> Behalf Of Charlie Bell
> Kat wrote:
> > My family celebrated, but I don't recall anyone being real
> > surprised. By then it was seen- by the people I knew and loved at
least-
> > as only a matter of time.
> and Gautam replied...
> If that's so, then they were just about the only ones. The CIA
didn't
> predict it. The SIS didn't predict it. The DGSE didn't predict it.
> The Mossad didn't predict it. No one did, actually.
>
> Gautam's right in that no-one predicted it happening just
> when it did.
>
> However, everyone did expect it. In another 5-10-15 years, possibly,
if
> things went well. Everyone thought the slow change would continue.
It was
> the astounding speed of the whole event that was most remarkable at
the
> time.
>
> Charlie
You're serious this time, right Charlie? :-) I have to disagree with
this too, I'm afraid. Dan M. and I have had a prolonged dicussion on
this topic, but I can't recall if it was on or off-list. Perhaps he
can. Let me paraphrase (I don't have the exact quote sitting in front
of me, but my memory is usually fairly accurate, so I'll be really
close to the actual words) one of my professors, from a lecture in his
intro. course on international relations:
In the late 1970s, American political scientists engaged in a
prolonged debate on whether the Cold War would end within a decade or
so because of the total collapse of one of the two Superpowers. What
they were debating, though, was whether the _United States_ would
collapse, not the Soviet Union.
His larger point was on the difficulties of predicting long-term
trends in international politics.
A good friend of mine is currently writing his PhD dissertation on why
the CIA entirely missed the collapse of the Soviet Union - not missed
its timing, but missed predicting that it would happen at all.
I would also point out that Robert Gilpin's book _War and Change in
World Politics_ (1980), which first laid out hegemonic stability
theory and is thus one of the most important books in political
science of the last quarter century, spends its last chapter
describing how the United States should deal with the continuing, and
virtually inevitable, _rise_ of Soviet power and its own decline from
a pre-eminent position. I would actually go so far as to say that in
the late 1970s there was something approaching a consensus - at least
among American students of IR, and among Europeans as well, I think -
that we were beginning to lose the Cold War.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
