I've been having some heated debates with a historian friend about American foreign policy. They grant that the U.S. has done plenty of fucked up, unforgivable shit, but still fall back on "I'd rather live in a world under American hegemony than Russian / Chinese / enemy du jour hegemony."
This person's generally into lesser-evilism in all aspects of political analysis - staunch Democrat, disapproves of the status quo and works against it when they can but is still profoundly wary of any kind of disruption, etc. (You'd think that would incline against American interventionism, but no.) They're also more of a deontologist than a consequentialist when it comes to political action in general. This is outrageously frustrating because apparently losing with honor is a lesser evil than winning if winning involves doing anything you'd rather not have done unto you. I shared the Mark Twain quotation about the two terrors and they thought I was a madman.
Frustrations aside, this is a very smart person with whom I often trade book recommendations. If I bite the bullet and read an anti-communist memoir on their insistence I can probably retaliate by pushing any book I want.
My goal isn't necessarily to convert my friend, but to get them to understand where I'm coming from. So what do I pick? Ideas so far include Manufacturing Consent, Inventing Reality, and The Jakarta Method. Right now I'm leaning toward the last one, which I haven't read yet, but looks as though it might be a good fit.
Do any of you have other nominations? Maybe something that deals with U.S. involvement in Latin America, specifically?
Edit - This has been amazingly helpful, thank all of you so much.
I think your friend needs to read the history of the fall of the Soviet Union and what happened to those who did live under Soviet hegemony and then lived under US hegemony. Spoiler: they received poverty and death.
Another good experiment is to compare IMF loans vs. Chinese like and. The IMF demands austerity, US food imports, cash crops, etc - setting up your entire country to become an extraction point for US interests. Don't pay up? We'll privatize and own entire industries in your country. China just offers direct investment. Can't pay your loan? They might just forgive it. If not, they'll take a greater ownership share of the exact thing they invested in, and negotiate.
Another comparison is simply to look at what happens when a country under US influence does land reform or even just diversifies its food production and nationalizes an industry (Venezuela is an obvious example). China has the power to fuck with its neighbors in the same way, yet it doesn't.
But I'll second The Jakarta Method. Sometimes libs just need to look at the horror they support.
We had an argument a while back where I brought out the life expectancy statistics from before and after the fall of the USSR. Even though they know that "anecdotes are not data" there was a lot of "I know a Ukrainian refugee and they say otherwise." We should never have taught the libs the phrase "lived experience."
The IMF vs BRI issue is one I'd love to have a book for. I just read a history of China which made me think that a great parallel would be the European age of exploration and destruction vs. Zheng He's ships laden with gifts.
I forget whether it says anything about the IMF, but the Chinese debt trap myth stuff by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire is pretty good.
And yeah it's tough to argue with anecdotes because they'll still discount yours. There are plenty of stats showing that people who were adults in Soviet times say things were better then (aside from Balts maybe). Westerners are so desperate to ignore this that they chalk it all up to nostalgia rather than recognizing that things were safer and more economically secure under the USSR.