You can't bribe an entire state. I don't mean that in a philosophical sense; I mean that any state gets to decide what's legitimate support and what's bribery.
They are champions of democracy but the leader of the most popular party is being railroaded in false cases their silence more than anything tells us what is going on. How come they are not saying anything apart from it being a countries internal matter when a democracy is being destroyed but had statements about human rights every week against the previous democratic government.
Comments like this irk me, obviously if the US has a choice here, allow Pakistan to remain non-aligned but democratic or closely aligned and non-democratic, one of these choices is better for advancing US interests. The cable itself barely says anything: “hey if you put friendly people in power we will be friendly”
If the US purely operated on principle I wouldn’t be surprised if we had many more enemies than we do now, politics is about trade offs, it’s not black and white.
Fwiw I don’t think it’s morally right necessarily, but these kinds of decisions happen all the time in diplomacy, it’s really easy to arm chair criticize decisions but getting the alignment of all of these countries against Russia is a difficult problem.
