More than any revolutionaries in history, America's revolutionaries got what they wanted. The government the United States ended up creating and sustaining was, adjusting for 250 years of changes, very similar to the government that the American revolutionaries had sought to create.

Why? What was it that led to Americans getting the government they had fought for, when so many other revolutionaries and independence movements, both historical and more recent, did not?

The common answer is to attribute this success to the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But for the past century, the biggest reason revolutionaries in foreign countries didn’t get what they fought for, as the Americans did, has been… the Americans.

Time and again revolutions, independence movements, and reformist democratic governments have been so harshly attacked and manhandled by the US that the likelihood of the regime emerging from it being what was originally desired was rendered almost nil.

The phenomenon of a revolution, even a very democratic-spirited one, ending in dictatorship after harsh foreign intervention predates both communism and American interventionism.

In China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others, the US armed opponents of the new revolutionary regimes, imposed economic embargoes, and more in attempts to strangle them.

After General MacArthur had provoked China into the Korean War, China lost over 200,000 men fighting the US. Nicaragua faced US-created and armed terrorists and saboteurs—the contras—who operated from safe havens in nearby Honduras. Cuba’s revolutionary government faced a US-backed invasion, numerous terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, as well as widespread economic damage from America’s Operation Mongoose sabotage campaign.

In Vietnam and Korea, the US waged wars against communist-led independence movements. Devastating bombing killed millions of civilians and laid waste to both countries. During the Korean War, US Air Force General Curtis LeMay explained, “[W]e killed off…20% of the population… We… burned down every town in North Korea.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the US joined Britain, France, and nearly a dozen others in invading the newly-formed Soviet Union and aiding the White Armies against the Reds (Bolsheviks) during the Russian Civil War. This was what influential British leader Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war and air, called "strangl[ing] Bolshevism in its........

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