Posted on 12/28/2021 5:35:29 AM PST by Kaslin
Russia is issuing virtual ultimata against any further advance of NATO into Ukraine or Georgia. Beijing, after digesting Hong Kong, is indicating that the time draws near for its annexation of Taiwan.
How did we get here?
At age 90, Mikhail Gorbachev, who gave up power in December 1991, identifies a primary cause: "The triumphal mood in the West, especially in the U.S. Arrogance and self-confidence went to their heads."
Indeed. Back in February of 1997, George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment of Joseph Stalin's USSR, implored America not to seize its triumphal moment and move NATO into Eastern Europe:
"Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."
"Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking."
So said Kennan. And so it came to pass, as Russia has placed 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine and told us that any further expansion of NATO into its border states, or the installation of weapons there that can threaten Russia, would be intolerable -- and resisted.
Because we admitted into an alliance to contain Russia all of its former Warsaw Pact allies and three former Soviet republics, we are now close to sword's point with a Russia that our own actions have driven into an entente with the greatest rival the U.S. has ever known: China.
And who built up China, with four times our population, into the first world power with a capacity to challenge America across all fronts -- strategic, military, diplomatic and economic?
Capitalist America did.
Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans, reveling in the riches global trade would realize for our prosperity, threw open America's markets to production from anywhere and everywhere on earth.As 1991 turned into 1992, America appeared to have arrived at the apogee of its national power and world prestige.
President George H.W. Bush had just sent an army of half a million men to expel, in a 100-hour campaign, Saddam Hussein's invading army from Kuwait. The world, including Russia, China and Iran, had supported U.S.-led military action to overturn Iraq's aggression.
Our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, had just collapsed and disintegrated into 15 nations. The Warsaw Pact had dissolved. All of Eastern Europe was free. We were the sole surviving superpower.
In the reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue for the victory parade of the troops of Desert Storm, the thought occurred: This is what it must have been like when the generals returned in triumph to Rome to take the cheers of the crowds.
But, instead of making America again "a normal country in a normal time," as Jeane Kirkpatrick had urged, we set out on our path to empire.
There was much hubristic talk in those days of a "unipolar moment" in which we would establish a "benevolent global hegemony" and create a New World Order under U.S. dominance and tutelage.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future."
Three decades after those heady days, how has it gone for us?
Today, the world's other great powers, Russia and China, are united against us in a "relationship" that, the autocrat Xi Jinping says, "in its closeness and effectiveness ... even exceeds an alliance."
U.S. corporations swiftly began to transfer production out of the United States to where it could be done cheapest -- the People's Republic of China. From 1991 on, China surged and eventually swept past the U.S. as the first manufacturing power on earth.
A self-sufficient America that provided for all its needs in World Wars I and II is now dependent on foreign nations for the necessities of its national life.
Meanwhile, a mighty China is rolling up islands, rocks and reefs in the South and East China seas and warning the United States against any effort to prevent the reunion of Taiwan and the motherland.
These, then, are three of the historic blunders that have forfeited for us the unique position America held at the close of the Cold War.
First, alienating Russia by treating it as an incorrigible and permanent enemy by pushing our alliance onto its front porch.
Second, pursuing a globalist trade policy that China exploited to become an economic and military rival of the United States.
Third, America's plunge into the Middle East, with our forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and then Syria, Libya and Yemen.
They availed us nothing and led only to death and destruction.
Of the passing of that preeminence we had in 1991, let it be said: We did it to ourselves.
H.W Bush started jowling about a “peace dividend” when the wall came down, and I thought that this talk was pabulum, much like “peace in our time” decades earlier.
Of course. Pat is right on here. Remember the Crimean “crisis” as Russia retook possession of what had been their access to the Black Sea since Catherine the Great [contemporaneous with the white racist slaveholding revolution ] in the US.
I know this isn’t a popular view here on FR, but how will you feel when Russia advocates returning Florida to Spain and China supports Hawaiian self-determination.
We hated Russia for taking away our enemy at the time. It was a bonanza for the MIC and we had to reinvent it. Eventually we got tired of waiting on Russia to get themselves back together and decided to go fix up the Middle East and fight wars for liberal democracy.
George Smith Patton got it dead on at the end of WWII...Kraut Commies (Nationalist-Socialist) done and away with, let’s go and finish the job in Moscow
I’m not sure how General Patton viewed that effort, but there were enough Communists in American Government to insure that idea did not take root.
