But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s.
Right, the standard of living is declining all across the empire, including Scandinavia. The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak, so the decline hasn’t hit as hard as other places, such as US, with more shaky safety nets.
This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports.
Not really, the west has continued to dominate the global south, and has a massive military presence across the globe. Western companies are extracting resources from Africa and other places at record pace today.
Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns.
Of course it does, all the material good such as appliances, phones, laptops, TVs, and so on are produced using resources and labour done predominantly in the global south.
And the whole reason we’re seeing countries increasingly preferring China to the west is precisely because China offers mutually beneficial relations as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes.
Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard.
You ignored my point that USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest. Given that Cuba being modelled on USSR politically, there is every reason to expect that Cuba would not behave in such a way either even if it was not under a blockade.
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.
Again, the point here was that USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes on weaker countries.
Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.
It’s not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately. And foreign policy is very obviously influenced by this fact. To give you a concrete example, let’s say you have a factory that’s owned privately by a capitalist. The owner wants to reduce operating costs and increase profits. They have an incentive to move production to a cheaper labour market where they can exploit the workers more than they can at home. This creates a direct incentive for capitalists to colonize other countries and exploit them. On the other hand, let’s say the same factory is cooperatively owned by the workers. They would have no incentive to move the factory to a cheaper labour market because they’d lose their jobs at that point. The incentive for imperialism is directly related to the economic system.