America claims to promote freedom and democracy abroad but does history really support this rhetoric?
US involvement in places like Vietnam or Guatemala indicate that the main factors motivating American foreign policy are economic concerns.
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. Our real task is to maintain this position of disparity,” states a US internal memo from 1948.
Maintaining this ‘position of disparity’ has led to the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands. One notorious example is Guatemala, where an American endorsed dictatorship overthrew the democratically elected government. Recently declassified documents show that US corporation United Fruit lobbied for the CIA sponsored coup, after the democratic leader began handing out valuable fruit growing land to peasants. “The United States intervened in Guatemala precisely because it was democratic,” argues Noam Chomsky. A similar pattern of intervention emerges in Vietnam, El Salvador and East Timor. Perhaps most oppressive yet is US policy in the Middle East: America provides Israel with more than $3 billion per year in military assistance, more aid than they give to the entire continent of Africa. ‘[Palestinians] have essentially nothing to offer to the United States'. explains Chomsky. He claims American policy is determined by: “A small corporate sector, tightly linked to the state … which makes decisions in their own interest.” An informative, disturbingly honest account of post WWII American foreign policy.