@AGM@lemmy.ca
Not just the US, but Russia, China - imperial powers that effect regime changes - have improved their game in the last 2-3 decades (per your timeline). They’ve evolved from publicly endorsing a group, which carries the ‘costs’ of have to appear to support them in some response. Now, they’re more underground, they sew disinformation, they hire paid protesters, etc. - what they’re doing is out of the public’s eyes and thus costs them a lot less. Privately meeting with civil society groups is this new version imo
The thing is, that’s unfalsifiable. An unfalsifiable idea about a small, shadowy group of people secretly being behind world events.
A far simpler explanation is that great powers try and exert influence, in actually very poorly hidden ways, but that it rarely works to the degree of countries being puppeted. Instead, middle and small powers spend a lot of time negotiating with and playing great powers off of each other.
I mean, that’s the conspiracy theory, anyway. There’s been a striking lack of new US-friendly dictatorships in the last few decades.
@AGM@lemmy.ca
Not just the US, but Russia, China - imperial powers that effect regime changes - have improved their game in the last 2-3 decades (per your timeline). They’ve evolved from publicly endorsing a group, which carries the ‘costs’ of have to appear to support them in some response. Now, they’re more underground, they sew disinformation, they hire paid protesters, etc. - what they’re doing is out of the public’s eyes and thus costs them a lot less. Privately meeting with civil society groups is this new version imo
The thing is, that’s unfalsifiable. An unfalsifiable idea about a small, shadowy group of people secretly being behind world events.
A far simpler explanation is that great powers try and exert influence, in actually very poorly hidden ways, but that it rarely works to the degree of countries being puppeted. Instead, middle and small powers spend a lot of time negotiating with and playing great powers off of each other.