'We Will Bury You' Redux (Back at Ya')
We should also note that U.S. president Ronald Reagan (sort of) 'predicted' the collapse of the USSR in his first term. He then seemingly went to great lengths to make that 'prediction' a self-fulfilling prophecy via his version of "Star Wars", the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, arguably one of the biggest, most expensive dog 'n pony styled shell-games of the Cold War.
But to then claim bragging rights for a Soviet demise was stretching it a bit, even for an old-school Hollywood ham like him. And being a big-picture man, whether providing it or receiving it, Number 40 was rarely fond of minutiae. Thus in true Gipper form he was a bit vague on key details, in this case the timeframes and reasons for when and why this prediction might eventuate. In simple terms, it was hard to know if Reagan was indulging in some misty-eyed wishful thinking or he got lucky.
Either way, when the Berlin Wall crumbled into dust and rubble in 1989, and the Stasi in East Germany began the long, mad and partially successful scramble to shred its warehouse-sized quantities of secret files, Ronnie's neo-con seconds in the corner wasted little time in claiming the biggest knockout in the 'ring of history' for their man. To this day, they would doubtless gag on any suggestion that 'The Teflon Man' might have, in fact, just been a bit 'tinny'. According to more nuanced, less ideological observers, at best it would appear that it was a TKO. To put it more aptly, the Soviets lost the Cold War, The Gipper and Co., didn't actually win it. Seems for the Soviets themselves, the real enemy - a la shades of Pogo - might've been within after all.
Yet in eagerly claiming bragging rights for the 'defeat' of the Soviet Union, neither The Gipper nor his devoted cadre were as keen to take 'credit' for the Iran-Contra Scandal that had previously consumed his presidency with quite the same enthusiasm as he/they did for 'winning' the Cold War. For his part Reagan may have vehemently denied any knowledge of wrongdoing and/or recollection of having authorised any of the murky black ops and cloak 'n dagger deeds that constituted the criminal, byzantine intrigues of the Iran-Contra quagmire -- itself making the whole Watergate Thing look like a political hiccup and the fallout and blowback from it a media beat-up by comparison. Which in reality it was!
But doubtless Reagan did recollect telling "Mr Gorbachev" to "tear down" the Berlin Wall and claimed bragging rights for 'inspiring' regime change in Moscow as a direct result of his forceful foreign policies, force of course being -- at least according to the hard-core neocons and "clueless Sovietologists" -- the only language the Soviets understood. In Reagan's worldview, in the face of his administration's hardline Cold War post-containment stance the hapless Soviets simply threw in the geopolitical towel before the bell rang. How could they ever hope to compete with life, liberty, democracy, freedom and the pursuit of happiness?
Regardless then, the Soviet Union had barely sunk, Titanic like, "under the waters of the [geopolitical] ocean" when a group of folks in the U.S. began busying themselves inventing new adversaries, devising new threats and drafting commensurate doctrines to meet and challenge them so as to pre-empt the "unacceptable shock" Kennan hinted at.
Throughout the nineties and in the lead-up to 9/11 and beyond then, it was this not-so-loose 'confederacy of hegemons' that would go on to profoundly alter the direction, purpose and focus of American strategic policy. And they would do so in ways it is hard to see how Kennan and his ilk might have contemplated in their wildest dreams and wisest imaginings, with or without a Soviet-style threat to contend with. That this 'rehabilitated' "direction, purpose and focus" in strategic policy still plays out today is a given, despite the disasters it has engendered, and despite the enormous cost in blood, treasure and geopolitical credibility.
Yet one suspects even Kennan and many of his old-school Cold Warrior confreres and their proteges -- those who were still on the right side of the grass anyway -- would have also observed supreme irony in the way this post-Soviet reimagining and subsequent rearranging of the world order (and America's subsequent place in it) played out. As noted, for the duration of the Cold War itself, this was ostensibly the great fear Kennan and his contemporaries had of the Soviet Union itself, which was that the USSR was positioning itself to do same. After all this was the fundamental premise of 'containment' -- that is, to keep a lid on the gremlins in the Kremlin and curb their presumed gusto for Third World exploitation, destabilisation, geopolitical mischief, war mongering and "inevitable" global hegemony.
And although this fear of Soviet imperial ambition we can now say with reasonable certainty was never founded on anything
resembling a viable or plausible prospect, nonetheless it dictated the course of geopolitics and history -- along with the balance
of world power, and we might add, the
global financial system and world economic order -- for almost half a
century. It seems safe to say that without a Cold War, there would have been no
Nuclear
Arms Race avec the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), no Third World proxy wars a la Korea or Vietnam, and almost certainly no Spy v Spy, the latter for some
being maybe the one truly lamentable outcome.
And considering the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and the USSR throughout the Cold War, all bluff and bluster aside, we can now say with reasonable assurance that given nuclear Armageddon did not eventuate between the superpowers, it had as much, if not more so, to do with Soviet caution than it had to do with any reticence -- or indeed common sense -- upon the part of the U.S. war planners. Documents recently released by the U.S. National Security archives that featured interviews with former senior Soviet military leaders, strategic planners and other key decision makers seem to bear this out. Moreover, the same documents clearly point to U.S. analysts "exaggerating Soviet aggressiveness" whilst downplaying Moscow's fears "of a U.S. first [nuclear] strike".
The following anecdote taken from these documents provides a darkly chilling -- and if one likes, an equally darkly humorous -- insight into the "Dr Strangelove" mindset that prevailed throughout the Cold War:
"During a 1972 command post exercise, leaders of the Kremlin listened to a briefing on the results of a hypothetical war with the United States. A U.S. attack would kill 80 million Soviet citizens and destroy 85 percent of the country's industrial capacity. According to the recollections of a Soviet general who was present, [Soviet] General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev trembled when he was asked to push a button, asking Soviet defense minister [Andrei] Grechko 'this is definitely an exercise?'"
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