Jim Geraghty is afraid that maybe we didn't win the Cold War after all. Sure, he says, it seems like we won:
And yet… Putin-era Russia doesn’t look all that different from the bad old days of the Soviet Union, particularly this year.
The Russian army invaded neighboring territories....horrifying brutality and the deliberate targeting of civilians....mercenary forces deployed to Syria, Libya, and the Central African Republic....“spheres of influence.”
....Just about all dissent in modern Russia is gone; pro-state propaganda dominates all forms of media....Russia is no longer interested in engaging with the West if that engagement requires them to abandon their dreams of an expansionist empire.
....Putin’s Russia has a different style than the Cold War-era Soviet Union, but it remains the same in most of the ways that matter most: totalitarian, brutal, aggressive, expansionist, habitually deceitful, paranoid, devious, and controlled by men whose blood is almost as cold as the country’s winters....In light of all that… did we really win the Cold War? Or did we just win the first round?
Oh, we won. But as George Kennan tried to tell us 70 years ago, Russian conduct is rooted in centuries of autocracy, inferiority complexes, and difficult relations with Western Europe. Communism wasn't responsible for that, it was just the latest veneer on top of it.
Winning the Cold War was never likely to change Russia's temperament significantly, though we had high hopes at the time. And if things had gone just a little differently, we certainly could have done better than Vladimir Putin. Still, winning the Cold War didn't mean turning Russia into Switzerland. It meant freedom for Eastern Europe and the end of communism as a serious alternative to free-market capitalism.
Thirty years later, both of those victories are almost entirely intact. Hell, most of Eastern Europe is part of NATO and the EU. And communism is dead no matter what China calls its government. There are still plenty of autocracies around, with many of them trying to manage their economies, but that's neither new nor significant.
The great ideological war of the 20th century is over. Capitalism won a rousing and complete victory. Just don't mistake that for an end to brutality, war, and tyranny. It'll take a lot longer than 50 years for those to be tossed onto the ash heap of history.
Russia has always had daddy issues
Don't contradict Geraghty! He's undermining the Republican Party's great claim to virtue.
But he would also like to see the GQP create in America what Putin has made of Russia.
I thought global warming ended the cold war
"Communism" is a dialectical term. It was pushed by white men of a Christian background from the mix-1700's to 1840's.
The impact of Marxism was more about industrialization and catching to the west. The chance of catching up consumption wise was always a pipe dream. As long as governments in the west has access to bailouts and raw materials, the debt ponzi scheme can continue indefinitely. The industrial revolution and the government driven via DoD information boom, have western nations a technocratic advantage. But that ended in the 21st century.
China knows it's people won't spend enough to support a global financial empire like the US. It's why they have began to withdrawal and plan to trigger a rebuilding of the curtain. Forcing western banks to pare back economic activity and liquidate a system that basically is in hospice care. When the dollar collapses, it will be a rough ride.
didactic.
The weaker Putin and centralized Russian power gets, the greater the chance that Slavic culture will split apart along more racial/geographic lines, don't you think?
That would be the final blow to the former Soviet Union and specifically Putin's romanticized glorification of Russian imperialism.
Red Aryans created red famine. R1a killing I2a. Stalin gloated this to Hitler. The opening of Soviet era archives hurt the "conservative" conspiracy theories on that one.
Tom Hanks has strong Aryan decendency fwiw.
Apparently, Ukrainians feel the same way. There are now calls for southern states to rise up and push back against Russian federal forces within their own regions.
If they find the courage, the Russian Federation will collapse rapidly and the first guy to disappear after Putin will be Kadyrov, followed by Lukashenko. No nuclear war; just the second ending of the Soviet Union.
Keep this thought in the back of your mind.
They can never find that courage. They would have to work with others and then they will always assume that someone else will be trying to ingratiate themselves with the autocrat by stabbing them in the back, so they stab all around first, and who could trust them after that, only the one person they won't stab because they're terrified, and who inevitably will stab them at some point, but maybe not so much.
I assume the same, actually.
But, Lavrov just attempted to lay pretense for invading Moldova -- again -- and after some point, even the tiniest of countries will simply tire of being threatened and will rather punch back after seeing Ukraine's efforts.
Kevin 1: Geraghty 0. Actually Geraghty should get a -1 penalty for obtusness.
Geraghty should go tell the Czechs, Poles, Estonians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovenians and so on that we didn’t win the Cold War, I’ll bet they have a very different opinion than him.
In fairness to the columnist, he used the term "complete" victory. If the West had won a "complete" victory, perhaps it's fair to conclude we would have done to Russia what we did to (and for!) Japan and (West) Germany at the end of World War 2. And maybe right now the Russian Federation wouldn't be a hostile, expansionist dictatorship involved in destabilizing war of aggression.
I mostly agree with Kevin here, but this sentence is a bit off:
The great ideological war of the 20th century is over. Capitalism won a rousing and complete victory.
Capitalism won. But how about liberal democracy? I don't view the Cold War as mainly (or even principally) a struggle to maintain an economic system of private property, and certainly the overwhelming bulk of Western rhetoric throughout the period deemphasized economics in favor of democratic norms, regular elections, the rule of law, civil liberties and so forth. It's true that America and the West had plenty of authoritarian friends during that long struggle, but that was noted and critiqued at the time as a glaring weakness of the West's case against Communism. Which wouldn't have been the case if the Cold War really were just about the right to start a company or own your own house.
