You’re trying to talk sense to a horse that’s wearing imperialist blinders, but it’s a worthwhile effort because others are reading too. thumbs up
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The US could have said, “Yeah, sorry about the Nazis and Uncle Joe. We are going to go back to our isolationist policies. Good luck with everything.” After WWII we had little to fear with direct war with Russia. This was pre ICBMs. The only way to make it to the US mainland would be a large Naval fleet which would have been decimated before it got here. The only reason we would need to assault Europe again was if we gave a shit as to what happened to it again.
Instead they kept their alliance with Europe and helped them rebuild, after dividing up a few of the eastern countries (really fucked over poor Poland).
You act like the US did this only as a selfish act, and that is bunk. Yes you get the benefit of stacking the deck that if there was a war, it would be in Europe, but with out US presence, that would have been a likelihood anyway. Are you saying the rest of NATO didn’t want the help of the US? That they weren’t fearful of Stalin? And again, I am not saying the US didn’t get some benefit with helping make Europe a stronghold against the Iron Curtain, but Western Europe also benefited as well. That and MAD, of course.
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Ensure the battlefield of a war against the USSR was kept as far away as possible? What are you talking about?
At the time of NATO’s founding, which is what established a permanent American presence, there was no threat to a battleground on US soil. For goodness sake, it took the entire economic output of the US to field an invasion force during WW2 and that was against already battered enemy. There was zero chance the USSR could do the same thing against us with all our infrastructure still in place.
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What are you talking about? We already had troops in Germany at the time NATO was formed. We had occupied it for over 4 years and had implemented the Marshall plan for 2 years. Hell, it became the HQ for our Army in Europe soon after WW2 ended.
At the time of NATO’s founding, the United States was the only country on the planet with nuclear weapons.
Reality and strategy do not necessarily coincide.
Some reminders of the perspective of US military leaders during the Cold War:
The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them, except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other Asiatic characteristics, the Russian have no regard for human life and is an all out son of bitch, barbarian, and chronic drunk.
Statement (8 August 1945), as quoted in General Patton : A Soldier’s Life (2002) by Stanley P. Hirshson, p. 650
Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!
General Thomas S Power, SAC Commander
They were planning long-term, not just looking at the current status of forces in the immediate aftermath of the war. And they were aware that the USSR was capable of astonishingly quick reconstruction, industrialisation and mobilisation; they’d just watched them go direct from the disaster of WWI, straight into revolution, civil war and repeated invasion, and yet they still managed to annihilate the Wehrmacht. A Soviet-style total control economy was awful for the ordinary people, but it did allow the state to concentrate resources to a greater extent than would be otherwise possible.
If anything, they miscalculated in the other direction. The development of ICBMs rapidly caused the US homeland to be indefensible (along with everywhere else) and made the European-based armies virtually useless.
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First, the Cold War didn’t start until 1947 at a minimum when the USSR consolidated its control over the Eastern Bloc. The Paton quote is from two years before the Cold War started.
Second, Paton was responding to a Lt. General in the Polish Army about Russia having taken 2 million Poles for slave labor - right after having shut down slave labor camps all over Germany.
Third, the quote from General Thomas Powers is from over a decade after NATO was founded. By that time, we had fought proxy wars against Russia and MAD was in full effect.
Seriously, you might not like to hear it, but the US joined NATO partly because they disliked Communism, but largely because Western Europe asked them to join their existing mutual defense pact so that the Soviets wouldn’t dare invade any more Western European countries.
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You didn’t oversimplify; you made an incorrect claim. Your amended claim above is simpler than the original. I feel like you would be better served by a study of socialism than a study of semantics.
You speak as if none of those countries contained supporters of communism that were in place during the Cold War. Of course they did - just as the Nazis were able to find support in the countries they invaded, too. Germany had a strong communist party in the Weimar Republic, and it is in part due to anti-democratic machinations to keep them out that history turned out as it did. The historic injustices in Korea and Vietnam explain support for communism in those countries. Afghanistan had a democratically elected communist government for fuck’s sake, which the US intentionally armed religious zealots in order to undermine.
East Germany is entirely a result of US intractibility, in any case. Fault for German division is regularly laid at Stalin’s door, when his proposal was for a united Germany neutral from both blocs. The US was unwilling to forego the prize of a fully industrial client state in Europe and in NATO (although ultimately it seems not to have panned out that way, and the UK largely took over the role of US cheerleader/catspaw).
It’s interesting because the usual position is that Europe or the US feared Soviet aggression (and maybe that fear was genuine, since fear doesn’t have to be rooted in particularly solid facts to be genuine) but an examination of history shows the USSR to have acted fairly consistently defensively, and most flare-ups to have been triggered by US or Western manoeuvring to threaten the USSR. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a perfect example of this. Such manoevres were fairly obviously part of a strategy of stimulation a soviet over-reaction - which makes US behaviour in the face of post 9/11 terrorism so utterly ridiculous - it’s like, the guidebook for this was printed by the CIA. No, really.
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The US did not “join NATO”. The US created NATO (with significant support from the UK government), and Germany was not given any choice about whether or not it wanted to be a member.
I am not denying that some of the countries of Western Europe desired alliances against a potential threat from the USSR (although it is worth noting that the desire for such alliances was much more strongly felt amongst the wealthy ruling class of those countries than it was amongst the general populace). What I am denying is the idea that the US role in the creation of this alliance was motivated by anything other than self-interest.
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I heard a lovely story about the Luxembourg army once [1].
Supposedly, their rulers decided to get involved in the Napoleonic Wars. It’s customary, when joining a war, to send your army to join in the fighting.
