Tag: Cold War

Russia, What Went Wrong?

+++I start my infusion today and I do not know how it will go so this may be my only post for the day….sorry about that+++

In the mid-90s there was a lot of optimism that Russia would join the world with market economy and our wealthy would have new regions to hunt.

But something went wrong and instead we got Putin and his band of thugees.

While I was out there reading I found a declassified document that could answer some of the question being asked.

Once in a great while, a diplomatic memorandum—the outline of a proposed change in policy sent from a foreign service officer to his political masters back in Washington—has momentous impact. The most famous of these is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 1946, which urged “a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

…

Now a similarly long memo, written nearly 50 years later, in the early days of the post–Cold War era and post-Soviet Russia, raises questions about how the world today might be different if Bill Clinton had heeded it as much as Harry Truman heeded Kennan’s.

The newly discovered memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, chief of the U.S. Embassy’s internal politics division at the time, didn’t make the same impact as Kennan’s for two reasons. First, Merry did not go public. Second, unlike Kennan’s memo, Merry’s was at odds with U.S. policy and was ignored, then buried, and its author was blackballed, by the policymakers at the time. In fact, it was buried so deeply that it was declassified just last week as the result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research firm at George Washington University.

Looking at it today, more than 30 years after the fact, it’s a remarkably prescient document that should prompt several lessons about how to run foreign policy.

Merry’s memo, titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway: Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” was written as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s experiment with democracy and free-market economics was in heightened turmoil. The party of his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of his economics policy, had recently lost an election—the result of popular discontent with the policy’s extreme inflation and displacement. Yeltsin mobilized tanks in downtown Moscow to put down an attempted putsch—launched for a variety of motives—in Russia’s Parliament. Yet, to the frustration of specialists in the U.S. Embassy, including Merry, many senior officials back in Washington saw Yeltsin as a still-strong figure and his “shock therapy” economics—which they had been pushing, along with a bevy of academic advisers, many of them from Harvard—as a success.

Merry stressed the urgent need for a course correction:

https://slate.com/_pages/cm51dbke8005qx9l0xtr1litr.html

It reads like ‘greed’ played a part in the rise of the Putin clan….maybe ambition should be tabled in favor of critical thinking….but that is not what big business pays the Congress to do….critically think.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Cold War

With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia the term ‘Cold War’ has returned to be part of the reporting and conversation.

But how many these days remember the so-called Cold War, with the exception of us old farts?

Well since it is history the Old Professor is here to help…..after 30 years there needs to be a refresher……

The Cold War (1947–91) was known as such because the presence of nuclear weapons made a traditional war between the rival parties (in this case the United States and the Soviet Union) unlikely as they each had the power to destroy each other and in doing so jeopardise human civilisation as a whole. This was known as ‘Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)’. For that reason, smaller-scale conflict and competition existed but a major ‘hot’ war, such as those in prior decades, was avoided. This period also underlined the importance of ideology in shaping global conflict, principally between capitalism and communism, which produced two incompatible international systems.

The Cold War was responsible for the historical image of a world divided into three zones. The ‘First World’ was the ‘Western’ nations (this is where the term ‘the West’ comes from). These states were allied with the United States, broadly followed an economic system of capitalism, and (at least aspirationally) a political system of liberal democracy. The ‘Second World’ was the Soviet Union and a range of ‘Eastern’ states that were governed predominantly by communist (or socialist) parties who rejected capitalism as an economic model. This conflict between the first and second world went beyond economics and created two irreconcilable international systems – leaving other states a stark choice to operate within one system or the other. That led to some states opting out and declaring themselves ‘non-aligned’ – creating a ‘Third World’. As most of those states were newly formed and/or developing it became a term often used to describe economically poorer states and is still sometimes used as such.

Despite the added ideological element of communism versus capitalism, the Cold War resembled other wars before it in that it became a battle for control over territory. Instead of meeting directly on the battlefield, both sides took part in ‘proxy wars’ as they fought to either support or oppose elements within states who sought to (or appeared to) move between the First and Second Worlds. The most well-known instances of this occurred in Asia, in Korea (1950–3) and Vietnam (1955–75), each of which resulted in several million deaths. As this took place in a time of decolonisation, the goal in this period was not to be seen to directly conquer other states, but to influence their political and economic development and in doing so increase the power of one ‘World’ and diminish the other.

