My sense of the Cold War examples is that they happened in places that were on a kind of knife’s edge already. Like Chile - there was an existing underfunded, previously influential and endogamous military that didn’t need to much encouragement to take down Allende, electoral mandate be damned. They managed to gain influence across a lot of Latin America at the time, but there’s no comparable place now. In modern places like with unstable governments, the US has been losing ground this decade, as opposed to running the show.

If the US was secretly replacing otherwise-stable governments all over the world, it would take vast numbers of people all over and be much too hard to perfectly to cover up. France’s program in north Africa ended up an open secret, for example. You don’t need it to explain anything either; so, it’s not supported by Occam’s razor. And obviously, how could I falsify that idea? This is when it starts feeling like arguing against a conspiracy theory. Every thing you can say against it gets twisted into evidence for a successful coverup.

There’s been open interventions like Iraq and Libya, and legitimate controversy about them, but neither of those guys were remotely elected (which is what I was asking about). Intervening in the sense of throwing their weight around in lesser ways definitely happens, both in secret and in open, but China is also notorious for it, and has even taken a couple swings at Canada deep in the US sphere.

But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying “promoting freedom and democracy” but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.

My point there was just that a lot of the decision makers believe they’re doing something noble (and the rest just want to get re-elected). At least in my country, which is culturally very close to the US, foreign policy isn’t a deliberately self-serving enterprise. (Although the fascist/“far-right populist” movement obviously goes in exactly that direction, and claims it’s a virtue)

I don’t agree at all that it’s always BS.

The first example I was thinking of there is Venezuela. Conditions in the nation are really bad, there’s been mass migration out of it, and it’s not hard to find a Venezuelan that hates Maduro and friends. He can say it’s the CIA planting people, but even if you agree that none of the situation is actually his fault, it’s not the CIA - people do blame the current government. Same story during the Arab Spring. Really, dictators will usually say an enemy manufactured any civil unrest, and the US is the obvious choice for some of them. Others blame local rivals, and historically Jews were popular.

Also, Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela, which goes back to the knife’s edge thing. The US appears to be gearing up for an open armed invasion to dislodge him, because just the considerable public support for the opposition and whatever clandestine programs weren’t enough.

A 2021 review of the existing literature found that foreign interventions since World War II tend overwhelmingly to fail to achieve their purported objectives.[100]

Interesting, I might have to read that. In my head the banana republic coups worked like half the time, but maybe that’s just because nobody talks about the failed ones.