digamma.net - notes

Matt Yglesias:

Democracy, liberal institutions, and roughly free markets have spread a great deal since 1945 and that’s overwhelmingly happened without the United States of America invading places and setting up new state institutions. That’s not to say that we’ve been totally uninvolved, but it’s been around the margins and rather subtle. We ought, I think, to have a little faith in democracy’s success and track record and not be in some kind of panic where either we need to spread freedom around the world tomorrow or else just decide we don’t care about values or humanitarianism.

In some cases, you could replace that first “without” with “despite".

Cambodia is awesome. In twenty-five years, Phnom Penh has gone from a collective trauma that left them in the stone age to a bustling city that’s probably what Bangkok looked like fifteen or twenty years ago. I’m less apalled by the atrocities that happened here than inspired by the resilience.

And, like Yglesias says, all without a US invasion. (Yeah, I know, Vietnamese invasion, but we opposed that bitterly.)