The Cold War

What was old is now new again.

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The Forgotten War

Closing Thought–23Sep21

The war that time tries to forget….the 1950s and the Korean War……this basically brought down America’s ‘Caesar’, MacArthur…..

For those that have fallen for the erasing of this conflict from American collective memory….I can fill in the blanks…..

The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them.  Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what many in the U.S. refer to as “the Forgotten War” for the lack of attention it received compared to more well-known conflicts like World War I and II and the Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula is still divided today.

https://www.history.com/topics/korea/korean-war

Let’s take a look at the major battles of this conflict…

Korea was under the rule of the Japanese Empire between the year 1910 and the end of World War II. In 1945, the country was liberated by the Soviet Union from the Japanese rule as a result of the agreement with the United States. The Soviet Union settled in the North while the United States settled in the South of Korea. As a result of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Korea was split into two with separate governments in 1949. However, both the government claimed to be the legitimate Korean government. The conflicts between these governments resulted in battles when North Korea moved into South Korea in 1950. The war marked series of wars that were to follow. To this far, no treaty has been signed and the two countries are technically still at war.

16. First Battle of Seoul

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/major-battles-of-the-korean-war.html

AS Americans put this deadly conflict out of their minds the next will be Vietnam….as those vets grow older and pass on there will be few that will keep their memory alive….hopefully people like me will keep Korea and Vietnam in their minds and in their memories.

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“lego ergo scribo”

A Cold War Reboot?

I admit it I am old…..I lived through the original Cold War for most of my life and even witnessed the death of the old Soviet Union….when the USSR died it was hailed as a new beginning of a world that would be at peace and prosperous.

Well the world got more prosperous thanks in part to the advent of globalization….the peace part has yet to be achieved.

While we await the promise of peace the US is stirring the pot for a reboot of the policies of the Cold War.

This time the new ‘enemy’ is China…..

There has been lots of rhetoric around the ‘China Problem’…..and now the Senate has made it official that we are rebooting the Cold War….

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced a new piece of bipartisan legislation to confront China through prioritized military spending and more arms sales in the Indo-Pacific, sanctions, money for “democracy promotion” in Hong Kong, and other areas where the US seeks to counter Beijing.

The legislation still needs to go through the Committee before being introduced in the Senate, but a draft of the bill, titled the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, was released by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Committee chairman. Menendez negotiated the bill with Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch (R-ID).

In a release on the Committee’s website, the 281-page bill was described as the “first major proposal to bring Democrats and Republicans together in laying out a strategic approach towards Beijing — and assuring that the United States is positioned to compete with China across all dimensions of national and international power for decades to come.” Menendez is convening a Committee meeting on April 14th for a vote on the legislation.

The bill calls for the US to strengthen military ties in the Indo-Pacific through arms sales. The bill reads: “The United States should design for export to Indo-Pacific allies and partners capabilities critical to maintaining a favorable military balance in the region, including long-range precision fires, air and missile defense systems, anti-ship cruise missiles, land attack cruise missiles, conventional hypersonic systems, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, and command and control systems.”

Senate Unveils Sweeping Legislation to Confront China

The Cold War will be rebranded  as well as the reboot…..

When it comes to future conflicts or present-day war games, they have all the advantages and we have none! Or as Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, told CNN recently, “Russia and China are playing a home game, we are playing an away game.” And mind you, we’re talking about a home game that could stretch from the Baltic Sea and the Arctic regions of Eurasia to the South China Sea. Those two “near-peer rivals” (as the U.S. military has taken to calling them) seem to have all the luck. I mean, count on one thing: imagined future flare points for conflict – “a fictional global crisis erupting on multiple fronts” in those war games – won’t be in the Caribbean, off New York City, or near the Baja Peninsula. As a result, the US will have to be fully prepared, at staggering expense, to deploy and support forces thousands of miles away for the future conflicts the Pentagon is now imagining.

