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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 5:46 am Post subject: How I Learned to Sto |
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Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174925/chalmers_johnson_teaching_imperialism_101
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Phillippe
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| Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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I think saying 30-years of life is.... a little extreme. Dec 25, 1991... 30 years back... was Dec 25 1961. The Soviet Union had incredible force between 1946 and 1970, to be sure. I highly doubt that had the US not taken any form of action that the system would have collapsed in the 1960s.
I do think that Reagan's policy of spending the commies into oblivion was a wasteful and completely pointless endeavor that cost the US more than it did the USSR. Between 1979 and 1985, Prime Ministers were dying as were Presidents. In reality, those years had no real administration. Instead of a strong centralized government, you had old men coming in, saying they'll make change (It is believed that Andropov could have done it) but then drop dead in office. Regional conflicts were arising at this time, putting nationalism back on the front stage, even after Stalinist 5 year plans. You see the outcome of the failure to modernize industry in Russia (Re: Kotkin, Steeltown USSR (1992)--good book) leaving Russia increasingly behind. There was not a production "problem", pe se; but the system of distribution never worked, and there were literally dozens of levels of bureaucracy one had to go through to shift something from point a to b.
An example could be that someone wanted to build a factory in Russia, but to do so you needed to build trains. Well the engine components were built in Azerbaijan, the train tracks in Eastern Russia, and the trains in Belarus. You couldn't ship things from Point A to B because you didn't get the permit, from all 5 local governments, so everything is shipped to Moscow, then assembled, then the governments are re-enlisted. By this point you're 5-10 years behind and now the factory is absolutely needed because there are a shortage of trains in the country.......... nothing made sense.
Had Reagan not done anything, the end result would have been exactly the same. No country can survive nearly two decades of extreme micromanagement, and no authority (many provincial leaders in rural regions had as much control as the dictator). It just doesn't work. The answer to the question of nationalism was work and the answer to work was nationalism. It doesn't make any sense!
People see Reagan as the man that brought them down, but in a decade or so, people are going to begin to show the fact that he didn't do diddly. It was internal conflict that really screwed the pooch.
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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It was a classic.
"What's the point in HAVING a Doomsday machine if you don't TELL anyone about it?" Peter Sellers - genius. |
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 5:31 am Post subject: |
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I remember when I was a young fella, that the USSR used to go from one failed five year plan to the next, with assessments that it especially could not feed itself and people were dying from hunger and lack of fuel, so an assessment that it was only being held together by collective fear of the USA does not surprise me.
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 6:33 am Post subject: |
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It doesn't surprise me that articles resonating with the left have shifted from defending Communism to blaming America for prolonging it. Oh well, I guess it's progress.
(So communism is still being clung to in China because... ? How is that one America's fault? I'm sure we can find a reason if we try hard enough. And if we can't find one we'll invent one.) |
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ratattack
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 6:54 am Post subject: |
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| This guy wrote a book. It is not "the left" writing the book. Do you have evidence that this writer ever defended communism? Do you agree that a person can criticize the Cold War and yet still not be an America hating communist? |
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Phillippe
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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MM,
One thing that I would state is that the upper echelons of the Soviet intelligencia knew the US would never attack. There are policy dossiers from the 1970s-1990s that stated that nuclear war was not an option, and that the USSR would not aggressively seek war with the US, or the West. I think it was a great foundational tool to push motivation on the average joe IS fear. Whether or not it worked is up for debate. I also think the USSR's military capabilities in Western Europe were overstated.
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with your assessment Phillipe.
As for Gaddis, he doesn't sound like any old idiot, given his credentials. This is his wikipedia page.
John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He was born in Manchester in 1939. He is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy. He has been hailed as the 'Dean of Cold War Historians' by the The New York Times. He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan.
He is best known for his critical analysis of the strategies of containment employed by the United States of America during the Vietnam, and for arguing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and role in history was one of the most important causes of the Cold War. His most recent work (2005) is a study of the entire Cold War. Prior to this, his important works included We Now Know (1997), an analysis of the Cold War from its origins to the Cuban Missile Crisis incorporating new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc, and his revised edition of Strategies of Containment, (2005), which analyzed in detail the theory and methods used to contain the Soviet Union from the Truman to Reagan administrations.
He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked under Robert Divine. He has taught at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute. At Yale, he co-teaches the elite leadership course, Studies in Grand Strategy, and his ever-popular course on the History of the Cold War. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992.
His PhD students teach at, among other places, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wright State University, the University of Maryland-College Park, McGill University, the University of Arkansas, Auburn University-Montgomery, Pennsylvania State-Shenango and the University of Kentucky.
