What’s your opinion on America?

[BeezyBee]

Lifelong US resident here. It’s really hard to say whether I like living here or not since I have nothing to compare it to. I definitely have my issues with the country as a whole, I feel like a lot of Americans are not used to being told no (as we are seeing through this pandemic).

 

[Mayor Ng]

Here's my honest opinion about the USA:
I like the USA as a country, its very vast and have many beautiful sceneries of nature. I have been to USA once in 2014 (before Trump was elected) to New York City and New York State and Orlando, Florida. The people were very friendly and nice in Orlando and in New York State but people in New York City was abit uppity and cold (propably because of the stress of citylife). Opinions are loosely based on what I have seen and experienced while I am there.

I watched Trumps victory via the electoral college and honestly had no clue what the electoral college is or whether it was democratic (isn't democracy about the people's votes?). Ever since, I've mostly heard unfavourable things about Trump in the international media. I can't judge since my country doesn't have a particularly good prime minister at the moment either. However, his recommendation of Hydroxychloroquine despite health experts disapproval and the overall handling of the pandemic is in my opinion, very very poor.

1. If you live here, how ashamed are you of living here?
- I do not live in the USA and cannot give you a comment on it.

2. Had Trump not been elected, would you still view America unfavorably? Why or why not?
- I cannot give you an accurate answer and I think my opinion is influenced by the scores of bad publicity that surrounds the USA since Trump's election. There is also no guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have made USA's image better. Just have to say that at the moment, my view of America is unfavorably because I wouldn't want to be residing in the USA with how Trump and his administration is handling the pandemic

 

[LadyDestani]

As an American citizen, I have to say that my view of America is generally unfavorable. I started to develop this mindset in probably my mid to late teens and it's only grown more unfavorable since then. That was about the time that I fully became aware of the prevalence of racism and prejudice in this country when I started dating a POC.

Then, the very first election I had the opportunity to vote in was the Bush/Gore election in 2000. I hope it's easy to see how a person could become disillusioned with the political process in the US when that was their first experience, especially as someone who voted for Gore.

Eventually, I got married and went on a honeymoon to the Bahamas. It was my first and only time out of the country and the one thing that immediately stood out to me was how easy it was to spot other Americans. They were loud, obnoxious, and showed a complete lack of respect for the rules of the establishment, the staff or the other guests. Now, I want to be clear that I don't think all Americans are like that, but every single person that I encountered who acted like that in a foreign country (basically like they owned the place) happened to be an American. That experience made me feel ashamed to be American, not because I had done anything wrong as I certainly had no control over these people, but because I didn't want anyone to assume I was like them just because of my nationality.

Those are just a few of the highlights that led me to view America unfavorably, but it's something that has been building in me for a long time. It definitely didn't start with Trump, but he makes everything worse. He is exactly like all of those rude, belligerent Americans that I was ashamed were my fellow countrymen, but the difference is that he's in a position of power. He was elected to speak for us and lead us and that just leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. It's the "me first" mentality in America that really bothers me the most. I would just like to see more compassion for others. And again, I want to specify that I don't mean all Americans because there are some lovely people on this forum who I know are from the US and they seem very kind and generous.

I have seriously looked into moving to a different country. I have a short list of countries that I would love to live in with Australia topping the list, but financially it's just not possible anytime in the near future. I know all countries have their problems and no country is going to be perfect, but I feel like America is going backwards while some of the other countries that appeal to me are moving forward.

 

[DJStarstryker]

Many Americans have not gotten the opportunity to live outside of the US for any period of time. I got to live in Japan for a few years so from my perspective I don't think there is such thing as a "best" country in the world. Each country has its charms. Each country also has its own negatives.

I am not ashamed to be American, but I am frustrated by things President Trump does. He makes us look bad on the world stage and has hurt our friendships with other countries. I think he is doing a terrible job with his COVID-19 response. Would Hillary or someone else have done better? Who knows. It's impossible to speculate and is not worth wasting our time on since that's not the reality. I am also frustrated by the growing political divide in this country, and how politicians fight each other tooth and nail and seemingly get very little done to make progress on anything at all. It doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you lie on - I feel like most Americans can agree with that.

 

[greenvoldemort]

to generalise a whole country is difficult! but there are obviously some postive and negative aspects!

