Yes they would like it all back.."Called their sphere of influence". But the game board is a lot bigger than just the old USSR.
The Korean war, and the Vietnam war, were also proxy wars fought with us on one side and both the Chinese and the Russians on the other.
North Korea would not even be there today if it were not for the Russians assisting and actually cajoling the Chinese into fighting us there and drawing the war to what was essentially a stalemate while the Russians assisted with intelligence.
Vietnam was pretty similar with the Russians supplying the North with fighter jets that they actually flew themselves..while the Chinese provided the rest.
Again the war was fought to a essential draw, and we left the field, allowing the north to finish off the south Vietnamese. It that war we lost. Lost it all. Not because we could not win, but because the American people were swayed by anti-US propaganda spread by our own media. Looking at Saddam Hussein, who was it that supplied him? Who was it that had thousands of advisers in country and who was it that supplied and then removed most of the Chemical and bio weapons that we did not find?
Who is it that is supplying Iran, Hezbollah and all the rest? Surely they do it through their proxy's, but who facilitated it and why? When you view it from several miles high, the picture gets more clear.
It's a war of attrition with the Russians and Chinese on one side and the US on the other.
It's been that way for some time now..more than 60 years and it's not going to end until it's over.,
The Ron Pauls of this world have total historical blindness and cannot see, or believe it is the US that is causing the Russians and the Chinese to act the way they do and they are wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
The US has tried many times to disengage, but when we do, and for whatever reason we take our eye off the ball for even few days, they will see it and raise the stakes every time.
So we can't...we cannot disengage. if we do...we do so knowing that they will be in our face again and this time the problem will be more difficult and more expensive to mitigate.
Call it preventive maintenance. It's a lot cheaper in the long run.
Good post, but I disagree somewhat about Vietnam. Yes, we lost that country to Communism, but we slowed the Communists greatly, and cost them greatly as well. The tragedy is that we had victory in our hands more than once, and a lot of South Vietnamese paid an awful price for siding with us.
Kim Il-Sun was a Soviet stooge for much of his life (much of his claimed life is a fraud) and career.
Yep and even that hardly describes it