Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> but think about Spain.
> Shouldn't the US have backed the Republic against Franco?
>
No. The U.S. should have refrained from its de facto support of Franco. The Republic had the money to buy arms -- the U.S., Britain, & France 'honored' a non-intervention policy while Germany & Italy did not. In effect, that policy was a blockade of the Republic but not of Franco.
I would suggest that there are deeply rooted structural factors which prevent the U.S., regardless of who occupies the White House and Congress, from intervening on the side of an autonomous (i.e., patriotic) force in any other nation. Hence the policy of leftists in the U.S. has to be a kneejerk opposition to all U.S. moves outside its own borders.
An exception to this may turn up, but as Dante put it here the high imagination fails me. The U.S. did interfere in Rwanda in the only way it was structurally capable of doing so: it blocked opposition to a genocide that did not threaten major imperial interests. To say that the U.S. _should_ have interfered in Rwanda is to pretend that we live in a different world. In a world in which the U.S. _would_ have interfered there would have been no need to.
Carrol