On Friday, November 09, 2001 10:54 PM Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
sentience@pobox.com wrote:
>>> Nation-building is the only strategy that ever worked for America. It
is
>>> only natural to suppose that America will never use it again. The only
>>> hope for the Afghani is that the war drags on until 2005 and we get a
>>> better President.
>>
>> Can you give any examples of nation-building working? What exactly do
you
>> mean by it?
>
> Post-WWII. Marshall Plan. Germany. Japan. You know, those two highly
> industrialized liberal democracies, allies of the USA, that used to be our
Our? I don't recall you and I being there...
Also, the remains the argument put by forth by Thomas Fleming (in _The New
Dealers' War_) and others (e.g., John T. Flynn and Robert B. Stinnett) that
FDR did his best to manipulate Japan and Germany (his real target)
> blood enemies sixty years ago?
First off, the Marshall Plan was not nation building, but wealth transfer
mainly justified to fight against Communism. (The way the war was
prosecuted by the US kind of wiped out any potential balance in Europe and
Asia against the Soviets. As Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla note in
their _War: Ends and Means_, people going to war should always do so to win
a better peace. War should not be just about beating up the enemy, but
mainly about the long run -- the time after the war is over.)
Second, from reading _The Fourth and Richest Reich: How the Germans
Conquered the Postwar World_ by Edwin Hartrich several years ago, I got the
impression that the Marshall Plan was not as successful. The deciding
factor in nations springing back from war was mostly what internal policies
they decided to implement. Notably, [West] Germany built itself back up,
while Italy (and Greece) remained basket cases.
To add weight to this "internal policy" argument, it's notable that it was
only after both West Germany and Japan shook off a lot of the continued
economic interventions from the US and other Allies that their economies
started to take off.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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