Applied Smart Power by a SEAL

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan,

Is it fair for me to Reply to your well-considered note a full eleven months after you wrote it? This feels a bit like the pace of exchanging letters from war during the 18th century.

Fair enough, though it almost went unnoticed... would have if not for casual curiosity over what happened to another thread.

I don't think we're all that far apart on the principles, and what I have to offer are less objections than points of caution. My perspective is possibly different because it comes from a very different background: from aid industry to journalism industry to political/financial analysis industry to going mostly native (10 yrs and counting) in a 3rd world indigenous community (one with an occasional insurgency problem, though the locals see the insurgents as less of a problem than the armed forces that occasionally come round looking for them). That perspective is naturally different from what you'd get from a military background, no more inherently valid, but different.

From that perspective, some points of caution:

That's why applied smart power (ASP) has the word "applied" built into it. We have to apply what we understand, not just form committees to debate whether we should form a committee to explore the theories.

The danger here is our inclination to overrate our own understanding. Any time we think we understand fully it's best to come to a dead stop and reassess, because there's likely a bit of self-deception involved. Again, perspective-based: after 30 years plus in my own chosen 3rd world backwater I've come to believe that the post dangerous point in the newbie learning curve is after 3-5 years in country. Before that they don't understand, but they know they don't understand. About 3 years in they hit a point where they still don't get it but they think they do, and that's when we have the ability to make a really stellar mess.

Nothing wrong with applying what we understand, but we must remember that our understanding is almost always incomplete and may be dangerously flawed. There are almost always going to be factors in any given picture that we don't see or that we don't fully understand. When we see people behaving in ways that seem irrational to us, that's a good time to assume there's something going on that we don't see.

Let's be coldly objective about the two options described. Let's take the optimistic view that fixing an economy costs exactly the same as winning a war. Which provides the greater value in the end?

We can "win" a war and end up with a shattered economy that implodes the week after we win and fly back to Los Angeles. The result is plainly lose-lose: we again face the threat of radicals streaming out of the freshly-crumbled society and spend the money all over again to win again. Or we can fix an economy and empower the legitimate (an entirely different subject for debate!) government to easily subdue and isolate the enemy force.

A coldly objective caution: we don't know how to fix an economy. The development types have been banging their heads on this one for decades, arguing with appallingly verbose passion and filling hundreds of thousands of pages with erudite and incomprehensible discourse, and we still don't have a clue. We know that broken economies can heal, over time. We know that economies can develop, over time. Comparative assessment of successes yields no recipes, though: all we learn is that each case is different and what works in one may not work in another. I can't think of any case, anywhere, where an outside intervening party has successfully "fixed" an economy.

Additional cautions:

Economic repairs are a governance function. Are we prepared to govern Afghanistan? Can we do so effectively? Given that Afghanistan already (sort of) has a government, do they need another? Are we going to replace, compete with, or (yeah, right) complement the existing government?

The obstacles to economic development are often political. Attempting to overcome those obstacles is likely to lead to direct conflict with established local power structures, whether traditional or recently developed, that find the current economic environment congenial. That's not necessarily bad, if we've fully assessed the consequences of that conflict and are prepared to manage them... but have we, and are we?

In such simple terms, it's painfully clear where the better investment is. It would even be justified to spend more for such a worthy outcome

Certainly true, if we have any assurance that the proposed worthy outcome will be achieved. Certainly fixing the Afghan economy would be a very good thing to do, if we could do it. I'm not convinced that we can.

I've nothing against the use of smart power, if we know what is going to be smart in any given circumstance. I'd have to argue, though, for what one might call the smart use of power. That, to me, means that before we even think about understanding the environment in which we propose to use power we have to understand ourselves. We have to know our objectives, and assure that those objectives are clear, practical, and achievable. We have to honestly, even ruthlessly, assess our own will and the commitment of resources that we are prepared to make and sustain.

The smart use of power requires clear, practical, achievable objectives that are proportional to the resources we are willing to commit. If we fail on that level - and I suspect that our effort to establish western-style central government in Afghanistan represents failure on that level - then even the use of very smart power may not get us where we want to be... in essence, that would be the stupid use of smart power. What we want is the smart use of smart power, if that makes any sense at all...

