Comment by nradov
7 days ago
The US is politically stable already (by historical and international standards), and has been since 1865. If you ignore the rhetoric and focus on actions there has been very little substantiative difference in foreign policy across the last 7 presidential administrations.
The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability.
What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability?
As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo.
I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.
Stability doesn't mean statis. The USA has been remarkably resilient to those minor shocks you listed. It continues to be the most politically stable of all the countries that actually count for anything in international affairs.
If those are "minor" shocks then is it only outright war that counts as instability for you?
If so then what countries in Europe (sans the Balkans) or East Asia do you think are less politically stable than the US?
If some catastrophic event is required to define instability, then by definition any country will be stable right until one second before catastrophe. This may work fine for certain analyses, but for predicting if or when that event may happen it is useless.
You're saying "nothing bad will happen because nothing bad has happened so far". There's a first time for everything.
Going from a treaty and cooperation with Iran to cutting them off was a pretty substantial change that has already had global implications.
Even prior to that, Iran was desperately trying to cultivate relations with the West in the 90s/00s before Bush suddenly declared them Axis 2.0 and created a massive security crisis on their doorstep.
[1]
> What emerged out of this economic crisis was a reform movement led by Mohammad Khatami, who won a presidential election in 1997 on promises to cultivate civil society, fix the economy, and replace a "clash of civilizations" with a "dialogue of civilizations." The cultural transformation unfolded over the next several years was remarkable. The share of university graduates who were women topped 60 percent, a new generation of intellectuals began to favorably cite Western philosophers, and religion more or less stopped policing the daily lives of most Iranians. By 2000, the Economist was reporting that according to Iran's own clergy, fewer than 2 percent of Iranians attended mosque on Fridays. On the economic side, the neo-liberalization of Iran intensified; small-scale factories were exempted from labor laws, and state-owned industries were privatized (loosening the state's grip on the economy was thought to be the best way of decreasing state interference in Iranians' private lives). Iran's relationship with foreign nations, even the US, also improved considerably. President Clinton eased up on the economic sanctions that Reagan had put in place in 1987, and Khatami appeared on CNN to talk about his admiration for the American nation and people. Al Qaeda's attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, was met with a massive outpouring of sympathy for America in Tehran, with enormous crowds holding candlelit vigils and some sixty thousand people observing a moment of silence at a soccer match on September 23.
[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-37/politics/we-used-to-run...
If Iran was legitimately interested in having relations with the West then they would allow religious freedom, release political prisoners, introduce free elections, recognize Israel's right to exist, stop sponsoring terrorist organizations, and apologize for holding our diplomats hostage. Since they didn't do any of those basic, simple things then I don't believe for a second that they were "desperately" trying. People who are actually desperate do whatever it takes instead of the bare minimum.
President Bush certainly bungled the situation as well.