participation, and the higher the share of employment in govt + SOEs, the more we erect economic walls between Americans and the people of that country.

of course doing this would require us to exit the WTO and a bunch of other agreements.

unfortunately, the post-war US decided very quickly that making sure Dole Fruit Company can get cheap bananas is more important than making sure we aren't complicit in mass murder and genocide.

we decided to liberalize trade, and we used our heft in international institutions to push for liberalization across numerous levels, *instead of* adopting a trade-for-values scheme.

we did this because we felt that trade would create shared material interests with important allies we would need in the conflict against communism.

that argument may have been true, especially 1945-1970.

The big success of this strategy is obviously detente with China.... but the prior and totally unrelated Sino-Soviet split suggests that we should not fall into the trap of assuming that China's choices are merely responsive to US policymaking. China had its own motives.

and what we've seen 1980-today is that detente with China may have helped set up an as-or-more-precarious strategic situation for the US than the one it (maybe) helped resolve!

But detente with China really did seem like a good idea for many reasons. That "seemed like a good idea at the time" view should have died with the protestors at Tiananmen. Nevertheless, it persisted.

to this day the US harms its material interests by disregarding its actual values. we should, as a matter of policy, disentangle ourselves from societies that make us complicit in terrible things, and seek deeper cooperation with societies nearer our values.

just impose economic barriers based on a vector of violent deaths, democratic participation, and government employment. finished. done.