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Charles Wukasch's avatar

Jake below makes some good points. I recall when the former USSR began imploding several decades ago. _Time_ had an excellent editorial on the legitimacy of secession. The author wrote "the principle of secession in our own country [the U.S.] wasn't decided by political science professors at an academic conference, but rather on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam." When I was taking my required U.S. Government course at UT Austin in 1960, a student asked the prof: "What is a legal revolution?" Without giving it a second thought, the prof answered "one that succeeds." One can say the same thing about secession: one that succeeds. Why is South Sudan an independent country today? Because the Sudanese government had neither the will nor manpower to crush it.

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DENNIS B MURPHY's avatar

Great article. Some thoughts, however.

I don't think US colonial possession of the Philippines is what led to the war with Japan. That war was due to Japanese desires for its own empire. Japan would have attacked the US anyway, in my opinion, in order to dominate the western Pacific.

HW Brands, my favorite historian author, does a great job of highlighting the "big" conflicts and use of US military as well as the pitfalls and downsides of those conflicts.

But we have used our military to equally dubious means for, well, almost 200 years with numerous incursions into Central American nations and Caribbean nations to preserve corporate domination for our leading companies, install dictators and tyrants friendly to US interests. One can readily get a list of of these interventions on Wikipedia. These interventions still plague us now with the result of migrants and asylum seekers trying to get into the US from these long-destabilized nations! My biggest pet peeve is those knee-jerk pundits who want to "close the border" or "build a wall" - both of which are ludicrous talking points. If people really want to solve the so-called "border crisis" then the root cause needs to be addressed- unstable governments and economies of those nations we have meddled in for a century or more.

We also have military involvement in a sort of shadow mechanism which genearally does not involve our troops but does involve US money and equipment:

- backing the Saudi war in Yemen

- backing various governments or insurgents in Africa

- deploying troops overseas in low level conflicts

That said, I do think our support for Ukraine is completely just and justified.

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