Fortunately, that military is, it seems, planning ahead for just such a future. As CNN’s Barbara Starr recently reported, this summer it’s going to engage in highly classified computer war games with two near-peer enemies with fictional names. No one, however, should doubt for a second that they will be China and Russia. This will happen just as the next Pentagon budget is being set in place and, in a recent exercise gaming out a future conflict against such adversaries, an anonymous Defense Department official confirmed to Starr that “we found the Blue Team, the US and allies, kept losing.”

The Cold War, Rebooted and Rebranded

We are returning to the ‘good old days’ of the Cold War…..that will mean more and more taxpayer cash will flow into the Pentagon and the rest of the nation will suffer.

Time to invest in some form of diplomacy….and leave the weapons and threats aside……but sadly talk does not equate into profit for the defense industry….and we all know it is more about that than the good of the nation.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Russia Returns To Afghanistan

Back in the 80s the old USSR had this war going on in Afghanistan…..and since it was the Cold War the US would send cash and weapons to the “rebels” that were fighting the Soviets.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In case you are too young to remember anything past the first Iphone….then this should help…..

https://youtu.be/FDQLHFBp4aM

Or read a history…….https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/08/the-soviet-war-in-afghanistan-1979-1989/100786/

In this conflict the US helped create the Taleban and the Northern Alliance to fight the Soviets….and today we, the US, are fighting the very same group we armed and paid in the past…..

I bring all this up because the Neocons are bitching about the Russians sending aid to the Taleban…..

Hardly a week seems to pass without some new crisis in Russian-American relations. The most recent was the revelation that U.S. President Donald Trump had ignored intelligence about bounties supposedly paid by Russian operatives to the Taliban in exchange for killing American soldiers. The veracity of this particular intelligence is questionable, in my view, but there is plausible evidence that Russia has been providing arms to the Taliban as Moscow seeks to play a more active role in Afghanistan. What to make of this? Some commentators in the U.S., including intelligence analysts and military commanders, see Russia’s policy as primarily aimed at pushing the U.S. out of what Moscow considers its neighborhood. Commenting on the most recent allegations, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff suggested that Russia should be “pushed out of the community of nations.” For Schiff, Russia’s Afghanistan policy is further evidence of a consistent anti-American agenda. This kind of zero-sum thinking says more about the American foreign policy consensus regarding Russia than it does about Russia’s view of the region or of relations with Washington. Russia’s engagement with the Taliban is not, primarily, about punishing the U.S. or getting revenge for Washington’s support to the mujahedeen fighting Soviet troops in the 1980s. Rather, Moscow is pursuing a pragmatic policy aimed at securing stability and security in Central Asia. 

https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/russian-moves-afghanistan-are-about-regional-stability-not-revenge-us

This is all so silly….the Neocons are all up in arms because Russia is aiding the Taleban……think about that for just a moment……

This illustrates the hypocrisy of American foreign policy….the arrogance….”we can do it but no one else can”

I wish that we could find a new foreign policy….but sadly little will change with the next election.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Return Of The “Cold War”

Return of the “Cold War”?

Back during the first Cold War the US and Russia tried to out spend one another in an attempt to one up the other in weapons….and they used proxies all over the world to confront each other militarily……Africa mostly……and now it appears that Donald the Orange has a new Cold War brewing….this time with China……

America is answering China’s missile supremacy by planning to deploy—you guessed it—a lot more missiles. Reuters reports that the Pentagon wants to arm Marines with Tomahawk cruise missiles and hasten a rare order of long-range anti-ship missiles, all to counter China’s lead in land-based ballistic and cruise missiles. Another goal is to even out China’s advantage in the so-called “range war”—missiles that can fly farther than America’s or those of its Asian allies. China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, stocked up because it wasn’t party to a Cold War treaty that restrained the US and Russia. But President Trump left that treaty last year. “The Americans are coming back strongly,” says an ex-defense official in Australia.

“By 2024 or 2025 there is a serious risk for the PLA that their military developments will be obsolete,” he adds. But China responded to Reuters with a stern message, saying Washington is stuck on “its Cold War mentality” and should “stop moving chess pieces around” the Asia-Pacific. For Washington, the issue is China’s increasing military pressure on Taiwan and around the South China Sea. The Sunday Times reports that Beijing, which claims nearly the whole area, has stood up to Malaysian oil drillers and reportedly “expelled” a US warship (which Washington denied). Jack Keane, an unofficial Trump adviser, says China wants to “hammer home their message that the US no longer has the status it used to have in that part of the world.”