If we've reached a point where the only way we can achieve our objectives is to fix the Afghan economy or transform Afghan society, I'd submit that we do not need a smart way to fix an economy or transform a society: these are things we can't do and shouldn't be trying to do. We need a smarter set of objectives, one that can be achieved by means we actually have at our disposal.

PS: to clarify an apparent discrepancy: 30+ years in this country (mostly), 10 in this community. Too long on both counts according to some, but it works for me!

[Pete]

Dayuhan, your previous message was both well-reasoned and well-written. However, from time to time there are moral issues that reach the impasse level. During the 19th century they included paying tribute to the Barbary Pirates ("To the shores of Tripoli"), the British forcing the Hindus in India to stop setting widows on fire, and the suppression of the slave trade. Today in Afghanistan there are issues like forced marriages, coerced pederasty, the stoning to death of women, and allowing terrorist groups to operate freely in the area.

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan, your previous message was both well-reasoned and well-written. However, from time to time there are moral issues that reach the impasse level. During the 19th century they included paying tribute to the Barbary Pirates ("To the shores of Tripoli"), the British forcing the Hindus in India to stop setting widows on fire, and the suppression of the slave trade. Today in Afghanistan there are issues like forced marriages, coerced pederasty, the stoning to death of women, and allowing terrorist groups to operate freely in the area.

The moral impasse can be the mother of all slippery slopes. If we praise the British for their morality in banning the burning of widows, what shall we say of their use of armed force to open the Chinese market to their shipments of opium?

There's a lot of nastiness in the world. Probably less than there has been at any prior point in human history, but still plenty. Have we a moral obligation to end mass starvation in North Korea? To improve the ghastly conditions of life in Somalia, the Sudan, the Congo, or Zimbabwe? To end forced abortions in China? If tolerating or enabling coerced pederasty is grounds for intervention, should we be contemplating regime change at the Vatican?

I'd submit that the primary moral obligation of the US government is to its populace, and that a large part of that obligation is the need to manage the limited resources provided to that government by that populace carefully and in the interests of that populace. We need to think not only of what we should do, but what we must do and what we can do.

There was certainly a need to do something about the use of Afghanistan as a base by terrorists intent on killing our people. Whether that need to do something required us to try and conjure a western-style government for Afghanistan, to transform Afghan society, or to fix the Afghan economy is another question altogether.

My objection to the "smart power" construct is that it emphasizes the need for smarter ways to pursue objectives, thus de-emphasizing the greater (IMO) need to re-evaluate those objectives. Since we embarked on this thing we call the GWOT we've hung an albatross around our necks by setting vague, unrealistic, and unachievable objectives. We speak of installing governments, building nations, fixing economies, as if these things were structures to be engineered. They aren't. Nations aren't built, nations grow. Economies aren't fixed, they heal. We may be able to help cultivate a nation or to help treat an economy, but the idea of building or fixing or installing is flawed from the start. The engineering metaphors aren't the problem in themselves, but they are a neon sign pointing at the problem.

I don't think we need smarter ways of pursuing stupid objectives. I think we need smarter objectives first, and then smarter ways of pursuing those objectives. Focus first on the smart use of power, and second on the use of smart power.

[davidbfpo]

A FP Blog 'Argument' piece 'The War on Soft Power' reminded me of this thread, slightly dormant and is sub-titled:

Even the U.S. military doesn't want to cut the State Department and foreign aid budget. So why is Congress playing a dangerous game with America's global influence?

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...power?page=0,0

Yes, I know this thread is on Applied Smart Power!

[Stan]

David,
The programs are indeed long-term and often hard to define. There are but a handful that could even be classified as successful and only after nearly a decade.

The other part of this equation that is not evident to most is, the DOS manages this pot of money and are but a cog in the stymied process that keeps the good programs running. Most of Sub-Sahara’s cash gets dumped into a giant hole with little benefits and certainly no real success stories. The remainder is divided amongst the former east bloc and those who ponder over what to do with a minuscule sum end up with nothing.

The sad truth is the US Military would prefer to control and wisely spend funds on real projects instead of being at the behest of the State Dept. and embassy in the countries in question. Directing smart or soft power is great assuming the individuals charged with such a daunting task in their brief stint abroad know what they are doing or even give a hoot in promoting something that will not bear a medal of honor in the short time they are in that country.

[J. Robert DuBois]

David,
The programs are indeed long-term and often hard to define. There are but a handful that could even be classified as successful and only after nearly a decade.

