Both FDR and Churchill are on record as saying variants of "it is permissible to walk with the devil if it gets you to the other side of the bridge" about the alliance with Stalin.
This sort of ruthless pragmatism is sadly missing from today's politics. Recently people are more focused on imposing their will on the others instead of compromising, however unsavory the other side may be.
Indeed the entire cold war (and I mean the previous one) was defined by this kind of questionable compromise. There was much talk of freedom and democracy while turning around to support brutal dictatorships, religious extremists and endless civil wars in order to defeat a supposedly more important enemy.
This is exactly why I'm so sceptical of the eagerness, even enthusiasm, of those who want to launch us straight into the next cold war, again to the mood music of ethical sounding objectives you cannot possibly oppose.
Please do start, meddling in those regions is well known to anybody interested in the topic (and currently helps greatly pro-putin crowds to rationalize and justify their views), but compromise ?
Perceived non-aligned folks were murdered if possible, often with CIA folks standing just behind the corner (Allende, Che etc.). You can't really say that putting into office fascist murderous dictator like Pinochet instead of Allende was a compromise in any way.
No need to limit it to the USA. The United States is not exceptional in this regard. Pragmatism has been a feature of the exercise of power for millennia.
I would be curious of the start of your list in the Americas, as I don't feel like making compromises with our adversaries is actually a common approach there.
Here's one: the US cooperating with Saudi-Arabia and other gulf states despite them being responsible for the largest terrorist attack(s) on US soil and funding terrorists, the big bad guy since 9/11, the reason why a generation of soldiers has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing nearly a million people.
I suspect that GP believes that US-supported strongmen and right wing dictators in Latin America were US adversaries, rather than useful, crafted actors for US interests in their countries, who were managed and supported until and unless they markedly diverged from US interests.
If you’re swimming in a sea of US-standard media and patriotic narratives, I suppose it’s easier to believe the former rather than the latter.
> I suspect that GP believes that US-supported strongmen and right wing dictators in Latin America were US adversaries, rather than useful, crafted actors for US interests in their countries, who were managed and supported until and unless they markedly diverged from US interests.
I'm not sure how you'd get that from my comment (I'm not from the US, so I think you are reading an awful lot into what I said there!).
Either way, both those narratives fit the realpolitik the OP seemed to be calling for.
>The entire history of US foreign relations in South and Central America and the Middle East (at least!) is dominated with compromises similar to this.
If you meant the support and establishment of dictatorships and banana republics there, those aren't compromises in the sense of "working with the devil they hate", like they had to do in WWII with Stalin.
These are working joyly with "our kind of guys".
The main difference being that Stalin was an opponent and against the US interests, whereas those guys like Pinochet were always about the US interests, even groomed and build up especially to support them.