It is getting serious…..the Navy has been ordered to respond……

The US Navy is once again sending ships into the South China Sea deliberately to confront China, and commander Admiral John Aquilino says that the US insists “the Chinese Communist Party must end its pattern of bullying.“

China has substantial maritime claims in the South China Sea, and to the extent they conflict with those of other nations, the US has always backed the other nations’ claims. The US regularly sends ships into the South China Sea, near China-claimed islands, to prove that they can do so.

Admiral Aquilino says the US ships are championing “freedom of the seas and the rule of law.” These are minor ships and probably won’t register as a threat to China. The US is sending the tiny littoral combat ship, the USS Montgomery, and a dry cargo ship.

The ships are heading to the area near a Malaysian drillship’s area of operation, with officials seeing the deployment as a US attempt to back the Malaysians over the Chinese.

(antiwar.com)

Is this the start of something new?  Or has it been brewing for a long time only to appear now that Trump needs a diversion from his disastrous pandemic response?

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

And The Wall Came Tumbling Down

09November in Germany is filled with lots of history….I shall let Padre Steve take on from that statement…..https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/770114/posts/2478338726

This is a bit of a departure from normal posting technique for IST…but it is a historic event…and we love history…..

Nope not some religious rant about he walls of Jericho….something more important…the 30 year anniversary of the beginning of the end…….first the Berlin Wall….09 November 1989 the wall came tumbling down.

Least we NOT forget.

First we should know the history of why it was erected at all….and then why it came down…..

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-berlin-wall-28-year-history-1779495

Try to remember that events of that November…..

Nearly 30 years ago, in the night of November 9-10, 1989, East German border police opened the gates at crossing points in the Berlin Wall, allowing masses of East Berliners to stream through them unhindered.

This started a night of unbridled celebrations as people crossed freely back and forth through the Cold War barrier, climbed on it, and even danced and partied on it.

The signal for the mass breach of the previously heavily guarded wall was a fumbled announcement in a press conference by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) Party chief of Berlin, Günter Schabowski.

https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-100812

Will this day be remembered?

The fall promised a bright new world without the USSR and the divisive politics that the Cold War brought about.

You know, it’s strange. There are certain moments that you and everyone in your generation never forget. For instance, I can tell you exactly where I was – eating a 25-cent hamburger in a diner that might have been called the Yankee Doodle in New Haven, Connecticut – when a man stuck his head in the front door and said, “The president’s been shot.” That, of course, was John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and I have little doubt that, if you asked just about anyone else my age, they’d have a remarkably specific memory of that moment, too.

But here’s the strange thing that TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll brought to my mind with today’s piece on what may qualify as the single most important historical event of my life: the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. I have no idea what I was doing or where I was that November 9th in 1989 when I first heard that the forever structure dividing East from West that symbolized the two-superpower world of the Cold War was coming down. I have just vague memories of TV images of crowds surging and the wall being whacked at by people with sledgehammers

What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later

A good retrospective……for those that would like to remember….

It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.

East German leaders had tried to calm mounting protests by loosening the borders, making travel easier for East Germans. They had not intended to open the border up completely.

The changes were meant to be fairly minor – but the way they were delivered had major consequences.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50013048

It appears that this event means NOTHING….and why should it….it only changed the world as we had known it and gave way to the crippling globalization with which  we have a love/hate relationship….so why look back?  Why try to remember what went wrong/right?

I was eating dinner of a ‘Wheel Burger’, a local famous burger and fries and watched the TV as I dined and enjoying my ice cold Miller….how about you?

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Making America Great Again–Part 28

I have been posting a historical series by Maj. Danny Sjursen….a look at American History that most people have NO idea about or why……

This installment is a look at JFK and the Cold War……but before that let me give the reader the series link so far…….

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10;Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26; Part 27.

Now a look at Part 28…….