So they did. All 70 or so of them.
After a few years, the army returned home. They now numbered 72, as they hadn’t lost anyone and they’d also made a couple of friends along the way…
[1] It’s a vague memory, might’ve been Lichtenstein or something. One of the European microstates, anyway.
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People in the UK are still, today, publicly debating whether or not they did the Third World a favor by colonizing it.
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All of the human race live and work in an enslaved system in government monetary sports and even the arts the human race is by nature a worker and loves or not their job’s. Working is the very nature of most humans without work their is no progress and what enslaves the human race is money we are in debt to money and we have leleader’s leading us into a slave system no one can break away from can also be illegal to break away from the system is corrupt and broken that’s why the elitists want a new world order because the present system can not be fixed and can’t last much longer without a total collapse we are all debt slave’s to one thing or another that’s how government keeps control over their slave’s
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That was indeed Liechtenstein.
What’s your opinion on African-Kemetic religion?
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Would you mind elaborating? If I trust your perspective, then I know I should be skeptical of most but not all of the comments here, but it is not immediately obvious from your comment which is which. If you talked a little about your perspective on socialism, I think it would be helpful.
Also, your metaphor is not great – you can learn to sight read and play an instrument very very well without knowing the first thing about music theory. (Jazz improvisation without knowing any music theory would be quite a bit harder, but there’s still a lot of people who can feel their way through by ear.) Also, if you don’t count voice as an instrument, you can learn to sight read and make beautiful music without knowing any music theory or how to play an instrument. This is relevant to your argument because while people may not be using the word “socialism” the same way you would use it, they might still be having a sensible discussion about coherent concepts.
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This is not exactly true. Take a look at the names of the Party of European Socialists. About a quarter of the regional names use social-democratic instead of socialist and they added the tag line “socialists and democrats” a few years ago.
(but the distinction between socialist and social-democratic is blurry, the Swiss SP [as one party, not a bundle of them like the PES uses as official names Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz, Parti socialiste suisse, Partito Socialista Svizzero and Partida Socialdemocrata de la Svizra)
In other words, you understand exactly why it matters whether the spending is mandatory or discretionary.
The decision to fund social security was made nearly 100 years ago, and it was sidelined out of the discretionary budget so that opponents of the program couldn’t immediately defund it. Probably more importantly, the amount spent on social security is almost entirely dependent on demographics and is not the least bit driven by the will of Congress.
As a result, it is fairly obviously incorrect to suggest that the amount spent on social security reflects the actual priorities of the political or business elites.
Discretionary spending reflects what Congress’ actual priorities are. While your argument that it’s good that so much of the discretionary budget goes to defense is interesting, there is a great deal of room for disagreement on that point. Also, the logic of that argument flatly contradicts the assertion that it makes sense to lump together mandatory and discretionary spending. It’s literally a contradiction to say that you “don’t see what it matters whether the spending is mandatory…” at the same time that you’re arguing that it’s better that the military budget is discretionary rather than mandatory. If it didn’t matter, one couldn’t possibly be preferable to the other.
A protection racket that has its victims sign notarized contracts that hold up in court is still a protection racket – especially when the protection racket also owns the courts!
And also, the alliance was made a long time ago and doesn’t necessarily reflect the current popular will.
Why would you personally take umbrage at the assertion that the US power elite abides by Realpolitik? I thought that was uncontroversial, and it really mystifies me why a US citizen would take it personally when it’s obviously not a reflection on them or the things that make the US pretty cool (which is manifestly not its political elite).
But more importantly, you’re missing the forest for the trees here. The CIA spent decades and millions of dollars subverting free and fair elections in Italy to prevent socialist candidates from getting any power. The US will intervene if anyone tries to invade Italy, but only if Italy has the kind of government the US wants, and the US will go to great lengths to make sure Italy has the kind of government the US wants. That’s not a healthy partnership – it’s an abusive relationship.
This is exactly how I think of it too.
Realpolitik. Of course it was a selfish act. An individual might give away billions of dollars altruistically (though that is exceedingly rare, even for those with many billions to give), but a group of political elites would never do such a thing without believing they’re getting a good deal.
That argument does very, very little to rebut the notion that it reflects the attitudes of many in the US military during the cold war. I don’t think there’s usually very much turnover in military hierarchies over a period of 2 years.
That does absolutely nothing to rebut the notion that it reflects the attitude of many in the US military during the cold war. (It might support the notion that such an opinion was justified, but that’s a different argument entirely.)
This is hilarious. Patton’s quote doesn’t count because it’s from before the cold war; this one doesn’t count because it’s not from before the cold war. Just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, huh?
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All this about spending priorities, and no one has mentioned the black budget or the fact that most spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was not reflected in the military budget:
As for war costs, Mr. Bush included little or none in his annual military budgets, instead routinely asking Congress for supplemental appropriations during the year.
Obviously, these expenditures need to be taken into account in any reasonable analysis of US spending priorities.
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But they are protected because the combined strength of NATO (including but not limited to nuclear MAD) makes it highly unlikely that there would be a WWIII. Living on the new frontier line of NATO, I find this a rather good deal. Despite plenty of bellicose rhetoric from Russia directed at us over the past few years, no physical attack has materialized. At the same time, Georgia and Ukraine, which individually are tougher targets than the Baltics but don’t benefit from outside alliances are both suffering from Russian aggression.
One could argue (and many do) that Ukraine is actually suffering from a US-staged anti-democratic coup, and that the Russian government is trying to protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine from the US-backed government. (I suspect the truth is some combination of these positions.)
And it wouldn’t be the first country to get that treatment from the US, BTW.
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