ABSTRACT
In the Western Hemisphere, US fear of "international communism" led the United States to turn a blind eye to the otherwise plainly obvious lack of support from their own people of many of the regimes the United States favored and rewarded. Foremost among the formal security agreements was the North Atlantic Treaty—the cornerstone of US national security policy. In the northwest Pacific, the United States reached individual mutual security agreements with Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. In Latin America, the 1947 Treaty of Rio de Janeiro bound the nations of the Western Hemisphere to "consult" in the event of a security threat-which the United States intended to be understood as one coming from outside the hemisphere. A major problem for the United States is that it remains mired in its conviction that "political" democracy must take precedence over "economic" democracy.
