They all participated in a worldwide loose alliance pitted against the freedom from colonialism and oppression of the peoples from Asia, Africa and Latin America. They were a rogue gallery, spanning, from Europe, former German Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe, Franco and Greek colonels, Gladio and the Mafia in Africa, the apartheid regime, Mobutu and the Katanga gendarmes death squads and latifundistas in Latin America extreme Islamists, the Taliban, and oppressive kingdoms in the Greater Middle East, corrupt and effete South Vietnamese regime and killing fields dictatorships in Asia-like the one that emerged in Indonesia after Suharto’s coup, the main topic of Bevins’ book. In fact, the allies that helped the US win the Cold War were very different from the ones Obama had in mind. Vincent Bevins’ book “The Jakarta Method” reminds us of reality. It was even stranger that this fantasy was peddled by Barack Obama, who thanks to the years he lived in Indonesia and through the fate of his step-father, knew how one-sided it was. It was a very upbeat image of what American post-World War II foreign policy aimed for.
Latin American nations rejected dictatorship and built new democracies… Indeed, the ideals that came to define our alliance also inspired movements across the globe… …After the Second World War, people from Africa to India threw off the yoke of colonialism to secure their independence… the iron fist of apartheid was unclenched, and Nelson Mandela emerged upright, proud, from prison to lead a multiracial democracy. “And this story of human progress was by no means limited to Europe. In the speech to the European Youth in Brussels in March 2014, the then-president Obama, speaking of American-led alliances across the world after World War II said the following:
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