 

[Nunnafinga]

My opinion on The United States of America?It ain't what it used to be.Since the end of World War II there have been several events that have caused fractures in American society.There was the Korean War which pretty much ended where it began.There was McCarthyism and the Cold War.There was the Kennedy assassination.There was Vietnam,then Watergate.But the biggest fracture of all came on Sept.11,2001.9/11 caused a major unrest because the vast majority of Americans thought we were untouchable and never believed something like 9/11 could happen on our own soil.Ever since 9/11,this country has gone into a downward spiral.We fight wars based on falsehoods.Our people are still dying in other countries despite promises to bring them home.Our political leadership,whether Democrat or Republican is self-serving and ineffective.Prices go up but wages rarely do.Racism is rampant.We need an upheaval in our political system,especially in the way we elect our leaders.Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?I wish there was but I can't see one.

 

[nintendofan85]

Yes and no, but these lockdown protests are gradually diminishing my view of my country.

America wasn't made "great again" by Donald Trump. We're arguably less great than we were under the Barack Obama administration. The United States has always had problems, like any country (some more prominent than others), but under Obama, views of the US abroad improved and were far better than what they had been under George W. Bush. The Bush administration's involvement in the Iraq War after it began in 2003 did significant damage to views of the US in other countries. If you notice, Bush became a gradually more and more unpopular leader abroad, especially in his second term. Barack Obama on the other hand was largely popular abroad (which could explain how Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009), but that distinction has faded away under Donald Trump. Trump has done so much since his inauguration in 2017 to anger other nations, especially our allies (at the 44th G7 summit in Canada that was hosted in 2018, Donald Trump had basically made the leaders of all of the other countries, with the exception of maybe Italy's prime minister Giuseppe Conte, and yet Donald Trump went to Singapore right after that summit to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and they appeared to have a chummier relationship than Trump did with our own allies). The Trump administration's poor response to the coronavirus pandemic is basically the last straw for much of the world, to the point that the strained relationship with an example of one of our allies, Japan, is not regarding English education as a language to be as important. This comes in heavy contrast as, for example, when Japan's economy was thriving back in the 1980s, English education was practically seen as a necessity in Japanese society. Even if Japan's economy is growing at a much slower pace now (the Lost Decade came in the '90s, and of course, because of COVID-19, Japan is now expected to enter its worst recession since World War II, outstripping the decline that happened during the Great Recession back in 2008 and 2009), most Japanese today still, in 2020, see the United States as a declining world power, even if Japan isn't what it was in the late 1980s with its hectic economic growth of the time (that time in history oversaw books such as Akio Morita's Made in Japan being written in 1986, and Morita also worked with Shintaro Ishihara, who later served as Governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012, to write The Japan that Can Say No in 1989, and other books were written as American reactions against these, such as Lee Iacocca's Talking Straight in 1988). The fact that our allies see us heading on a path of irrelevancy should be worrying.

It's worth mentioning that I think, in my opinion, that the coronavirus outbreak has only worsened this ever since it began late last year. China's government has taken a lot of heat internationally for how it spread around, considering that, of course, the virus began in Wuhan (with cases first being reported in November I believe), but the way the Chinese government has handled the matter does not excuse a poor response on United States soil from the administration of Donald Trump. On top of this, numerous Chinese doctors have worked to develop in recent months medicines and vaccines, and while they have been used in China first, these medicines and vaccines have been exported to other countries, and will soon be exported to Australia. It used to be-especially in light, although it wasn't as severe as the coronavirus, of the 2009 swine flu pandemic-that it was United States doctors who led the world in these necessities and endeavors. If the US isn't leading as much as it was just eleven years ago, that should be telling.

 

[Alolan_Apples]

You guys have excellent opinions on how bad America is. It doesn’t matter which side I support in our country (I’m usually with the Republicans because of traditional moral values and economic freedom), bigotry is one thing I will never get behind. God created everyone, but Satan created racists. That had always been a problem in America since the beginning, and that’s one thing I can’t defend America for.

 

[kayleee]

Honestly it’s very embarrassing

 

[Corrie]

I'm gonna do my best to be nice but honestly I'd never live in America. It has too many problems and the mindset of a lot of the people there is awful.

 

[Seastar]

I'm just going to say that as the years go by, my opinions of this place get worse and worse. History class made it sound like things had gotten better. Child me was given very false impressions and I hope future children are not put under this impression too.

 

[*The Oakboro Mayor*]

Oh, I’ve kind of given up hope, to be honest.

