As 1984 put it ‘oceania has always been at war with eurasia’ edit: eastasia.
Country’s have complex relationships. At the height of the Cold War the US and USSR still had some trade. It’s really propaganda that boils things down to allies and enemies.
Allegiances shift over time. I like to remind people of The Living Daylights (1987), in which James Bond helps a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists blow up a plane.
(it's a Soviet plane running drugs, so it's OK, and the Mujahedein involved are run by a chap who went to Oxford, and are fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, so that's OK too)
> It’s really propaganda that boils things down to allies and enemies.
Yes and no, there are some ways of seeing things that are not really compatible. For example, the USSR wanted to export communism internationally which meant incidentally fomenting violent coups around the world to create socialist powers they could control. If you are a target of such strategies you can't seriously be "friendly" with such powers - it's not just propaganda.
People are not their governments. Viewing competing governments as competition between their countries - I think that is propaganda. The US government violates the privacy of US people through mass surveillance. Now it is competing for control over social media. Yet the goal of mass surveillance of US people, which harms US people, is justified in terms of US interests.
During the cold war all sorts of things were justified because they made sense from the perspective of US (governmental) interests. The Vietnam war, the Mujahideen, the toppling of free and democratic governments. In a "realist" framework, the ends justify the means. The "ends" and "means" here are considered from the point of view of the statesman.
When the world is viewed as a chessboard between competing nations, human beings outside the decision making centers suffer - we are reduced to being expendable resources, collateral damage, in the pursuit of "national" interests.
Especially in dictatorships like China and Russia, indeed.
> Viewing competing governments as competition between their countries
I don't understand this comment. So if a foreign government is opposed to you, it's OK because it does not represent its people and therefore you should not do anything about it? As far as I know the government controls the use of violence force so in the end of the day governments matter over people when it comes to foreign relations.
> During the cold war all sorts of things were justified because they made sense from the perspective of US (governmental) interests. The Vietnam war, the Mujahideen, the toppling of free and democratic governments.
This hardly happened in a vacuum. In case you missed an episode the whole of Europe and several parts of Asia were threatened to be taken over by communist rule, in a violent fashion - the US acted as a counter power to that.
The US has fomented violent coups and interfered with legitimate elections all around the world in service of exporting capitalism and free market imperialism (e.g., in Italy, Indonesia, Iran, any number of countries in Central and South America).
And Stalin repeatedly instructed revolutionary communists to stand down in order to avoid provoking Western powers (e.g, in Greece, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and even China). The USSR provided little to no assistance to revolutionaries in Central and South America, believing that socialism needed to develop there naturally.
> The USSR provided little to no assistance to revolutionaries in Central and South America
So I guess Cuba does not count? Sending missiles right at the doorstep of the US and constant financial aid seems to counter your point.
> The US has fomented violent coups and interfered with legitimate elections all around the world in service of exporting capitalism and free market imperialism (e.g., in Italy, Indonesia, Iran, any number of countries in Central and South America).
Every major power does that, but they are not all equal. The British empire was in comparison a lot more violent that the US has ever been. And people who lived under Soviet Rule (even outside of Russia) also know very well it was far from a peace-loving, people-respecting regime.
The USSR proposed deescalation and moratoria on new weapons development repeatedly during the Cold War, and they were consistently rebuffed. Did the US not have a presence in Europe on the Soviet Union’s doorstep?
“Everybody does imperialism” is not the glimmering rebuttal you think it is.
The short list is China, Iran, Russia, N Korea, Venezuela, Cuba. There are others, but these seem to get the most attention.
Remember the Axis of Evil?