NO, they didn’t have to. It was a new govt. The other satellite countries did not.
Russia proactively assumed the debt. Why?
There is going to come a time when we can’t pay off our debt. What will happen?
What is the essence of bankruptcy? (not the set of federal rules)
Sovereign bankruptcy can and does happen. What does history teach us?
The bankruptcy of the USSR is an interesting study.
No, Alan Greenspan is correct. We get to pay debts in dollars we print. So we won’t default. But, doing so recklessly would create massive problems and could potentially wreck our economy for decades. But since we sell bonds with varying degrees of time to maturity, we could print and buy the debt back over time, even sell some as we buy more with a plan to pay it down in shorter or longer time periods. Doing so would probably be inflationary or hyper inflationary depending how fast it was done. But if we didn’t sell more bonds - or at least kept buying back more than we sold - those dollars would ultimately work their way into capital investments. If we had sincere leaders who know what the hell they were doing (or weren’t doing the bidding of well heeled industries) there could be a way to ease out of it. But first, we need to get our budget under control.