I am a little ashamed to live here. I feel like we have a lot more to offer than a fat democrat who only wanted to become president because it would be an adventure has to say. I feel like our foreign affairs have been wrecked. I like living in America for a lot of different reasons. I love NASA and I think that it’s great that we put 2 astronauts in space to go the ISS on American soil. America has given my family the opportunity to grow and become very well off. But I don’t like living in America because of the government. The way Covid-19 was handled disgusts me to this day. Trump treated it like a game and for that it got millions killed. He fires anyone who disagrees with him. I think that we need an honest person as president, not people who are doing it for personal gain. We need to fix our forgien affairs because people all over the world have a bad opinion of us. Just because Americans who travel the world are loud doesn’t mean I am! I want to be valued not as an American, but as a human being. It’s hard to say what would have happened if Trump hadn’t been elected. I think that we have made a really bad mark on other countries an at the end of the day that can’t be erased with a sorry. But I feel like I should apologize. I feel bad that we are shutting off Japan with tarriffs, and that we can’t even be in a discussion of global warming without getting defensive and rude. I wish we were better. I really do. I’m sorry.

 

[moonbox]

Both my parents are immigrants but my mom is pretty whitewashed because she was adopted by an American military guy.
Since I’ve looked into the Korean perspective on US imperialism and how they’re responsible for the divide, I’ve just become more and more disgusted and conflicted by my American identity. I see too much wrong in this country from a nonwhite perspective and it’s just hard to reconcile. I dated a very patriotic white guy in college and the way he invalidated so much of my existence still bothers me to this day.

Post automatically merged: May 31, 2020

also living in Korea and making international friends who didn’t see America with rose tinted glasses opened my eyes.

 

[epona]

i'm not american but have visited numerous times and have also lived there for an extended period


beautiful country but whewww what a mess

 

[duckykate]

I'm very ashamed to be living here, this country was built upon hatred and malice and there is nothing to celebrate

I really wish I could be proud of where I'm from and be patriotic but what is there to be proud of???

 

[Ichiban]

americas tweaking rn, dunno if i'd want to be there rn but i have tons of friends down there who i hope are alright

 

[visibleghost]

i wouldn't want to live there honestly, too many things i dislike and actively disagree with that goes on there. capitalism exists like everywhere but the extreme extent of it in the usa is wild. i don't like the culture either sorry i don't know how to put it because i don't mean that your music and movies suck or anything, just the way things are strike me as odd and a bit icky at times. this comes off as very offensive and i don't mean it in that way, also i don't actually know what it's like living over there since all i know is from the internet and visiting once so obviously ignore me lol.

the politics are just another thing that makes me never want to live there. a two party state where both parties are right wing and one of them is extreme and run by religious idiots? sorry but no thanks

 

[nintendofan85]

Both my parents are immigrants but my mom is pretty whitewashed because she was adopted by an American military guy.
Since I’ve looked into the Korean perspective on US imperialism and how they’re responsible for the divide, I’ve just become more and more disgusted and conflicted by my American identity. I see too much wrong in this country from a nonwhite perspective and it’s just hard to reconcile. I dated a very patriotic white guy in college and the way he invalidated so much of my existence still bothers me to this day.

Post automatically merged: May 31, 2020

also living in Korea and making international friends who didn’t see America with rose tinted glasses opened my eyes.

I definitely think that the United States takes some blame for Korea's split, but I also put some of the blame on Japan and Russia. Japan forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, and then during World War II, the Japanese soldiers committed heinous atrocities that I cannot say here, and they are still a historical issue that I know Japan and South Korea have with one another today. As for Russia, the Soviet Union didn't honor its agreement to allow Korea to be a unified republic at the Potsdam Conference (although, again, the US can take blame for that too).

Post automatically merged: Jun 1, 2020

I'm just going to say that as the years go by, my opinions of this place get worse and worse. History class made it sound like things had gotten better. Child me was given very false impressions and I hope future children are not put under this impression too.

I really thought the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, and then the election of the first African American president in 2008 would change things. However, people's ignorance appears inconsolable.

 

[Alolan_Apples]

I definitely think that the United States takes some blame for Korea's split, but I also put some of the blame on Japan and Russia. Japan forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, and then during World War II, the Japanese soldiers committed heinous atrocities that I cannot say here, and they are still a historical issue that I know Japan and South Korea have with one another today. As for Russia, the Soviet Union didn't honor its agreement to allow Korea to be a unified republic at the Potsdam Conference (although, again, the US can take blame for that too).

