Chapter 9: The Allies of Convenience: A History of Misguided Intervention

The historical narratives detailed in the previous chapters were not merely academic exercises; they were the operating manuals for foreign policy. When the leaders of the Anglophone world looked out at the globe, they saw it through a lens ground by their own self-serving histories. They saw a simple world of allies and enemies, of civilization and barbarism, of the “Free World” versus the “Communist bloc,” and later, of “moderates” versus “extremists” in the “War on Terror.”

This simplistic, binary worldview consistently led them into disastrous alliances. In the name of fighting a perceived greater evil, the United States and the United Kingdom repeatedly provided money, weapons, and legitimacy to some of the most brutal dictators, death squads, and religious fanatics of the 20th century. These groups were cynically rebranded for domestic consumption as “freedom fighters,” “allies,” or “moderates,” while their true nature was ignored.

This chapter will serve as a ledger of these misguided interventions. It is the consequence of seeing the world through a flawed lens. We will examine key case studies where this dynamic played out with tragic results:

• The Nicaraguan Contras: How a Cold War obsession led the U.S. to back a reactionary force of human rights abusers and market them as the “moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”
• The Shah of Iran: How a quest for oil and a fear of Soviet influence led to a coup against a democracy and the decades-long support for a brutal monarch, paving the way for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
• The Afghan Mujahideen: How the funding and arming of the most extreme Islamist factions to fight the Soviets directly planted the seeds for the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

These are not isolated mistakes. They are the predictable and devastating outcome of a foreign policy built on a foundation of historical lies.