What will it take to stop our government from covertly overthrowing other governments?

[Scootaloo]

5. That's an interesting question

But I think it's better to ask why the ones we've done so far worked - or seemed to work.

it's a question of relative power. In 1953, the Us stood as the one nation in the world with both a powerful industrial base and also had suffered very little in WW2. Only the USSR could serve as competition in power; thus the notion of "superpowers" - it's not that these two nations were enormously powerful on their own... but also that all the other nations were either flattened by war, or former colonies that had been impoverished to pay for that war - and the one before.

The US was so much more powerful than these other "little nations" that it really could just sweep in, throw out the old regime and instal la new one fairly securely - as in Iran. The Soviets were able to do the same thing. However less powerful states - like Britain and France - foundered in the same endeavors, because they were closer to their targets in terms of power.

However, two things happened. First, other nations began to regain some of their lost power - the parity began to shift. Second, alternate methods of establishing and expressing power came into use - through guerrilla or terror methods, mainly, but also in mass civil unrest movements.

As the power began to ebb closer to parity, we found that our attempts at changing and maintaining "favorable" regimes became more fragile, more likely to blow up against us. The clearest lesson for the US was in Vietnam, where pretty much the entire nation participated in a guerrilla war against our soldiers and the installed government they were protecting. It blew up again in 1978 with our attempted counter-revolution in Iran, and then in 1984 when we tried to back up Israel's puppeteering in Lebanon. The Soviets meanwhile lost hard in Afghanistan and were rapidly losing their grip on the Warsaw pact, starting with Poland, and quickly spiraling from there.

Nowadays, we lack the ability to effectively "puppet." Either we destroy these other nations - as in Iraq - or we end up backing blatantly anti-human regimes such as in Honduras and Egypt.

What will it take? Well, it'll take someone in our government realizing that we are no longer staring down Stalin across occupied Berlin; We are long past the era of superpowers. However our foreign policy is still stuck in the Truman administration, and Allen Dulles might as well still be head of our intelligence agencies. The Us is living in a leave it to beaver fantasy land of foreign policy, and so long as that's the case, we'll keep smashing around like bulls in a china shop until either we reach an economic tipping point where the taxpayer can no longer support the military and themselves, as happened in the USSR, or some genius figures out that HEY! 1953 was sixty years ago, time to move on.

Sadly that genius will not be from this generation of politicians, all of whom are still firmly rooted in the concept of "evil empire" and "superpowers"