Among the American people—if not historians—John F. Kennedy regularly ranks as one of the best presidents in various opinion polls. There is, undoubtedly, something magnetic about the Kennedy administration, dubbed “Camelot” by the president’s wife, Jacqueline, soon after his assassination. However, one wonders if sentiments like this are little more than postmortem nostalgia for a young, handsome president. JFK memorialization and mythology are such that it seems the memories contain something for everyone. Today, mainstream liberals tout his efforts on civil rights; defense hawks laud the toughness of his Cuban Missile Crisis stand; conversely, antiwar types insist that Kennedy was about to pull the U.S. troops out of Vietnam when his presidency was ended by an assassin’s bullets. To the scholar, however, much of the passionate praise for JFK seems unwarranted for a short administration that boasted so few tangible accomplishments.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-history-for-truthdiggers-jfk-trapped-in-a-cold-war-box/
 
Maj. Danny is helping the American people get in touch with their real history not some sanitized version……the version we are all taught in school.
 
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Making America Great Again?–Part 27

I have been posting an historical series written by Maj. Danny Sjursen….his series is a bit different look at our history in the vain of Zinn’s People’s History……it is an excellent look at American history from the beginning….

For those that may have missed the series as I posted them…I can help get your caught up……

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10;Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26.

This “chapter” takes us to the dreaded “Cold War”……..the days of the Red Scare and the days of yore…..

Nothing is inevitable. Not war, not peace. Those writers and politicians who tell readers or constituents otherwise are selling snake oil. So it is, oftentimes, with proclamations about the Cold War. Americans have been taught, programmed even, to believe that a permanently bellicose nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union was inescapable—such was the diabolical nature of global communism. There were no alternatives, we have been told, to a firm military response to Soviet aggression in the wake of World War II. This myth of inevitability served, and serves, a vital purpose. That purpose is to explain the seemingly unexplainable: how Soviet Russia, America’s valued ally in World War II, so quickly transformed, almost overnight, into a national boogeyman. You’re not supposed to ask tough questions or draw nuanced conclusions; to wit: Weren’t the U.S. and the Soviet Union ideological enemies long before they were allies (of convenience)? And, couldn’t different American policies have assuaged Soviet fears and lessened the atmosphere of tense standoff after 1945? To answer yes to either, of course, is to commit national heresy, but honest history demands that the scholar and student do exactly that.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-history-for-truthdiggers-a-cruel-costly-and-anxious-cold-war/

I believe that Americans should know our entire history not the sanitized bullsh*t we are given in school…..and Maj. Danny does an excellent job in our continuing education.

I believe that you either learn from history or it devours you.

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Class Dismissed!

That “Marshall Plan”

As usual the old professor is about to drop some history on you….was that an eye roll?

Whenever some economic plan comes about it is compared to the Marshall Plan of the 1940s….but since the nation is so damn young now how many actually knows what the Plan was about?

Well I can help with that lack of knowledge……

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. The brainchild of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, for whom it was named, it was crafted as a four-year plan to reconstruct cities, industries and infrastructure heavily damaged during the war and to remove trade barriers between European neighbors – as well as foster commerce between those countries and the United States.

In addition to economic redevelopment, one of the stated goals of the Marshall Plan was to halt the spread communism on the European continent.

Implementation of the Marshall Plan has been cited as the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and its European allies and the Soviet Union, which had effectively taken control of much of central and eastern Europe and established its satellite republics as communist nations.

The Marshall Plan is also considered a key catalyst for the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance between North American and European countries established in 1949.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/marshall-plan-1

But with this gesture of goodwill was not without a bunch of myths…..was not all rainbows and unicorns……

Perhaps the most persistent and enduring myth in modern British history is that the country did badly, in comparison with its European neighbours, out of the Marshall Plan, the scheme of American largesse that funded the reconstruction of war-ravaged western Europe. But it is simply not true.

West Germany received $1.7 billion of postwar aid from the United States, which it invested primarily in capital and infrastructure, paving the way for the Wirtschaftswunder, the postwar economic miracle that turned the country into a manufacturing powerhouse, which, even after the considerable cost of reunification in 1990, it remains.

Britain, as victor, had an understandable sense of entitlement – and let us not forget the nature of the regime that it and its Empire had helped defeat – but, as an indication of the sacrifice it had made, it ended the conflict with an economy more like that of a defeated or occupied nation.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/editor/marshall-myths

You now know more than you did before reading…..

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Class Dismissed!