That is quite interesting. Yeah, there are numerous cases where one country is responsible for the problems coming from another. The ideas behind Holocaust, believe it or not, trace all the way back to slavery in the United States. Hitler got his ideas from American nationalism, which especially got more aggressive after the Civil War, which was started because of slavery. Who started World War II? Hitler may have done it, but if you look in the long term, it was the allies from World War I that should hold responsibility. But, they were this harsh because of how Germany went during World War I, which Serbia started in the first place.

 

[nintendofan85]

That is quite interesting. Yeah, there are numerous cases where one country is responsible for the problems coming from another. The ideas behind Holocaust, believe it or not, trace all the way back to slavery in the United States. Hitler got his ideas from American nationalism, which especially got more aggressive after the Civil War, which was started because of slavery. Who started World War II? Hitler may have done it, but if you look in the long term, it was the allies from World War I that should hold responsibility. But, they were this harsh because of how Germany went during World War I, which Serbia started in the first place.

As time goes on, a country's role in a historical matter can become muddled, but there are still some countries in which foreign policy I can say came back to bite the United States, some of which I've discussed with my friends recently on Discord:

• Japan. President Millard Fillmore and his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, sent Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, a widely respected Navy general from the Mexican-American War, in 1852 to force Japan to open up to trade with the US and other Western nations, ending the policy of "sakoku", or self-imposed isolation, that Japan had been in since 1639. The Tokugawa shogunate, which was in power when Japan was still a feudalistic society (Japan was literally the world's last feudal nation, as feudalism had been done away with in Europe long before the nineteenth century) was suspicious of Western nations (trade was limited to just being with China, Korea, and the Netherlands, with little trade done with the Dutch at the port of Dejima in Nagasaki as the Dutch promised not to send Christian missionaries to Japan) due to word-of-mouth intellect of events such as the Spanish conquest of the Philippines and there was also massive distrust for Christianity as a religion. In mid-1853, Perry arrived in what is now Tokyo Bay and threatened to attack Edo with the so-called "black ships" (a term still used for unwelcome foreign objects in Japan) he brought from when he had departed the coast of southeastern Virginia. The Japanese, while not showing hostility in a militant manner to Matthew C. Perry, understandably did not want to open up to the West due to their past experiences, but given Perry's threats, the Japanese felt they had no choice. Ultimately, Emperor Komei and other Japanese leaders gave into Matthew C. Perry's demands, and Perry returned to Japan a year later, meeting with Japan's leaders in Kanagawa and signing the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. This treaty, along with the subsequent Harris Treaty in 1858, were so-called "unequal treaties" (because they were always unequal) that basically gave the Americans unrestricted access to Japanese ports, and Japan ultimately ended up signing similar treaties with European nations as well, given the gunboat diplomacy at the time (which, unsurprisingly, when Perry arrived on Japanese shores, this had already instilled fears in the Japanese, as they had heard about what China had to deal with in regards to the British with the First Opium War of 1839-1842). Japan remarkably had stability politically before isolation ended, but once it did so in 1853, Japan essentially went into both political and economic chaos in the 1850s and 1860s because it was ultimately too much for its economy and society to handle. Numerous feudal leaders were attacked and even assassinated during this time, and for example, due to this continued hostility against foreigners, the British legation in Edo was attacked in 1861. This crisis in Japan only ended with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 (Meiji was the son of Emperor Komei, who took over the year before, in 1867, after Komei's death) and with the victory the Japanese empire ultimately had in the Boshin War of 1868 and 1869. Of course, after its formation in 1868, the Empire of Japan would prove to be an aggressively expansionist country, learning from the Western models (with how imperialism was so commonplace back during the nineteenth century), with Japan seizing control of Taiwan by 1895, Korea by 1910, and then, of course, Japan took over Manchuria in northeastern China in 1931 and then China and Japan would wind up in a full scale war with one another, the Second Sino-Japanese War, in 1937, which folded into World War II after Japan then bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. I'll admit that I ended up rambling far more than I intended about this segment of Japanese history, but there was a clear way that the United States shaped it with Matthew C. Perry's actions back in 1853 and 1854, and while it was nearly nine decades later, it seemed to backfire on the United States once Pearl Harbor was attacked, which of course, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared it to be a day that would live in infamy, and it was the worst attack the US experienced on its own soil until when 9/11 happened in 2001.