The losses as I see it would have been equal to the previous three and a half years easy, and would our allies such as they were, gone with us?
You can’t blame the eastern europeans for what the Soviets did to them. Was Germany the reason they got caught up in it? European history is very bloody. Without us it goes back to their old ways unless modern thinking enters into it. We’re doing the same thing with our open border. Europeans collectively must deal with the muslim threat as well as the Chicoms taking influence in a hostile manner.
The size and power of the Red Army in 1945 far exceeded anything the US-UK could have deployed, and we also had that little Japan problem.
Best we could have done is maybe get some of the Captured Nations, but going into the Soviet Union itself would have been sheer madness.
"the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"
...the signs were there, we were just too blind/complacent to see, and let corrupt/greedy traitors become our overlords.
...remove them, you remove the cancer, and survive.
Stay on the path we're on...dead.
Buchanan is a lying through omission. The "weapons there that can threaten Russia" is not mentioned because its the Aegis Ashore missile system slated for Poland in 2022. Its a purely defensive anti-missile system set up for possible intercept of Iranian missiles.
Also, there is no "our path to empire". NATO is not part of a US empire.
China under the CCP has always heading towards rival, if not “enemy” status. It is built into the CCP governing ideology and party DNA, and they have been working every day, every year, to increase their power and challenge the USA. The USA, particularly people like Clinton, blithely assisted them.
Russia was very different. It was smarting over the chaos, corruption and humiliation of the collapse of its empire, but communism was truly dead. They re-embraced Christianity and re-affirmed their Western outlook, while the West embraced its own form of neo-marxism insanity and empire building. Confrontation with them was NOT a foregone conclusion.
“George Smith Patton got it dead on at the end of WWII...Kraut Commies (Nationalist-Socialist) done and away with, let’s go and finish the job in Moscow.”
Those “Kraut Commies” pleaded with the West to place the vanquished German military under American and British command and attack the USSR. Ike and Truman refused.
“The size and power of the Red Army in 1945 far exceeded anything the US-UK could have deployed, and we also had that little Japan problem.”
No, it didn’t. At war’s end (September, 1945) the total US force (all branches) was just over 12,200,000; the total number of all Soviet forces, all branches, was 11,365,000. Now, the USSR had more GROUND forces, but it had no navy to speak of and its air force was miniscule compared to ours, and its strategic air force was non-existent. Also, we had access to “the bomb” (granted, after Nagasaki our inventory dropped to zero; but we had the means to produce more).
Well, expelling the Red Army from the Elbe to the Volga would have been an exclusively ground forces problem, not sure what the Air Force and the navy have to do with that.
Russia is what it is today, due to turning back to tyranny and anti democratic Putin.
Nobody to blame but themselves, a second rate economy dependent on oil who allies with rogues like Iran and NKorea.
Economic power about the same as Spain.
“Well, expelling the Red Army from the Elbe to the Volga would have been an exclusively ground forces problem, not sure what the Air Force and the navy have to do with that.”
Uh, no. Tactical air strikes would most certainly have been employed, primarily by the Air Force (though naval aircraft could also play a role if launched from the North Sea or Baltic Sea, and even from the Black Sea on a limited basis (i.e., against targets around the Lower Volga).
But, the problem we’d have would not so much be with the Soviet forces, but with the land mass and physical obstacles Russia presented. Russia’s long-time defensive strength was somewhat similar to ours: Distance. Where Russia had the huge land mass for foes to overcome, we had two huge oceans between us and any potential aggressor. It would be madness to invade Russia, as it would be madness to invade the US.
A better scenario of an immediate postwar expulsion of Soviet forces from the West would have been to drive them back across the Vistula, and thus there would have been no need to enter the Russian vastness in any kind of ground offensive.
well say what you will about Putin, at least he knows the difference between a man and a woman
Lunacy. The Germans were utterly destroyed and in condition for nothing. And I suspect you may not have been a rifleman, certainly not in 1945. That’s a non starter to tell US soldiers to forget that bitter fight against the Nazis and help them attack Russia.
Patton was flat out an idiot on that suggestion.
Yes. And he will screw them both if they don’t vote and support his ignorant policies that continue to degrade Russia.
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