page_title: Criticism of United States foreign policy
section_title: Support of dictatorships and state terrorism
hierarchical_section_title: Criticism of United States foreign policy / Historical foreign policy / Support of dictatorships and state terrorism
caption_attribution_description: Español: Entrevista Kissinger-Pinochet.
context_page_description: Criticism of United States foreign policy encompasses a wide range of opinions and views on failures and shortcoming of United States policies and actions. There is a partly-held sense in America which views America as qualitatively different from other nations and therefore cannot be judged by the same standards as other countries; this belief is sometimes termed American exceptionalism and can be traced to the so-called Manifest destiny. American exceptionalism has widespread implications and transcribes into disregard to the international norms, rules and laws in U.S. foreign policy. For example, the U.S. refused to ratify a number of important international treaties such as Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and American Convention on Human Rights; did not join the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention; and routinely conducts drone attacks and cruise missile strikes around the globe. American exceptionalism is sometimes linked with hypocrisy; for example, the U.S. keeps a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons while urging other nations not to get them, and justifies that it can make an exception to a policy of non-proliferation.
context_section_description: The U.S. has been criticized for supporting dictatorships with economic assistance and military hardware. Particular dictatorships have included Musharraf of Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, Museveni of Uganda, warlords in Somalia, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Park Chung-hee of South Korea, Generalissimo Franco of Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano of Portugal, Melez Zenawi of Ethiopia, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala, Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, Suharto of Indonesia, Georgios Papadopoulos of Greece, and Hissène Habré of Chad.
  Ruth J Blakeley, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, posits that the United States and its allies sponsored and facilitated state terrorism on an "enormous scale" during the Cold War. The justification given for this was to contain Communism, but Blakeley says it was also a means by which to buttress the interests of US business elites and to promote the expansion of capitalism and neoliberalism in the Global South.
  J. Patrice McSherry, a professor of political science at Long Island University, states that "hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were tortured, abducted or killed by right-wing military regimes as part of the US-led anti-communist crusade," which included US support for Operation Condor and the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War. According to Latin Americanist John Henry Coatsworth, the number of repression victims in Latin America alone far surpassed that of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites during the period 1960 to 1990. Mark Aarons asserts that the atrocities carried out by Western-backed dictatorships rival those of the communist world.
  Some experts assert that the US directly facilitated and encouraged the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. Bradley Simpson, Director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, says "Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party's unarmed supporters might not go far enough, permitting Sukarno to return to power and frustrate the [Johnson] Administration's emerging plans for a post-Sukarno Indonesia." According to Simpson, the terror in Indonesia was an "essential building block of the quasi neo-liberal policies the West would attempt to impose on Indonesia in the years to come". Historian John Roosa, commenting on documents released from the US embassy in Jakarta in 2017, says they confirm that "the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI." Geoffrey B. Robinson, historian at UCLA, argues that without the support of the U.S. and other powerful Western states, the Indonesian Army's program of mass killings would not have occurred.
  According to journalist Glenn Greenwald, the strategic rationale for U.S. support of brutal and even genocidal dictatorships around the globe has been consistent since the end of World War II: "In a world where anti-American sentiment is prevalent, democracy often produces leaders who impede rather than serve U.S. interests . . . None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets."
  The U.S. has been accused of complicity in war crimes for backing the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, which has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, including a cholera outbreak and millions facing starvation.
caption: Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in 1976.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "75", "Image YResolution": "75", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2017:04:24 22:34:36", "Image XPTitle": "[54, 0, 49, 0, 55, 0, 32, 0, 45, 0, 32, 0, 70, 0, 67, 0, 32, 0, 51, 0, 48, 0, 50, 0, 0, 0]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Image ExifOffset": "2272", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4482", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6319", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "680", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "468", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}