• Cuba. First of all, the United States had long since, for decades, had a desire to extract resources, or even annex, Cuba due to the fact that it always produced so much tobacco. (Even today, Cuban cigars are considered some of the world's best) What would happen was this-the USS Maine was sent to the harbor of Havana in 1898 to protect US interests in Cuba while it was trying to gain independence from Spain (something that the US government covertly supported under the administration of then-President William McKinley, and his predecessor, Grover Cleveland before him). A month after its arrival, the Maine sank, which the Spanish government immediately was accused the American public of causing its sinking and it ultimately led the McKinley administration to get Congress to declare war on Spain. The war, of course, led to an American victory, and Spain ceded to the United States Puerto Rico as well as the Philippines and other colonies it had in the Pacific Ocean, and Cuba was granted independence as well, although Cuba would remain occupied by the US until four years later in 1902, after McKinley was assassinated and his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, became president. Nevertheless, the United States government strongly supported Cuba's governments, which was actually a democracy (albeit a troubled one after a coup in 1933) all the way until half a century later in 1952, when Fulgencio Batista, outraged over a presidential election loss that year, seized power in a coup d'état. Unsurprisingly, many Cubans were unhappy with Batista's undemocratic rise to power, but due to Cold War policies of the time where dictators that were capitalist were supported by the United States government no matter what, President Harry Truman still supported Batista's government nonetheless, which continued under his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Anyways, unhappiness with Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship ultimately led to the Cuban Revolution starting in under a year and a half after Batista's coup, and indeed, it would drag on until 1959 when Fidel Castro ended up seizing power from the revolution and Cuba became communist. In the waning days of the Eisenhower administration before President Eisenhower was set to be succeeded in office by John F. Kennedy, the Eisenhower administration broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 (they wouldn't be restarted until Barack Obama did so in 2015), and then, of course, embargoes were also placed on Cuba between 1958 and 1962 by both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, which are still in place today. These tensions, of course, would be exacerbated in 1962 when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev faced off with one another in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although Obama restarted diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015, and the following year, became the first president to visit Cuba in eighty-eight years, since Calvin Coolidge in 1928, the embargo remains in effect, and since Barack Obama left office and was succeeded by Donald Trump, the Trump administration has actually increased the embargo, and Trump has also tightened travel restrictions for Americans to visit Cuba that had been loosened in the Obama era.

• Iran. Considering how it hasn't even been five full months since Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by the Donald Trump administration, this is a pretty relevant country to bring up in the matter. While I'll admit that the United States sort of got forced to support Iran decades ago, when its dynasty was still in power (it really started when the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, back during World War II in 1941, went in and did an invasion of the country under the leaderships of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, because the shah Iran had at the time, Reza Shah, was seen as too friendly to the fascist government that Germany had at the time under Adolf Hitler. The British and Soviets, after invading Iran, forced Reza to abdicate, and his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took power on the throne. The British had heavy control of the Iranian oil industry, but after Mohammad Mosaddegh became Iran's prime minister in 1951, this was challenged. Just two years later, in 1953, Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower would have the UK and US governments support a coup in Iran that deposed Mosaddegh, and within a year, by 1954, foreign-owned oil firms, which were British and American-run, began extracting Iranian oil once again. However, the son of Reza Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who took over after his father's abdication in 1941, was known to be a brutal dictator in Iran, and thus was unsurprisingly extremely unpopular with the Iranian public. After nearly four decade's as Iran's dictator, by 1978, protests in Tehran began taking place against his rule, and in the Iranian Revolution, his government was overthrown by early 1979. This resulted in the 1979 oil crisis, a second oil crisis the world had to deal with in the 1970s after one had happened in 1973 and 1974 due to United States support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. High inflation in the US brought President Jimmy Carter's approval ratings plummeting. On top of this, merely months later, officials at the US embassy in Tehran would be held hostage by November 1979 by Iranian college students who were sympathetic to Ayatollah Khomeini who had risen to power in the shah's place in Iran, and ultimately the high inflation and hostage crisis together brought the end of the Carter administration-Jimmy Carter lost re-election in the 1980 election, and in a landslide, to Ronald Reagan. It was the first time an incumbent president had lost re-election since Herbert Hoover had lost re-election to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 (Gerald Ford was an incumbent president that had lost to Carter just four years earlier in 1976, but Ford was never elected, as he had been appointed vice president by Richard Nixon after Spiro Agnew's resignation from a tax evasion scandal from when he was Governor of Maryland from 1967 to 1969, and so Agnew resigned in 1973 and then Nixon appointed Ford as vice president in his place, and then, several months later, in mid-1974, Nixon himself became the first, and only thus far, president in history to resign and Ford ended up being the only unelected president, losing his bid for a term in his own right in the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter). Minutes after Reagan was inaugurated president at the beginning of 1981, the Iranian government released the hostages, but Iran is still an American adversary. The Reagan administration would later find itself imperiled by Iranian matters because of the Iran-Contra affair, in which from 1985 to 1987, various revelations were revealed causing a scandal for the administration in which it was revealed that the ban on sales of weapons to Iran-which had been enacted by the Carter administration in 1979-were still in place, all so members of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet could use these funds to assist the Contras in Nicaragua, an anti-socialist and anti-communist group in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinistas during the Nicaraguan Revolution. This was also a violation of the Boland Amendment, an act passed by Congress authored by Congressman Edward Boland of Massachusetts which passed in 1982 stating that the United States government could no longer fund Nicaragua's Contras. In more recent times, things with Iran seemed to get better when the Barack Obama administration in 2015 worked with China, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which built upon a plan from 2013 to get the Iranian government to stop the development of some of its nuclear weapons in exchange for reduced sanctions on the country, but in 2018, Donald Trump pulled us out of the agreement. Since then, in just over the last year under the Trump administration, we have seen numerous tensions build up with Iran again in the Persian Gulf region, to the point that there have been fears of an Iranian-US war. The Iranian military attacked the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, on New Year's Eve 2019, and then just three days later, as seeming revenge (although it's been widely described as a way to distract from his impeachment), Donald Trump got Qasem Soleimani, one of Iran's top generals, assassinated. In my opinion, while Soleimani was an awful man, the need to kill him seems very nebulous at best to me.

