11-19-2015, 12:20 AM
(11-19-2015, 12:10 AM)shaun.lawson Wrote: Yet buffer territories can also become buffer states, to everyone's benefit.
In Uruguay, I was delighted to discover streets named after George Canning (subject of my PhD), and Lord John Ponsonby. As British envoy in first Buenos Aires, then Brazil, Ponsonby played an enormous, pivotal role in establishing Uruguay as a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina, to the benefit of British commerce. His legacy, above all, is why Britain is generally very popular in Uruguay even now.
And before folk laugh - "fuck sake Lawson, do you have to bring Uruguay into everything?" - nineteenth century Latin America was just constant war. Kill or be killed. Google The War of the Triple Alliance - especially its impact on defeated Paraguay - for more on that. Yet in the twentieth century, once the period of nationalist expansionism (especially from Argentina) ended, the continent became one of the most peaceful in the world. Why is that? Because it doesn't have unnatural countries full of wildly differing ethnicities forced together against their will.
Is it really so impossible for Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria to realise that if the Kurds are granted a state, they'll no longer be some Fifth Column in their countries? Events in recent years in the Middle East have to tell them that: not because of the Kurds, but because of Sunni and Shia fighting each other for territory which only remained intact for a century thanks to a whole series of brutal dictators who did sweet fuck all for their people.
Quite a good post Shaun, but I can't shake the image of a sunburnt pasty Englishman baffling the locals by jumping for joy on the corner of Plaza de Ponsonby