Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad.
The reality is that it’s both.
Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific.
That’s just a false narrative.
But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy.
Scandinavian states participate in the plunder just like every other western bloc country. My cat can’t doesn’t get much say in how my house is run either, but it does benefit none the less.
The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951.
USSR had an entire bloc around it and plenty of non aligned countries to trade with. US embargoes clearly didn’t prevent USSR from being able to trade and to exploit countries if it chose to. The relations USSR developed with its partners were of a profoundly different kind than the ones western imperial powers have with the countries they subjugate today. The whole discussion here is regarding the exploitative nature of the relationship between the west and the global majority.
Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don’t extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.
Social democracy can have a slight short term impact in these domains, the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises.
So if you want meaningful democracy, you’re going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition.
Social democracy isn’t part of any transition, it’s a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.
Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.