And so yes, the obvious and perhaps somewhat painful conclusion is that the West's "triumph" in the Cold War wasn't as complete as it could have or should have been (though we didn't perceive this at the time). It was far from a failure, of course. It just wasn't all that decisive. Big geopolitical victories usually are somewhat muddied, when you think about it (ie, defeating Hitler only to see half of Europe under Stalin's thumb; defeating the Kaiser, only to sew the seeds for a future World War, and so on).
So, Jim Geraghty may have overstated his thesis (haven't read the piece), but he may not be totally off base.
I'm going to disagree with you, gently. I *wish* your view of what the Cold War was about were true -- those were the values most worth fighting for -- but I don't think that's how it played out. When you say
> It's true that America and the West had plenty of authoritarian friends during that long struggle, but that was noted and critiqued at the time ...
my interpretation is that that was a feature, not a bug. The US -- or at least the people in power -- were perfectly fine with authoritarians (do you remember the Reagan administration tying itself into a rhetorical pretzel trying to distinguish between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes?), as long as they were on our side in the all-encompassing battle against the commies. That's how we achieved all those great foreign policy successes in places like Iran, Chile, Vietnam, El Salvador, ...
I'll gently disagree with your gentle disagreement!
1) Totalitarian Marxist-Leninism really was a grave danger and menace.
2) Reasonable people wanted the US and other Western countries to be safe from said menace and to bequeath to our descendents a world not dominated by the aforementioned totalitarians.
3) Achieving #2 involved a number of things, including constructing alliances with non-democratic states willing to help us.
4) It is absolutely the case that some of the decisions with respect to #3 were questionable—especially in light of history. Zero argument from me there. The several examples you cite are particularly egregious. You could add Taiwan, Philippines and South Korea to the list. And Greece, Turkey and Spain. But I don't think a fair reading of the history suggests many people regarded the authoritarian proclivities of some of our allies as a "feature."
5) Most serious persons involved in national defense realized the unsavory activities of such regimes presented a problem (we very much were in a battle for "hearts and minds").
6) Finally—and this last bit tends to drive Western leftists mad, but that doesn't make it any less true—in a lot of cases the authoritarian systems simply weren't as bad as the totalitarian regimes they joined us in opposing. Such countries were typically characterized by a fair degree of freedom in such things as religion, work, family life, business, careers, travel, education and so forth. So, you might not be able vote in a free election nor publish a newspaper critical of the regime, but you probably could send your kid to a private school, or attend the church of your choice, or visit a foreign country or start a business and keep the profits yourself. Western officials weren't wrong to note the difference between such societies and the grim dictatorships run by people like Stalin and Mao.
Leninists were heavily influenced by the Nazis. Including the Maoists. The early days of the Soviet Union were actual one of anarchy in many respects.
Nazis brought total control from cradle to death using industrial processes. Something unheard of.
Attend a "private" school???? Give me a break. That is your example?????
One of the problems with authoritarian regimes was that you could start a business and keep the profits for yourself if you were properly connected to the government and of the right ethnic group. They were traditional economies, not capitalist economies. The radical idea of capitalism was that the government was supposed to create a level playing field and that no one cared about your religion, origin or race in matters monetary. It's not clear that this has ever been realized. Even now, everyone on the internet knows if you are a dog.
Yes, of course they were problematic. Authoritarianism always is!
We've only exchanged the landed titles of duke, baron, count, earl, prince, esquire, marquess, and all the finer versions of them (bows deeply to the ladies) for those of the C suite, cabinets, and commissions and of course that old money hiding in plain sight.
Sure Capital won, when has it ever not?
There was a big transformation in England during the 19th century with aristocratic families diversifying. Originally, manufacturing and trading wealth were stigmatized by the ruling class, but eventually the money was too good. One still had to "sink the shop" and adopt ruling class manners and mores, but wealth was wealth. Aristocratic families and wealthy business families merged via inter-marriage. Even a lot of rich Americans got involved. An entire genre of literature emerged.
I have been thinking that George Kennan's Long Telegram proposing a long-term containment strategy *might* offer some insight for handling the rising Republican insurrectionist threat.
The Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan response to the challenge of US sanctions and the looming loss of US Dollar hegemony; the million Americans dead from Covid and the surplus profits earned by pharma; the epidemic of mass shootings and killing of unarmed persons of color by the police; the waste of trillion dollar war budgets; the stagnation of the American median wage in relation to economic growth and the rise of inequality to Gilded Age levels; the elimination of low cost college and the public subsidy of charter schools; the brutality of the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and the interference in the domestic politics of Venezuela and Ukraine; the new age of tyrants in US electoral politics. All these issues belie any victory for the American people from the dissolution of the USSR and the total domination of capital.
A CDC report estimates life expectancy in the US dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, by nearly one year, bringing the total to 2.7 years lost since the start of the pandemic.
"And if things had gone just a little differently, we certainly could have done better than Vladimir Putin." Things? Things like American policy, which embraced Yeltsin while he crushed the nascent Russian democracy. Which pushed for a breakneck restoration of capitalism, collapsing the Russian economy. And which steamed ahead with the expansion of NATO, rubbing salt into the wounds of a fallen superpower. All of which helped set the stage for Putin. Yes, with wiser American leadership, we might well have done better.
Cold War? We didn't even win World War II. After all, we were fighting AGAINST fascism, weren't we?