In 2005 he received the National Humanities Medal.
Gaddis' most recently published book, The Cold War: A New History, examines the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context than previously possible.
I shall have to read some of his stuff
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Midwest
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| Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 4:29 pm Post subject: |
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I'll ask my brother if he knows anything about him, given that the guy's a military historian.
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marginallymanic
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 5:53 am Post subject: |
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I found this interview he did for Frontline in January 2003, interesting stuff.
This for instance about Iraq
Let's focus on Iraq. How does a war with Iraq fit into the war against terrorism?
Well, the argument that the administration is making about Iraq behind the scenes -- because it seems to me, here you've got to read between the lines -- is basically this: that if, in fact, the United States can find the appropriate occasion for military intervention in Iraq and go in with United Nations' support and multilateral support -- perhaps, in the view of some people in the administration, even if the United States goes in without these things -- [it] is going to set off a reaction in Iraq very similar to what happened in Afghanistan. And that is that we will be cheered and not shot at; that there is a sufficient level of resentment and fear and frustration with the Saddam Hussein regime that the Iraqi people are just waiting for somebody to come in and topple it.
That then creates the possibility for a reconstruction of Iraq, the administration is saying, along democratic lines. And I think they are serious in what they are saying. I think that they are thinking about the reconstruction along the lines of what we did with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. How realistic that prospect is in that country is something else. But I think that they are serious in thinking like that.
I think they are further serious -- and again this is not going to be said in public -- [that] what they have in mind as a long-term strategy is actually a kind of domino theory in the Middle East; that if, in fact, you could get a functioning democracy in a place like Iraq, that truly would have an effect next door in Iran. That's perfectly plausible; it might well have an effect elsewhere in the Middle East.
And in my own view -- definitely not something the administration is saying for publication -- this is a strategy that's ultimately targeted at the Saudis and at the Egyptians and at the Pakistanis; these authoritarian regimes that, in fact, have been the biggest breeders of terrorism in recent years. Iraq has not been; Saudi Arabia actually was. And I think the administration is thinking over the long term about that problem, too. And properly so; they should be thinking about that.
http://pbs.gen.in/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/interviews/gaddis.html
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buddhakisa
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 10:04 am Post subject: |
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When I have about 5 years I intend to read everything I can about the fall of the Soviet Union. The problem as I see it most authors start with plausible theories and then take leaps of faith to support them. I need to find out what leaps I would take exception to and investigate them further. So far we have Regan spending them into oblivion, Charlie Wilson playing large part in that with his funding of Afghanistan fighters. and now we have the US military extending their existance to further their own agenda. I'm sure someone is going to write a book about how God did it. Looks good on the godless bastards. HAR HAR HAR. This guy sounds like a very interesting writer.
-SM-
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Midwest
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 10:35 am Post subject: |
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My brother's assessment of Gaddis (bro edits the Journal of Military History for VMI):
"Gaddis is one of our more conservative diplomatic historians. For example, he sees nothing wrong with Bush’s unilateralism and the use of preemptive strikes, believing as he does that we live in a world that has been hostile to our interests since the beginning of the republic." Which reinforces what MM quotes from the PBS interview
I wouldn't exactly call him an America-bashing lefty. And the military as a lobby, so to speak, has never been hesitant about feathering its own nest.
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Phillippe
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 11:40 am Post subject: |
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Buddha,
You should know that I (and I'm so rarely wrong!  ) think in reality, that the Soviets brought themselves down. I used to think that the world of espionage, secret stealing, the war machine and US tactics brought them down, but once you read books on the Soviet economy, it becomes painfully clear that it was destined to fail. The Soviets never built much of a light industry sector, rather they continually built up heavy industry. The Soviet city of Magnitogorsk was producing as much steel in a year as the UK, and more than Canada. But what value was it? With a system of distribution that never worked, there was no intrinsic value in the steel. In the late 1980s, under Gorbachev, efficiency experts were brought in to Soviet factories for the first time and found that there was no shortage of goods. The problem was that distribution didn't work: To ship steel from Rostov-Na-Donu to say Volgograd, which is 400KM, products would have to go somewhere else first, namely, Moscow a thousand KM to the north, then make the trip back. What was the point of that?
People can say that Reagan brought them down, but in reality, their own inefficiency did them in.
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buddhakisa
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 11:58 am Post subject: |
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Pip,
I promise to read your book on the "Fall of the Soviet Empire" when you finish it.
-SM-
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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I keep wanting to blame the people and, particularly, the leadership of the Soviet Union for communism lasting as long as it did in the Soviet Union.
Twisted, convoluted thinking, I know. |
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