The other part of this equation that is not evident to most is, the DOS manages this pot of money and are but a cog in the stymied process that keeps the good programs running. Most of Sub-Sahara’s cash gets dumped into a giant hole with little benefits and certainly no real success stories. The remainder is divided amongst the former east bloc and those who ponder over what to do with a minuscule sum end up with nothing.

The sad truth is the US Military would prefer to control and wisely spend funds on real projects instead of being at the behest of the State Dept. and embassy in the countries in question. Directing smart or soft power is great assuming the individuals charged with such a daunting task in their brief stint abroad know what they are doing or even give a hoot in promoting something that will not bear a medal of honor in the short time they are in that country.

Great arguments, gents. I'm glad the issue was in play as recently as April. For my shameful absence I can only claim that I've been insanely busy trying to get my manuscript done and into my publisher's hands...on the topic of "applied smart power." (Much of the material is available for review now at my "balanced peacemaking from a Navy SEAL" blog, http://PowerfulPeace.net)

I borrowed from your quotes, Stan, because they describe much of the current troubles. I'm a "Senior Defense Policy Advisor" in my day job, but that doesn't mean I can get buy-in from the policy makers when I urge that we move "beyond jammers and armor." (By this phrase I don't intend to demean the absolute importance of CREW systems and armor where appropriate; I mean that if we don't concurrently pursue longer-term programs of value to change the environment that spawns IEDs and insurgents, we will be forever shackled to a futile spiral of CREW and armor superiority.)

On your Para 1: The higher value methods absolutely do take more time. Between changes of administration and the generally fickle and impatient quality of American political will, many such critical programs survive just barely into adolescence, sometimes just inches from where they would begin to "turn a profit."

Para 2: DoS...ugh. Take so many great and talented people, snarled up with so many apathetic people, all stirred up together in antiquated bureaucratic processes, and see how effective even the most promising program might be. Add a budget one tenth that of DoD and Congressional approval for sharing between them, and the challenges are daunting before you even cross the US border! At a recent book event, Joseph Nye told us Bob Gates (a staunch advocate of soft power initiatives) tried to pipe $20B over to Hillary Clinton for just such purposes. When it reached Congress they saw a windfall of "surplus funds," rerouted half of it, and wrote Hillary a check for $10B.

Finally, Para 3, Part 1: This is so true - the US military (in very general terms) wants to spend money on "real" projects. Even that choice of phrasing indicates the significant bias against what I consider vastly more important initiatives...again, concurrent with "real" programs so we maintain the immediate needs of force protection and mission readiness.

Para 3, Part 2: Smart or soft power absolutely is great "assuming the individuals charged with...know what they are doing or even give a hoot." Sadly, many of those so charged either don't know or don't care; and I blame me and other advocates, not the unwilling themselves. Communicating great new concepts is not the responsibility of the conveyee.

[motorfirebox]

Can't believe I only just now found this thread. It is a really, really good read. I don't have anything to contribute myself, but I wanted to quote this portion of a previous post, if only for posterity:

I asked him why, despite abuse and atrocities such as the recent marketplace bombing, the Taliban enjoy enough active or passive support to resist the incredible might of the US military. He didn't even pause for a second, but just answered directly: "Because men don't have jobs."

Military-age males, pissed and ashamed that they can't provide for a family, eventually say Screw It, resign themselves to the only game in town, and help the Taliban because they need money.

It's very frustrating to see this core issue be not just ignored, but completely denied, so frequently.

[J. Robert DuBois]

Can't believe I only just now found this thread. It is a really, really good read....
It's very frustrating to see this core issue be not just ignored, but completely denied, so frequently.

Thanks for the supportive words, motorfirebox. I'd like to point out to everyone that my intention is NOT to offer yet another "right way" to do war, peacemaking, diplomacy, or building mousetraps. In my opinion, a monumental part of "our" problem in the conflict industry is having a whole bunch of Chiefs with Just The Right Solution...please let me, instead, be one Indian in search of others who can all open their minds to the right bits of every argument and so form a deep and abiding Right that can adapt to reality.

Anti-COINers tease COINdinistas (such as myself) because in some specific events the approach can be "proven" to have failed. COINdinistas lash out against misuse of force as being a main contributer to worsening violence and instability...yet no one can deny that a decisively brutal response has at times been just the right response.

