Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…arter’s subsequent human rights campaign destroyed communist belief in communism. Okay. Another president, another counter-argument. Those who are fans of Richard Nixon would say, “No, no, no, no, no. It was Richard Nixon who played the China card so the United States and China could gang up on the Soviet Union and overextend it financially to wreck it militarily.” I think the Chinese would beg to differ and say, “No, no, no, no. It was Mao who played the America card.” Because what’s going on in 1969? There’s a border war between China and the Soviet Union. China’s gotten its nuclear bomb in ‘64. It no longer has to defer to the Soviet Union and starts playing more tough on their border disagreements. So the Soviets are really upset. They come to the United States and ask us whether it would be okay to nuke these people, because they think Americans don’t like the Chinese . Well we didn’t, but we said, “No, it’s not okay to nuke those people.” So the Chinese figure it out. The one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary, right? Up until then… Think about it, China and Russia, for them the United States was the primary adversary. Now they’re primary adversaries with each other, freeing up the United States to decide which one it’s going to cozy up to. And the United States decides it’s going to cozy up to China. Why? Well, Chinese belligerency forces the Soviets. Not only have they already got a big militarized border with Europe, now they’re going to do the same thing on a very long border with China. These are nuclear-armed mechanized forces, very expensive. Imagine if this country had to have such borders with Canada and Mexico. It would be bankrupting, and we are far richer than the Soviet Union was then, whenever. It was bankrupting. So some would argue that US cooperation with China fatally overextended the Soviet Union. One could take all of these arguments, starting with President Nixon all the way through Reagan, to make an overarching argument that says, “Look, each president opened up opportunities for the others who then leveraged them.” So Nixon plays the China card, which others play with increasing dexterity. Ford comes in and begins dabbling in human rights. Carter then comes in and really goes for human rights and starts doing a military buildup, which then Ronald Reagan really does. So that by the time you get to Reagan, he is dealing in a position of both ideological and military strength vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. For those who think that US foreign policy was not consistent during the Cold War, you’re not looking at it at the strategic level. There were certain different strategies going on and how best to achieve it, but both parties agreed the goals were free trade, democracy, containment of communism. Those were staples of US foreign policy, for both parties, for its duration. So some would argue that Presidents Nixon through Reagan produced the cumulative presidential effects to defeat the Soviet Union. Okay, others would say to forget this great man theory of history business, that’s really passé. residents Nixon through Reagan produced the cumulative presidential effects to defeat the Soviet Union. Okay, others would say to forget this great man theory of history business, that’s really passé. What really accounted for the outcome of the Cold War was this military platform, that’s Pentagonese for large military systems. But anyway, it’s a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine. They say that this is the item. The way deterrence theory worked during the Cold War, and I believe now as well, is that in order to deter the other side, you have to have a reliable second-strike capability. So if they thought of lobbing a nuke at you, they would be guaranteed that you would have the second strike to lob a nuke back. Therefore, they’re never going to lob the first nuke. When Jimmy Carter became president, he was a graduate of Annapolis and also a submariner. The United States began a much more aggressive deployment of its fleet and that’s continued even more so under Reagan. We’re taking our submarines and we’re targeting Soviet submarines in their home water bastions. So the Soviets are thinking that we’re going to be able to destroy their second-strike capability on our first strike and they’re having a heart attack. So here you have Valery Boldin, a longtime aide to Gorbachev, saying, “Look, the most powerful strength of the United States is the naval fleet and we aren’t going to get one, or our geography isn’t set up to use one the way the United States can.” And then you have Marshal Yazov saying, “For the Americans, the main means of atomic attack is the fleet.” So then you get Marshal Akhromeyev, who’s visiting the United States in 1987. At the end of the Cold War he will kill himself, but he’s still around in ‘87. He’s telling his American hosts, “You know where our submarines are, but we don’t know where yours are. It’s destabilizing. You, you the United States Navy, are the problem.” Go Navy. And here’s his host, Admiral Trost, who’s going, “Yeah, the inability of the Soviet Union to maintain a strong defensive capability led to the demise of the Soviet Union and to the removal of the Soviets as a major threat to us.” So you can make a perfectly good argument to say the Soviet Union could not counter technologically or financially the US submarine threat to its retaliatory nuclear forces, so war termination was the only thing it could do. All of these preceding explanations are navel explanations, spelled with an ‘e’, as in staring at one’s own. They’re all about what the United States did or didn’t do. So let’s get beyond the half-court tennis of Team America. You need to look at the other side of the net. This is where the Western guru for things military, Carl von Clausewitz, emphasizes reciprocity in war and the interaction of both sides. You’re not going to do well unless you consider what the other side is doing. So I have given you some external explanations and I’m going to do the internal ones. Here is Arnold Toynbee, he’s one of the finest historians of the 20th century. He wrote a big multi-volume history of the West, in which he argues that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. . Here is Arnold Toynbee, he’s one of the finest historians of the 20th century. He wrote a big multi-volume history of the West, in which he argues that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. So I discussed the murder, what the United States tried to do to the Soviet Union. Now I’m going to talk about the suicide, what the Soviets did to themselves. And here is counter-argument number one. The Soviet Union was an empire, and when that collapsed, that meant they lost the Cold War. During the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there was much fear in the West of this domino theory. The idea is one country falls to communism, then the next and next and next and next would fall to communism. Turns out the domino theory did not apply to capitalism. It applied to communism because once the democratic contagion hit one Warsaw Pact country in Eastern Europe, it spread to the others until it was a seething mess and they fell like dominoes. So in 1988-89, there were all kinds of demonstrations in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, they’re for political freedoms. In the Eastern Bloc, they’re for freedom from the Soviet Union. Gorbachev may not have gotten that detail. They’re all about not only wanting political freedoms, but also they’re about crumbling economies and how to fix their miserable standards of living. Very uncharacteristically, the Russians didn’t send tanks. In fact, Gorbachev welcomed and encouraged reforms in the Eastern Bloc, both political and economic, just as he was doing in the Soviet Union. So his ideas of glasnost, openness, and perestroika, rebuilding, resonated at home and abroad. These reforms began in Poland. Poland had been a scene of much worker unrest many times, in 1956, 1970, 1976, and 1980 and 1981. In 1981, this is when Solidarity, the workers movement, gets going and it gets a national and an international reputation. The next set of strikes are happening in 1988, because in the preceding several years, the Polish standard of living had shrunk by over 3%. The government was out of cash and wanted to raise basic food prices, and Poles hit the streets. The government was in a panic, because it was worried the economy would go into free fall. So the government cut a deal with Solidarity. They said, “You call off the strikes and then we’ll let you into political talks,” and Solidarity agreed. There was a complicating factor on all of this. It’s called the Roman Catholic Church, which is an institution of enormous credibility and legitimacy in Poland, which had a partiality for Solidarity and it had a Polish pope. So the roundtable discussions were these political talks. They occurred a year later in February 1989, and the Soviets encouraged them. In fact, here’s one Soviet person there advising the Poles: “Look, you’ve got to find some quick solutions out of your economic and political mess. You’re an itty-bitty country, so when you make mistakes, they’ll be itty-bitty mistakes. But if we make them, they’ll be big.” They got that one right. The Polish Communist Party thought they had this one covered by the way they jiggered the election rules. Not quite.…

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