Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so people are learning about these things for the first time. Is the sense that they kind of suspected? I mean, people have family. They must have known, “My uncle was off in this little mining town that he was forced to go to for a decade right after World War II.” Were they totally shocked or was there some sense that things were pretty bad and now we’re just learning the extent of it? I think there was an understanding it was terrible, but I think there’s this exuberance of thinking it’s going to get much better. Then the disappointment is equally extreme. And then there was this feeling that the West owes us because you’re all really rich and you now owe us to fix everything. The counterargument to that is, “No you are an enormous migraine. You set back all of these countries across the globe in time with this nonfunctioning communist model that you peddled around there. And now you want extra aid.” The problem was that we wanted to do some of the aid, but they’re not going to be receptive to it. That was another conclusion with the Bush administration, that if we dumped a lot of money in it, it would just go straight into corruption. You need a legal structure in order to place money, and they just plain didn’t have it. That was another thing that was worrying the Bush administration. There’s nowhere to put the money. Speaking of these different countries that the Soviets and the United States were competing for during the Cold War, you had this presentation where you say Reagan alone didn’t do this. But I wonder if the broader lesson is that nothing any US president did in terms of foreign policy… That was all a sideshow, this tête-à-tête competition for different Third World countries: “We’re going to get Brazil, we’re going to get Vietnam, we’re going to get Algeria.” That just seems much less significant than the fact that liberal capitalism was more appealing and out-produced communism. So even if some country, even if Brazil goes communist, this is not going to change the fundamental playing board here.…

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