I can't help but notice that many, if not all, of the policies and direct actions you refer to happened in the last 10 years or, to put a finer point on it, during the Clinton administration.
I have long suspected that a different crowd came to run our foreign policy in that time. It would have been easy to disrupt the chain of continuity with past American policy, with the arrival of the first Democratic administration in over a decade amid the chaotic aftermath of the Cold War.
We stopped pursuing principled policies and began turning our entire diplomatic, intelligence, and military apparatus into an economic vanguard whose purpose was to execute the will of the Davos crowd. Old distinctions--communist and anti-communist, for instance--were rendered less important than economic considerations.
Do you share this view, or do you think it goes deeper than the Clintonites?
I can't help but notice that many, if not all, of the policies and direct actions you refer to happened in the last 10 years or, to put a finer point on it, during the Clinton administration.
But the seeds were planted and fertilized by Bush I and that evil James Baker. Ask the Georgians about our support of that Soviet thug Shevardnadze against a democratically-elected Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and our subsequent support during Bush Admin for the slaughter of Shevardnadze's opposition -- the "Zviadists," who were viscerally anti-communist and pro-freedom.
Bush started it because he traded freedom for "stability" in his vision of a post-Cold War world. In the name of stability, Bush I established a paradigm that Clinton's academics who came to dominate foreign policy were only too happy to exploit in the name of their even more nefarious ideologies. So who was worse? Hard to say. If Bush had stood for freedom and supported freedom wherever it took root, things would have been very different in a way that Clinton might not have been able to disrupt. I blame Bush more.