But in the first three post-WWII decades the U.S. "allowed" the development of political democracy (and economic prosperity) in western Europe, and more recently the U.S. has "allowed" movements toward political democracy (and economic prosperity) in East Asia...
The explanation that the U.S. always and everywhere seeks to create poverty and dictatorship--and has the power to do so--seems to me to be simply wrong.
To reach this conclusion you have to close your eyes to the differences between South and North Korea, Japan and China, Taiwan and Vietnam, Greece and Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary, and West and East Germany throughout most of the post-WWII period.
I do think that in Latin America (and to a great extent in Africa) United States policy has--wrongly--bet on authoritarian thugs rather than democratic socialist reformers, and that Latin America has suffered greatly from it--that Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and several others would be much better off if not for the United States.
But others disagree:Jeanne Kirkpatrick, for example, says: (i) that revolutionary leaders like Salvador Allende who are attractive to pinko-bleeding-heart-liberal-San-Francisco-social-democrats like myself never come out on top once the revolution has rolled through to its completion; (ii) that the leaders of the communist dictatorship that the revolution ends in are people like Josef Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Josip Tito; (iii) that someone like Fidel Castro is at the benificent end--way at the benificent end--of the possibilities of what might happen after the revolution; (iv) that a Latin America ruled in the 1970s and the 1980s by a couple of Castros, a few Zhivkovs, a Kadar or two, plus a Hoxha and a Pol Pot would have led to a world vastly inferior to the one we have; and (v) that the illusions about the possibility of acceptable regimes to the left of Sweden under which I suffer were allowable back before Kronstadt but today indicate nothing more than a softness of the brain.
And I have a hard time arguing back, for there are and never have been any acceptable regimes to the left of post-WWII Sweden.
Brad DeLong