In my opinion, which I consider to be worth exactly 1/Xth of all X of us in the conversation, standing rigidly in a theoretical camp is as destructively useless as partisan political wars that leave a "represented" population underserved while "representatives" seek mainly to serve their personal best interests. I hope to inspire some frank and humble dialogue with a forthcoming book, based on my balanced peacemaking from a Navy SEAL blog at the link, below.

In the end, I believe, an adjustment to our perspective will result in better accomplishing that mission we all agree on: protecting innocent life.

- Rob
PowerfulPeace.net

[ganulv]

Given my admittedly poorly informed point of departure my perception is certainly over-simplified, but when I see the DoD committing itself to USAID-type actions in response to military challenges I have to wonder whether groups and governments in heretofore unproblematic (from the US’s point of view) locales might decide that offering a military challenge to the US is more productive than remaining well-behaved.

[Dayuhan]

Development, economic reconstruction, and improvement of governance are all legitimate constructs, but I think that some people on the .mil side who are just discovering these constructs vastly underestimate how difficult it is to actually produce development, economic reconstruction, and better governance. The history of development efforts is littered with failures, some of them disastrous... there have probably been more failures than successes.

Building stuff isn't "development", and fixing an economy is probably more difficult and complicated than fighting a war.

I personally don't think it makes a lot of sense to retrain the army to do development work, because if we do that we will seriously compromise the ability of the army to fight wars, which we might need it to do someday. If the army is the only organization we have that has the capacity to do development work in certain locations, we might well question whether that's really what we want to be doing.

[J. Robert DuBois]

ganulv and Dayuhan,

Thanks for your comments - I think each time we have an exchange of perspectives it illuminates a little better what assumptions might be driving a conversation in different directions.

ganulv, you're spot on that governments, like individuals, will take the path of least resistance. It's just good business to economize wherever possible on costs of money or time or effort. I don't believe we could point to much in OIF/OND or OEF that indicate this dynamic in action, though, because God knows there are plenty of good, old fashioned hatreds and grievance behind the chaos there. In other lands it's entirely possible that regimes overinflate their relative instability if it will net them a larger share of the US national teat...I would, if anyone would trust me with a country.

Dayuhan, I'm especially interested in your comment because it really gets to the heart of the matter of responsibilities for the military. You questioned whether it's sensible to train armies for development...and so do I. Armies are designed to break things or, better still, to present a convincing enough capacity for breaking things that nothing ever actually has to get broken.

The screaming, glaring, invisible-in-plain-sight problem is, development must occur for stability to exist. In my country's case, that means the USG must have a development capacity if we are going to take on development. It doesn't mean DoD has to "do" it. I'm saying that every body should perform its role...and our gaping hole in capacity lies in the coordination of those bodies.

If DoS has development responsibility, can DoS carry that out in isolation? USG (the parent) has the responsibility to "teach" DoS and DoD to work together, like any siblings. In an effective system - which I don't believe is an impossible dream - DoS and DoD support one another like a well-oiled machine. Okay, maybe that is a dream, but it's not impossible.

The yin-yang, or soft-hard, or diplomacy-force of DoS-DoD has unrealized potential while our persuasion is poorly integrated with our coercion. May I give one real-world example of lousy coordination? During an assessment in one country which shall remain nameless I sought out the local PRT on a base which shall remain nameless. I wanted to gauge their level of integration and asked what sort of coordination they had with PRT HQ in the capital.

The response? "We don't coordinate with them. They give us a budget and trust us to use it on the right initiatives." In other words, everyone is doing his or her very best...but without coordination our very best results in excess redundancy, wide seams, and wasted resources. And let us not forget that one of our resources is human life.

Quick caveat - this was ONE PRT on ONE base. I have no idea whether it is indicative of the overall system and I would never presume to condemn such. I will, however, declare that this grievous dis-integration is prevalent over my quarter century in war and peace with the DoD, DoS and IC. It's been the one constant, in my observation, that thrives without regard for administration, economy or enemy.

[Dayuhan]

The screaming, glaring, invisible-in-plain-sight problem is, development must occur for stability to exist. In my country's case, that means the USG must have a development capacity if we are going to take on development. It doesn't mean DoD has to "do" it. I'm saying that every body should perform its role...and our gaping hole in capacity lies in the coordination of those bodies.

