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When exactly did America lose its innocence?
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JFK averted disaster in the Cuban Crisis by talking to Krushchev. The same Krushchev who famously proclaimed "We will bury you!", which the majority of Americans perceived as a nuclear threat. And STILL Kennedy had a phone line direct to Moscow so the 2 could talk.
In every hostage situation, the FBI or police negotiator tries to figure out what the gunman wants. Even if the FBI has no intention of actually fulfilling any of those demands.
And heck, I agree with some of Al Qaeda's demands. They want US troops out of the Middle East, and I agree. Saddam's not around anymore, so who exactly are we protecting the Kuwaitis from nowadays? Iran's the big regional bogeyman, but they haven't attacked anyone in over a century (the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s started because Iraq invaded them).
I don't know, we did let the whole "burning down the White House" thing go pretty quickly.
Also for fairness sake, Britain and France did provide a ton of economic and even material aid to the Confederacy during the Civil War. Those Confederate warships and blockade runners? The South wasn't exactly known for its great shipyards.
Edit: The British and French position in the Civil War was basically "Help the Confederates enough that they might win, thus greatly weakening a major power in the New World and overturning the Monroe Doctrine, but don't piss off the US enough that it stops exporting grain, at which point Europe would basically starve to death."
And Britain, France, and America contributed huge quantities of materials to the White Forces/Tsarist Loyalists during the civil war (in effect, the entirety of their armored assets), alongside tends of thousands of actual fighting troops. The Whites weren't exactly famed for their engineering prowess, or their personal ownership of US Marine Corps soldiers. To be fair.
Fair point about the White House, though I know it was in retaliation for a Canadian legislature (don't know where). Comparing it to the destruction of another American monument--the World Trade Center--in particular, there's a difference (of course, you can't even pack thousands of people into the White House today, much less 1812, and Washington as a whole was evacuated if I'm not mistaken). The Ango-American alliance is pretty clearly one of the closest in the world, the only comprable ones I can think of are the India-Bangladesh and Russo-Amernian partnerships.
Khrushchev's famous shoe-waving temper aside, that specific quote was actually in reference to his belief of ideologically superiority--i.e. Soviet ideology would bury American ideology--and nothing really to do with atomic weapons. Which is ironic, since Khrushchev probably made more insinuations and threats of using nuclear weapons than any of his counterparts (try and find Brezhnev, Chernenko or Andropov doing the same thing, or as often), so it's understandable by Americans would take that quote as a physical threat. It's the same reason Soviet citizens took one of Reagan's famous jokes--"I've signed legislation that makes Russia illegal, nuclear fire will begin in ten minutes." [sic] or his "Evil Empire" rhetoric seriously--clearly, Reagan cannot just write the USSR out of existence like that, but he was known to be crazier then a lot of his contemporaries AND have his hand on the button.
1) We did burn down Toronto, so fair's fair.
2) Mainly it was the British that built confederate ships, And the Brits apologized and paid us some cash, so it's cool.
Well, the fact that even though the US technically "lost", pretty much all the war goals were de facto attained, and that the war ended on a high note for the US, probably helped with there being no great hate over the War of 1812.
This is not entirely unlike why the USSR and Finland enjoyed continuous polite, stable, and profitable relations during the entirety of the Cold War, despite the Winter War.
The Finns: got a stunning, undenyable victory over a much larger military power, albiet at a high cost, as glorious victories tend to come (though, as records have revealed, their existence as a nation was not threatened, because...)
The Soviets: got all of their territorial demands at the peace settlement for which they went to war in the first place (literaly--the Finns might have been phenomenal fighters, but apparently couldn't negotiate their way out of a damp paper bag), a harsh wake-up call in the area of winter warfare that would very much assist them in a much more serious war than "land grab with the Finns"--namely, preventing the genocide of the Slavs and Central Asians. After that war, everything else seems like small peanuts.
Finnish national mythos celebrates the Winter War, and with good reason, but there's a reason why there's no hate on the part of the Soviets, and then the Russians (with whom the border was shared), and both countries get a decades-long tradition of cooperation over shared concerns (and the occasional competitive rivalry) which lasts to this day. The shared sour notes--that the Winter War brought Finland closer to Germany, which the USSR blamed in part for masterminding the whole affair, or that it was a humilating defeat for the Red Army--are bad, but hardly disasterous in the context of the time.
Nah the European policy was rather more "Someone of questionable moral quality wants to buy our military products with their hard delicious cash? Fine by us!", a policy that western countries including America continue up to this day.
Why would Britain want to overturn the Monroe doctrine? The British underwrote the Monroe doctrine right up to the 1880s as the US had no fleet to speak of. The US during the civil was just as reliant on European imports as Europe needed its exports (90% of Union gunpowder was made from nitrates produced in British India).
The US has always been much more involved with and dependent on the wider world than its national consciousness wants to admit.
Nothing. Just be prepared to have your opinion opposed and argued. A lot.
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Not much, however basing your policy on the idea that America is the only awesome place and can do no wrong whilst everyone else is useless sniveling freedom haters causes a lot of problems.
Of course, France and Spain stil did things in the western hemisphere regardless, there was the whole emperor of Mexico thing after all.
Naive? Definitely.
Still is...
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Now that I'm done shitting on the whole thread (sorry but it seems the thread is geared towards shitting on itself), I'll say that I like the comic above and I also like that bit John Oliver did, where he showed each of Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly, doing a sappy monologue about the simpler times in America, and each one of them referring to a different time in America, which in each case just so happened to be the time when that particular pundit was himself a child.
The US said no to the idea of calling it the Monroe-Canning Doctrine, that sat back and let Britain do the actual enforcing of the concept anyway (Britain nix'd the various French and Spanish plays in Latin America) whilst looking 'tough' - a win really. The Monroe doctrine is just some action statements, not what actually went on, or the near religious law later US politics made it.
Umm after 1812 the US fleet was allowed to decay to a pretty pitiful and out dated state much the same as what happened after the civil war. The French intervention in Mexico only went ahead because Britain was on board (since the Mexican government owned them money too). You're also conflating Britain, which needed food imports with Europe, which didn't and Britain was rich enough to buy food elsewhere - the US's economic importance came later.