Oh, you mean 1922-1991. Well, Western “Empires” retreated during that period or you have to talk about an evolution of imperialism that’s more like spheres of influence. The USA started controlling a lot of the world after WW2, not as completely as, say, Britain controlled The Raj, but dominated a lot of the world, had close to a veto on many governments, and is what a lot of people are talking about with imperialism in modern times.
But, yeah, the USSR was actually conquering and holding territory during that period.
Don’t forget about the time USA#1 and the Europeans that came before them spent the better part of 500 years genociding the native populations in the Americas in pursuit of land and riches.
And after that, Capitalism/“The West”/multinational corporations had conquered the parts of the world that mostly just serve as resource stores and dumps. Like, The Philippines didn’t need to be conquered again. They had a ruling class in place that benefited from the arrangement and it just needed some military support. And the same thing went for probably 50 countries.
They didn’t have very extensive soft-imperialism. You could say Cuba and Vietnam, but that’d be a pretty bad comparison, and, at any rate, much less extensive.
But I’m not tankie-ing anything. Like I say, Stalin and Mao were horrible… But much more so internally than externally compared to the USA et al. You just can’t stand still for attacks on the USA, Capitalism etc because, despite having the spec of enlightenment required to not like Trump, you’re still an indoctrinated patriot.
Just to take Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh was clearly the resistance to imperialism and Diem was clearly the imperial puppet. It’s closer to Ho Chi Minh: USSR:: George Washington:France than the USSR being imperialist. Cuba was similar.
Wrong, because I didn’t say the USSR wasn’t imperialist. In fact, quite the opposite, just that it was on a smaller scale than the West. We’re running into your literacy problems.
The main way military spending boosts our economy is that so many innovative technologies come from inventions that were part of making more efficient killing machines but then later found their way into having civilian use.
US companies that have shareholders and profit expectations can’t sink billions into basic research that may not pay dividends in the next fiscal quarter. Government can play the longer game.
Of course we could just take billions out of the military budget and invest in research universities and other organizations that could work on projects of public interest. But no that’s socialism or something. The US is very socialist when it comes to the military industrial complex.