Some might say that stability must exist for development to occur... bit of a chicken and egg thing. Either assumption is, for me, oversimplified. Development doesn't always produce stability, in fact it can produce instability, especially in the short term. Development usually threatens people, typically people who have a stake in the existing order, and those people usually resist. Different people and different groups often have radically different ideas of what "development" is or how it should proceed. Attempts at producing rapid and highly visible "development" through the infusion of massive resources have typically failed to produce much in the way of development or stability. Gradual step by slow step development has a higher probability of getting somewhere, but is rarely visible enough to have much impact on an immediate stability issue.

The central question, to me, is what we are actually trying to achieve in any given case. If we're trying to throw money into a bunch of "development" projects to make people think a bad government is good or persuade people to support a government we like, we might as well keep the cash in pocket and go home, because the probability of success approaches zero.

If DoS has development responsibility, can DoS carry that out in isolation? USG (the parent) has the responsibility to "teach" DoS and DoD to work together, like any siblings. In an effective system - which I don't believe is an impossible dream - DoS and DoD support one another like a well-oiled machine. Okay, maybe that is a dream, but it's not impossible.

I'm not sure that DoS and DoD could produce effective development even working seamlessly together, because even DoS/AID is often pretty clueless on the development side. AID is institutionally biased toward centralized, cash-intensive projects involving contractors, often a very inefficient and highly politicized way to proceed. In a lifetime in the developing world I've met a number of AID people who seemed to have a clue, but I've seen very little lasting positive impact from the agency, especially in cases where HN capacity is minimal. "Development aid" is more often wielded as a lever to influence policy or win concessions than with any real hope of producing development.

The sad truth about this development stuff is that even on the development professional side there is very little clear idea of how to reliably produce "development". Nations do develop, but they generally do it on their own, in their own way. I can't think of a case, offhand, where external intervention has directed and produced meaningful "development".

[ganulv]

Having spent time living in Guatemala near the end of their civil war I became well acquainted with the fact that a lot of dark things are done in the name of stability. I can understand how violence à la night raids in Baghdad in 2006 can have a place in producing stability; a decades long policy of shooting up malnourished peasants protesting being pushed off their smallholdings in the name of stability is harder for me to understand. Which is just to perhaps echo Dayuhan’s point that there are many hows, whys, and time scales related to stability.

[J. Robert DuBois]

See, now I agree with both of you on the important message of "time" required for an effect. In my observation DoD thinks quick. There's no way to quickly assist a society to stability, because stability is an internal condition. Security, on the other hand, we can establish as fast as we can kill or intimidate the local fighters.

I don't mean to imply that there is a quick, easy fix to complex crises and conflicts. As you've said, there are 360 degrees of perspective and some actually thrive amid the suffering and deprivation. I believe it's important for us in the USG to look at opportunities to evolve our own mindset. Real change takes real time. If we don't maintain a long-term desired endstate while operating today, all the good intentions in the world won't arrive anywhere except by accident.

Finally - we can't disregard the responsibility that a host population has to work for its own brighter future. I'm not an interventionist who says we should cross the world and bring peace and prosperity to all. For many reasons like the few above, that's literally impossible.

[Dayuhan]

Thinking and acting quickly can be an asset if we're talking about rebuilding stuff that got broken in the course of conflict. That of course is reconstruction, not development, and we have to be aware of the difference.

One critical point at the start of any "development" effort (actually at the start of most things we do) is to realistically assess our goals, meaning strip away all the pretty jargon and look at what we are really trying to accomplish. If the primary purpose of a "development" effort is to make a bad government look good or to persuade people to like the government we think they ought to like, we're looking at a big red flag and might do well to reassess our course before starting on it.

[J. Robert DuBois]

If the primary purpose of a "development" effort is to make a bad government look good or to persuade people to like the government we think they ought to like, we're looking at a big red flag and might do well to reassess our course before starting on it.

Totally disagree. The US has had a great run of making bad governments look good and persuading people to like the government we think they ought to like! Just look at all our success stories: Hussein, Mubarak, Saleh...oh.

[davidbfpo]

J.Robert DuBois,

You stated:

The US has had a great run of making bad governments look good and persuading people to like the government we think they ought to like! Just look at all our success stories: Hussein, Mubarak, Saleh...

