the short term overall standard of living is raised
But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s. That’s three generations worth of living standards which have largely leveled off and even begun to decline relative to their Eastern peers as neoliberal trade chews into proletariat standards of living. Scandinavian states were explicitly neutral during the Cold War and avoided the imperialist impulses of their southern peers. THIS is the windfall they reaped into the end of the 20th century.
However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating
This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. It is the Middle Eastern bloc that’s seen all the real material benefits of imperial subjugation. Dubai and Riyahd and Amman and even Tehran have seen enormous windfalls. Folks in London and Boston and Berlin have not. Standards of living in Scandinavian states are slipping and poverty is rising (abet marginally).
If you look at the supply chains for practically any goods, such as cell phones, you’ll see that most of the resources needed to produce these goods are extracted in places like Africa using slave labor.
Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns. What’s more, as Chinese business interests take over traditionally western owned-and-operated enterprises along the African coastline, quality of life is improving. We saw this first in South Africa, as it joined the BRICS block and pivoted away from reliance exclusively on US/UK monetary policy. But we’re seeing it in Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, and the DRC as well.
Should we laud Scandinavians because their purchase of electronics is finally becoming a boon for African miners? Should we laud democratic socialism for this transition? Of course not. Neither should we defame it for the atrocities committed by American, English, French, and Spanish post-colonial corporate thugs. No more than we should blame a shopper at an American grocery store for the crimes committed by the United Fruit Company.
I’m talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved.
Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard. Meanwhile, their retail markets and agricultural/biotech exports are what would inevitably draw in the exact same criminally sourced consumer goods. This isn’t a problem of Cuban (or Nordic) social democracy. It is a problem of foreign monopolistic exporters in occupied regions of the global south. And the Scandinavians, at least, lack a meaningful contribution to that project. The citations you link to are token at best. Akin to blaming Poland for the invasion of Iraq in '03.
USSR did not subjugate other nations the way the west does, and when it collapsed the standard of living in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea also collapsed because they had a mutually beneficial relationship with USSR.
At which point they had to reorganize and reestablish new trade ties in order to rebuild their living standards. But this had to do with access to developed industrial capital, not the exploitation of labor through imperial expansion.
Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep’s clothing of imperialism.
Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.