US repeatedly acts against its own self-interest

8 March 2007

I’m presently reading the history of the American wars in Indochina – from a bolthole in central Laos, appropriately enough. The thing that strikes me again and again is the unerring ability of the United States to act against its self-interest.

Let’s put aside the morality of encouraging the putsch against the democratically elected Noradom Sihanouk in Cambodia in 1970; the cancelling of the Vietnamese elections; and the laying to waste of much of Laos - where one a half tons of bombs were dropped for every man, woman and child.

Let us instead examine the effect these actions had on the interests of its corporations and its Administrations. Answer: they were disastrous.

The attempts to destroy national sovereignty and democracy in these countries led to uprisings against the United States, and the puppet regimes it had installed, which in due course drove those regimes from power and delivered a series of governments aligned to China.

In the light of the United States’ long and shameful history in Iraq, I fail to understand why – instead of doing what it does - the US does not act to support democracy and national sovereignty. It would make friends everywhere, instead of the enemies by which it is now surrounded.