The United States seems to constantly be "helping to rebuild" some nation abroad. Yet, in the Middle East, American support doesn't always seem to be having as positive of a reaction as we hope for. Presidencies from Eisenhower, to Kennedy and beyond have always had a policy of "reform, develop, and modernize" as a way to promote evolutionary change and suppress revolutionary change. Now, this looks good on paper, give military and economic support to help promote growth in these countries abroad, like for instance the support for the Shah of Iran. Which ended up turning into not only a repressive regime with secret police forces and missing people, people that had an opinion about the way the government was behaving, being killed and kidnapped with American financial and arms support.
Just like every other country, American must protect its on assets and conduct itself in their best interests. We preach to be a country of peace , justice, and democracy promotion, yet we still find ourselves supporting war lords and oppressive regime leaders for our own personal gain whether it be Anti-Soviet agendas or protecting oil resources. It sometimes seem as though the more the West tries influences the Middle East, the more people seem to pull away, especially political leaders who seem to harbor a range of distaste for anything that progressively democratic or that may take away from their power. This is seen with Iranian Hostage crisis, people where so upset with the Shah and pro-Khomeini gunmen took the American embassy workers hostage.
The United State's approach to achieving economic development and westernization is to meant to support political stability in pro-American regimes. Many programs are designed to raise the living standards in countries abroad but in areas with social, political and economic unrest, it tends to fizzle out and lead to even more discontent by the citizens who are hoping for change and end up being effected directly by the corruption and power struggle of their political leaders. U.S. foreign policy looks good on paper, but in actuality it just seems like another way to keep resources under close control by dismantling and re-instating new governments, supplying money meant for a good cause but that ends in corruption and unrest instead.
Hi Olivia!
ReplyDeleteI understand what you're getting at, but your writing needs a bit of work. You have some sentence fragments and grammatical errors that make understanding your points more challenging than it should be.
You understand the gist of the article, which is great, but I think you give the U.S. too much credit. Even money supplied for "a good cause" actually has a cynical purpose--simply to buy time and keep the regime in place.
7/10