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IPFS News Link • Foreign Policy

Dump Our Double-Dealing, Thuggish 'Allies'

• nationalinterest.org

Indeed, one could argue that even during the Cold War, the United States was the most secure great power in history. How many other great powers ever enjoyed the luxury of two oceanic moats on its flanks and nothing more than weak and friendly neighbors on its other borders? Most confronted geostrategic situations that did not even faintly resemble such a benign environment. Moreover, although the Soviet Union was a credible military challenger, in the end, it proved to be a much weaker and more fragile great power than the image that members of America's national-security bureaucracy had created.

It was a logical and moral stretch to justify some of the alliances that Washington forged with repulsive, autocratic regimes to wage the struggle against the Soviet Union. Decent Americans had to restrain their gag reflexes to see their government support the likes of the Shah of Iran, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, South Korea's Chun Doo-hwan, or the Saudi royal family, given the massive human-rights abuses those regimes committed. With the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, and the disappearance of even an arguable existential threat to America's security, maintaining close relationships with corrupt, murderous autocrats became harder and harder to justify.


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