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Originally posted by Spanky
Yes but then he went and tried to work out a deal with Ortega undermining Reagans foreign policy.
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Substantive disagreement on foreign policy is not treason, or cluelessness, or what have you.
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You are kidding right? Look at North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam - and it took 70 year to get rid of the Soviet Union. Communist dictatorships are tough to get rid of.
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In some cases. In other countries, Communist governments did not last.
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Would South Korea be better off if it was part of North Korea?, would Malaysia and Indonesia be better off if they were Communist like Vietnam.
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No. And if that's what you understand me to be saying, you're not reading me right.
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Sometimes the choice was between communists or authoritarians. What these liberals were promoting is that we withdraw support from the anti-communist regime and let the communists take over. This was a tough call.
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Sometimes nuns had to be murdered, eh?
That wasn't always the choice. We tended to support strong men -- thugs -- because they served our interests, and because we feared that democracies would not survive.
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What makes you think Singapore is not a democracy.
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You must be kidding. It's things like the absence of a free press and an independent judiciary. I'm with
William Safire on this one.
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China is run by communists. Since 1985 they have slowly been moving towards capitalism. The communist party thinks they will be able to hold on but they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Pretty soon there is going to be strong middle class that will demand democracy.
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I hate to say it, but you sound positively Marxist.
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South Koreas turn towards democracy was inevitavble.
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Hardly. Read the book by George H.W. Bush's ambassador to South Korea and China, China Hand. Things easily could have worked out differently.
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Like I said before countries when they reach $6,000 to $8,000 per capita income they always go Democratic. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, Argentina, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan etc. Can you name a country that has over $8,000 per year in per capita income that is not a democracy?
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Singapore and Malaysia are not functioning democracies, though they may hold elections. I'm glad that the military juntas in Chile and Argentina lost power, but it was hardly inevitable.
There obviously is a connection between economic prosperity and political development. I'm not going to argue with you there. But, if so, it kinda makes you wonder why conservatives are so wedded to military force as a way of solving problems that we might solve through other means. Lift the economic sanctions on Cuba and North Korea. And so on.
Presumably your answer to this is that right-wing juntas are peculiarly vulnerable to the growth of a middle class. But why not Communists, too? Your China scenario is that the Communists are inevitably going to be forced out of power by the middle class, right?
