----- Original Message ----- From: "Gautam Mukunda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 12:19 PM Subject: RE: Corruption in a Democracy
> No, I'm saying that the injuries were self-inflicted. Transitioning over > from Communism is difficult. I've become something of an expert on this > topic thanks to my new job. An example - we now estimate that, by 1985, > _60%_ of Soviet industry was _negative value-added_. That is, the stuff > coming out of the factory was worth less than the raw materials going into > the factory. This is nothing short of mind-boggling. Clearly, this did not happen overnight, or in just a few years. By the '70s, foot dragging in the Soviet Union was epidemic...and things continued to decline into the '80s. As I've mentioned offline, I had a chance to have a Russian in my home for two weeks back in '93, as part of a business training program. He talked about when he was young in the '70s, and he declined a chance to join the Communist Party. While his actions certainly took a lot less courage than the actions of the refusenicks, IMHO, it proved to be the type of action that led to the downfall of the Soviet system. A system can prosper with a small fraction of that society diametrically opposed to the government and system. It cannot prosper with passive resistance from the majority of the society. Another thing worth noting here is how badly the US overestimated the Soviet ecconomy in the '80s. Our assessment of the risk from the Soviet Union was based on the assumption that their ecconomy was far more robust than it was. IIRC, the CIA's estimate of GDP was high, but the closest to reality. It was outvoted by the assessment of the military intelligence units. > You'd need some evidence of that, and I think you'd be very, very hard > pressed to find it. There are three canonical examples of a bipolar > conflict in international affairs - Athens vs. Sparta, Rome vs. Carthage, > and the US vs. the USSR. > > Anyways, of those three, the first two were resolved by massive warfare. > Athens lost to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and Carthage was destroyed > by Rome. The third, however, ended peacefully. This was not an accident. > It was a product of deliberate policy - the remarkable efforts of the >Reagan Administration and, equally, the truly extraordinary diplomatic skill of >the first Bush Administration, detailed very well in the marvelous _A World > Transformed_ by Scowcroft and Bush Sr. Gautam, you know that the plan for the Cold War was formed during the Truman Administration. The plan from the beginning was containment. At the time, the conclusion was reached that the Soviet system could not prosper in the long run; the Soviet Union would fall far behind the West. Western European governments would have a small military burden, so they could focus on developing their ecconomies. The US would take on the lions share of the spending burden for defending the West. This conflict was different from previous conflicts because the winner of a nuclear war wouldn't be much of a winner. I cannot think of MAD as a policy in other bipolar conflicts. Everything that I've seen indicated that there probably would have been a shooting war if there wasn't the liklyhood of near total destruction for the "winner." > >The push had to be hard because international relations is not something >conducted with perfect information. It is very easy for you, now, where >there are no consequences to your views, to say, gee, if it had just been >calibrated a little bit more carefully, a slightly better outcome might >have occurred, and that shows that Reagan was incompetent. I have no problem with the outcome. It was as good as we could possibly have expected. However, I think we can seperate two different things that were done at the time. 1) Beefing up US's conventional military forces in Europe so it could defend Europe without resorting to nuclear weapons. That made sense. If the Soviet Union was about to crumble, its leaders might have rolled the dice and decided to invade Europe and hope that we would not start WWIII over it. 2) Threating the Soviet Union with a WWIII scenerio where we could destroy them and emerge with minimal damage. That did not make sense. > Brezhnev's USSR was pushing _very_ hard. Reagan > decided, for the first time since JFK was in office, to push back, and push > back as hard as he possibly could. The consequence of that was the > shattering of the Soviet Empire. Hundreds of millions of people living > under one of the most brutal tyrannies in human history got to live in > democracies instead. The roster of countries restored to freedom (or at > least somewhat better governments) is incredible. East Germany. Poland. > Czechoslovakia. Romania. Bulgaria. Lithuania. Latvia. Estonia. The > Ukraine. Belarus. And, not least, Russia itself. I could go on. _Even > if_ I agreed with your criticisms about the push being too hard - and I > don't, because 1 - I don't think it was, any less and the outcome could have > been very much worse, ranging anywhere from a Soviet invasion of Western > Europe (successful) to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe (failed) to > nuclear war and 2. There was no way to judge it that closely in advance > _anyways_ - I would say that it's nothing more than quibbling around the > edges. This was one of the most extraordinary diplomatic triumphs in > history, and it seems to me that you have to really, really _want_ to blame > Reagan to say that it was anything other than a remarkable achievement. > It's equivalent, in my mind, to the right-wing insanity of saying that FDR > handled the Second World War poorly because he didn't set up our post-war > strategic situation in such a way that we had an advantage over Stalin. > Now, that's true, and it was a mistake on his part, and I think that's > actually a _fairer_ criticism than the one you're making of Reagan. But so > what? The man _won the Second World War_. This isn't a trivial thing, > obviously. Saying, "If he had a stronger line at Yalta, things would have > been different 10 years down the road" is both true and irrelevant. When > contrasted to the extraordinary scale of what he _did_ do, and the > extraordinary difficulty of doing that, it just doesn't matter in terms of > historical assessment. > > Gautam > >
