Fearing his Marxist policies, the U.S. supported a 1973 military coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, leading to a 17-year dictatorship.
Many modern conflicts are fueled by national borders arbitrarily drawn by European colonial powers, which ignored ethnic and religious divisions by lumping rival groups together and splitting unified ones apart.
The now-common structure of separating government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches was an Enlightenment idea from philosopher Montesquieu, designed to prevent tyranny.
During the Cold War, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles viewed the neutrality of the Non-Aligned Movement as "immoral," believing all nations had to choose a side between the US and the Soviet Union.