The choice of names reflects a contemporary focus on Arab and Muslim regions. Since 1945 the USA, sometimes with allies, has done a great deal of 'making' and 'persuading' in other places - nor where development was say in vogue. Places like Greece and Italy, later on and further afield Allende in Chile and Mobutu in Zaire. Many of these places no longer appear in focus.

It would be a mistake if the USA's perceptions of the places for 'making' and 'persuading' were limited to Arab and Muslim regions. Oh yes, what is missing in the calculus? Oil I nearly forgot.

Nor should we overlook the private sector, NGO's or communities. As illustrated by the UK population via charities sending abroad UK Pounds 4.0 billion p.a. or US$6.4 billion more than sent in official aid.

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to Zenpundit for re-directing me back to Robert Haddick's weekly column and the tip to a new website by Joseph Fouche. Where I found this appropriate to this thread.

Reasons of state demand that strategically substantive and consequential action be taken from time to time. But the inertia of the system demands that nothing be done within the system to raise an inconvenient stir or distract the American public from its patriotic consumption. This places two constraints on strategically significant action:

It must be small enough to escape sustained public awareness.
It must be big enough to have real strategic effect.

Link:http://fearhonorinterest.wordpress.c...tegic-default/

Now will 'smart power' work within such constraints?

[J. Robert DuBois]

The choice of names reflects a contemporary focus on Arab and Muslim regions. Since 1945 the USA, sometimes with allies, has done a great deal of 'making' and 'persuading' in other places - nor where development was say in vogue. Places like Greece and Italy, later on and further afield Allende in Chile and Mobutu in Zaire. Many of these places no longer appear in focus.

It would be a mistake if the USA's perceptions of the places for 'making' and 'persuading' were limited to Arab and Muslim regions. Oh yes, what is missing in the calculus? Oil I nearly forgot.

Nor should we overlook the private sector, NGO's or communities. As illustrated by the UK population via charities sending abroad UK Pounds 4.0 billion p.a. or US$6.4 billion more than sent in official aid.

Absolutely, David - the three names I facetiously put out were convenient to mind as "recent" (in decades) events. I had no intention of highlighting dictatorial Arab/Muslim regimes, but the connection is compelling.

What's more important is that I also had no intention of suggesting that American action abroad is necessarily counterproductive. Heaven forbid I would think that...after all, I'm an actor on that stage! We've done some tremendous things for improvement in global security.

I'm trying to point out the larger dynamic of self-interested (which is an imperative; individuals and states will never deliberately act against their best interests) national actions taken without "thinking it through" for long-term consequences. Governments act a little too much like individuals, in fact, since there is no "US" or "Russia" that takes decisions and acts, but individuals. Individuals can be mad at or irrationally in favor of other leaders, cultures or nations...these motivate decisions that seem right at the time...

As to oil: let's not forget that the US has not apparently acted with oil at the forefront of any of these interventions. I've heard all manner of other reasons, including WMD, democracy, nation-building and human rights.

[Dayuhan]

Since 1945 the USA, sometimes with allies, has done a great deal of 'making' and 'persuading' in other places - nor where development was say in vogue. Places like Greece and Italy, later on and further afield Allende in Chile and Mobutu in Zaire. Many of these places no longer appear in focus.

This is true, and it's interesting to look at why many of these places are no longer in focus.

Not so long ago Southeast Asia and Latin America were the focus of American attempts to prop up "friendly" governments and destabilize "unfriendly" ones. They were seen as basket cases; the terms "banana republic" and "tinpot dictator" were coined to describe Latin American nations and governments. We poured on both military intervention and "deveopment aid", all calculated to support the governments we liked and exclude those we didn't.

Today, of course, Southeast Asia and Latin America are generally quite peaceful and are chalking up impressive economic growth and development figures. They've a long way to go, undeniably, but there is real and impressive progress. So what happened? Did America rescue them from their benighted squalor with development aid and military intervention to protect them from the bad guys within?

Actually, no. What happened was that we finally left them alone. When the Cold War ended we scaled back intervention and politically driven aid. During the Cold War we'd never have tolerated a Chavez or a Morales, and we'd have been actively subverting a Bachelet, a Kirchner or a da Silva. Without the Cold War paranoia, we've found Chavez and Morales to be minor inconveniences, easily managed, and the more moderate left-side politicians to be quite congenial partners. With less meddling and less aid these regions have actually prospered, and found their own ways to peaceful coexistence.

Possibly something to consider when looking at today's basket cases.