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Comment by tabtab | Hacker News Reader

Any large country will try to exert influence to keep the world in a state they are happy with. It's an extension of human nature. Considering what the US could have done, their footprint has been relatively mild. Most "interventions" were to keep authoritarianism limited. If you are pro-authoritarianism, you indeed may see such moves as sinister. (I won't put a value judgement on authoritarianism in this post.)

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This is a list of USA interventions in latin america until 1996:

http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

We could find many more examples of fights against authoritarianism, for instance:

"The 1953 Iranian coup d'état,[..], was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United States [..] and the United Kingdom [..]"

"Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP) and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves"

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

Put it in context. The USSR basically occupied all the countries near it. Every country was effectively ruled by Russia. The US didn't occupy Canada, or France, or the UK, etc.

Yes, the extremely weak countries were pawns but, relatively speaking, the US let France be France and Canada be Canada.

Mexico has always been extremely leery of the United States. Notable they very prudently nationalized their oil industry on the eve of WWII.

>Yes, the extremely weak countries were pawns but, relatively speaking, the US let France be France and Canada be Canada.

Thank you very much but we let ourselves be France by getting nukes as soon as possible, leaving NATO command and kicking US troops out.

France seems almost as bad as us (the UK) at thinking they're still relevant in their post-empire age.

It's got nothing to do with being relevant, or having delusions of grandeur. It's just a matter of not having terms dictated by the US, Russia or nowadays China within our effective perimeter. Back then acquiring nuclear power was essential to those aims, and building a European block was also the right answer for the foreseeable future. Stumbles aside, it seems to be fairly reasonable and workable to me. You can't just pretend everything's fine and be a good boy for the overlord of the day.

In the 50s a number of people were acutely aware of the bullet we dodged in WW2 (we came quite close to being scraped apart into rump states).

The US let Canada be Canada by forcing them to renegotiate NAFTA and then unilaterally imposing steel and aluminum tariffs while the negotiations were going on as leverage?

The US is by far the biggest bully in the world and has been since WW2.

Countries tariff each other all the time, big and small. It's probably the rule more than the exception.

It really is amazing when you see a list like that and realize how little America actually abuses its' position in the world.

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