Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. 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. The day they held elections is exactly the same day that Deng Xiaoping turned the tanks on demonstrators in Beijing and you have the Tiananmen Massacre. Two solutions for the problem. So the way the elections worked out in Poland is that Solidarity won every single seat for which it could compete but one. And then only three people in the communist-designated seats actually won. So who won all the rest of them? The box on the ballot called “none of the above.” Yes, the Roman Catholic Church had helped instruct people that that’s the box you want. With that, the legitimacy of the Communist Party to rule had just been wrecked and we’re on to democracy in Poland. This democratic contagion then spread into East Germany four months later. This is about the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany. 70,000 people demonstrated in Leipzig. Within the week around like 1.4 million Germans are demonstrating in over 200 demonstrations. Typically, the East Germans would have sent tanks. That was what they would have done in the past. But would-be tank man Erich Honecker was already out of a job. His ruinous policies of living off debt since he came to power in 1971 had just about wrecked East Germany. So he was out. Then less than two weeks later, the Council of Ministers resigns. Then on November 8th, the Politburo resigns. Then on the 9th, whatever is left of that government is issuing new travel regulations. You might wonder what travel has got to do with it. I’ll get there. So in response to a question at a news conference, this guy, Günter Schabowski, who was one of the remaining communists helping run the show, gets asked a question and he doesn’t know the answer. So he wings it. The question is, “When do these travel regulations go into effect?” And he goes, “Immediately.” Well, crowds immediately started gathering at the six gates to the Berlin Wall. At one of them, the border guards decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and they opened the gate and East Germans poured into West Berlin. Within the first week alone, over half of East Germany’s population visited the West. Within the month, 1% of the population emigrated to the West. Like the Polish elections, this opening of the gate was a pivotal decision. A pivotal decision, whatever it is, means there’s no going back to the way it was. Here’s good old Günter going, “Gosh, we hadn’t a clue that opening the wall was the beginning of the end of East Germany.” Okay, better luck next time. And the Russians were shocked by how unpopular they were. They were thinking they were going to get credit, Gorbachev, for Eastern Europe’s liberation rather than blame for Eastern Europe’s enserfment.…

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