George F. Kennan : The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.

[Wetzelbill]

Yesterday I made a post that led to a web page about American Diplomat, George Kennan, a Cold War Realist who came up with the original strategy of containment, and later critiqued the way his ideas were misinterpreted. Republicans are always quick to jump on the horn about how they supposedly won the Cold War. It's a joke, but I hear it enough to be plenty sick of it by now. Kennan in this article talks a little bit about the Cold War strategy, how it went wrong and argues against the GOP's rhetoric. Interestingly enough, he asserts that nobody really "won" the Cold War. I get the impression that he feels it became an unfortunate battle between hard-line factions, who were seeking to rectify the problems with heavy militarization and not proper diplomacy and other political solutions.



http://groups.google.com/group/tx.politics/msg/a94030df88449726

The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under
Republican Party leadership "won the cold war" is intrinsically silly.
The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence
decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in
another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish.
No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments
of any other one.
As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the
regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns and hopes of
the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation
of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become lost in the
exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing
generational gap in the regime.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. My vote goes to Iceland and the baltics. (and the Afghans)

When the baltics stood up and stormed out of a politburo meeting, declaring that they would follow moscow no more, and when Iceland (several months BEFORE George HW) recognized them as independent states, their brave stand caused the rest of the world to stand up to the USSR as well.

The true disintegration began earlier, and not because of Star Wars. Nope, some morons in their administration promised that they could safely invade a middle east country and safely control it over a period of weeks. Maybe a month, no problem, trust us.

Where have we heard that recently?
Afghanistan bankrupt the USSR morally, financially and made it look inept to its own people. WHen dead and broken bodies started returning from the front, parents began to complain and even went so far as to hide their teenaged sons to keep them from being drafted. Lawlessness was bound to happen, and it did.