I did not mean to ramble so much and I apologize for all of these walls of texts, but it's clear why some people could be upset about United States foreign policy, especially when we have made questionable moves dating all the way back to the nineteenth century. However, these things have gotten attention in recent years-for example, the 150th anniversary marking Matthew C. Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 was in 2003, which came just merely months after the administration of George W. Bush led the United States to invade Iraq-a war that the US would be dragged into for years and was seen as another one in which there was no clear direction, much like the Vietnam War under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon (largely worsened by the fact that both the Johnson and Nixon administrations escalated our role there). While it may be hard to necessarily say that the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 was the reason that the Attack on Pearl Harbor happened eighty-seven years later in 1941, and it's not a view that I 100% espouse (what largely caused Pearl Harbor was the fact that Japan had been heavily expanding into China and Vietnam, and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt had put embargoes on Japan for this, which made the Japanese mad as Japan has few natural resources of its own, and it needed American materials for these invasions into China, Vietnam, and elsewhere), it's just that Japan literally saw expansion only a decade and a half after Perry arrived as the only way for the country to survive, essentially "we conquer, or be conquered". That mentality would be what caused Pearl Harbor decades down the line, and like I touched upon earlier, that doesn't even get into Japanese atrocities in China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia. Where things do get murky about Matthew C. Perry's voyage to Japan and his demands to make Japan open up to the United States and the West is that it's unclear which demands were those of the president that sent him-Millard Fillmore-and those that were his own. I think at the end of the day, with how Japan is a high-tech, advanced society and is a US ally, Japan ultimately benefited in the long-run for Perry's actions, but it took a long time to make that happen-and in the earlier decades, things weren't so great for sure. Japan also wouldn't become a US ally, either, until 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and Japan's then-prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi (the grandfather of the current prime minister, Shinzo Abe) signed the security treaty in Washington, D.C. Also, unlike Japan, Cuba and Iran are not United States allies, in fact, they could be described as quite the opposite now even if they once were, especially Iran. Indeed, speaking of the seeming "gunboat diplomacy" that was used to describe George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq back in 2003, just a year before that, in the 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush described both Cuba and Iran as being part of the "axis of evil"-that statement is honestly very telling. Granted, Bush made this statement just four months after 9/11, but still, it almost came off as that the Bush administration wanted adversarial relations with these countries. Actually, Iraq had already been bombed by the administration of Bill Clinton in 1998 (following the Gulf War that happened under George W. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, in 1990 and 1991 following an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) in what was criticized as a way for Clinton to distract from the negative attention he had gotten for becoming only the second president in history (after Andrew Johnson) to be impeached, due to his lying about his extramarital affair while in office with Monica Lewinsky-not dissimilar to how Qasem Soleimani, again a top Iranian general, was assassinated by the Donald Trump administration not long after Trump himself got impeached.