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I think this idea that there's some sort of geopolitical pressure from the West that forced Moscow to make all the wrong bets in its economic and development planning starting in the 60's like short circuiting the Kosygin reforms is baseless. The USSR and the Warsaw Pact didn't need to spend like 15% of GDP on the military; the West was never going to invade and if the USSR didn't do things like trying to install puppet governments in Eastern Europe and closing off Berlin the Cold War might never had occurred. Like China is clearly facing many of the same geopolitical pressures in its bid for global hegemony but it's handling it a little more smartly with a stronger economic foundation that it got from adopting a vastly different economic system but it's diplomacy is still about as astoundingly bad as the USSR's except China doesn't care about being actually liked and in full machiavellian fashion uses its money preferring to be feared instead of loved to far greater effectiveness. You use "decentralization" a lot, but it's unclear I think what exactly you mean. Devolving some of the decision making from the Economic Ministries to the Oblasts? I believe IIRC that caused some considerable amount of dislocation but that was iirc under Kruschchev, and they had 60 years to fix those problems, so that can't hardly be it. Giving a bunch of weapons to various countries hardly could be said to be why their economy wasn't able to compete. This "protracted conflict" was entirely of their own making, but even so, I hardly see exactly and you certainly never explain the exact mechanisms in which competition with the West instead of spurring innovation in the USSR (as certain the Soviet arms industry remained top notch and comparable if not better than the West's in some respects even towards the end even as it slide behind in advanced electronics). The West didn't force the USSR to adopt Lysenkoist policies that harmed their agricultural sector and forced them to eventually import grain from the West, the West didn't put a gun to their head and say "Buy our You keep saying its because of its relations with the West and that "China didn't have to deal with this" but you don't elaborate. e or as Alchenar says so their post don't get lost: Alchenar posted:You can't just keep saying this without pointing to the specific ways that you want to claim that the Cold War screwed with the Soviet economy (if we are fast tracking to 'military spending' then that was an issue but a massive security state was more a consequence of the fact that everyone living in the USSR absolutely hated it and would have voted to get rid of it had they been given a chance, which wraps back to being a significant problem for the argument that the economy was working just fine).
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Aug 22, 2021 16:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The USSR inherited one of the wealthiest nations on earth from a pack of poo poo aristocrats and capitalists. It's not Cuba or Vietnam, the decadent west did not cause the fall. They inherited an empire in decline mired by corruption, secret police, being surrounded by enemies and just generally being late to the industrialization train. Now what the Soviets did manage to change was that last part, as for the rest... Russia as a nation-state is just one continuous case of institutional rot, with any incidental hickups of progress quickly being squashed by the next fan of extractive institutions and secret polices.
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Aug 22, 2021 17:30
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Alchenar posted:everyone living in the USSR absolutely hated it and would have voted to get rid of it had they been given a chance, They did get a chance to vote on getting rid of the USSR in 1991 (well, 9 out of 15 constituent republics did, the Baltics and Caucasus republics along with Moldova boycotted). On substantial turnout, they voted overwhelmingly to keep it, at least in "renewed" form.
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Aug 22, 2021 17:37
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Cpt_Obvious posted:No, the Soviet Union was destined to failure but not because of some sort of internal incompetence or poor planning. I am not saying that reopening the economy led to the demise of the Soviets, I am saying you can't ignore western influences like the Cold War which China never really had to deal with because the USA and their allies weren't constantly trying to gently caress them. At its peak the USSR covered 1/6th of the globe. Its vast territory was (and still is) rich in natural resources and the country had the second largest economy in the world. But thanks to central planning, a substantial portion of that economic power went towards the arms race with the West. Brezhnev used up the immense profits from two decades of oil boom not to improve the standards of living of Soviet citizens, but to boost up the Soviet military and nuclear arsenal. This was completely unnecessary even in the context of the Cold War; by the time Gorbachev became president in 1985, USSR had tens of thousands of nukes — almost twice as much as the USA (which had actually started to decommission its arsenal a decade prior), and enough to end the entire human race several times over. Throughout that same time period, there were severe shortages of even the most basic goods. Because of this, it is estimated that the black market made up around 10% of the entire GDP: citizens could acquire many basic goods only through illicit means. But nobody could complain because the government covered up and censored every issue and used the military and the secret police to brutally crush any dissent. Framing the Cold War arms race as "the USA and their allies constantly trying to gently caress the USSR" is stupid. Blaming the collapse of the USSR on open markets and the profit motive is laughable. If your underlying assertion is "central planning is cool and good, actually" then USSR is the last example you should use.
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Aug 22, 2021 18:02
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:At its peak the USSR covered 1/6th of the globe. Its vast territory was (and still is) rich in natural resources and the country had the second largest economy in the world. But thanks to central planning, a substantial portion of that economic power went towards the arms race with the West. Brezhnev used up the immense profits from two decades of oil boom not to improve the standards of living of Soviet citizens, but to boost up the Soviet military and nuclear arsenal. This was completely unnecessary even in the context of the Cold War; by the time Gorbachev became president in 1985, USSR had tens of thousands of nukes — almost twice as much as the USA (which had actually started to decommission its arsenal a decade prior), and enough to end the entire human race several times over. Throughout that same time period, there were severe shortages of even the most basic goods. Because of this, it is estimated that the black market made up around 10% of the entire GDP: citizens could acquire many basic goods only through illicit means. But nobody could complain because the government covered up and censored every issue and used the military and the secret police to brutally crush any dissent. You seem to be forgetting, comrade, that Communism can never fail; it can only be failed.
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Aug 22, 2021 18:41
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another thing to remember is that a genuinely important percentage of the USSR 'opening up markets' was motivated by the fact that the markets were there they simply could not control black market trade anymore and it had become a necessarily entrenched part of what everyday people had to use just to get by they could not crack down on the private markets anymore, they could only further attempt to criminalize systems that were increasingly necessary to interact with as a russian citizen, and, you know, that had been going swimmingly that china has not committed to the same idealistic mistakes is simply just a credit to it as a sustainable power. it's not "become invaluable to the Western economy so they don't gently caress you" it's "if you centrally manage the economy and allow no private trade, any failure of access to anything from food to durable goods is your fault" and "when it's inevitably your fault, the markets will come"
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Aug 22, 2021 19:15
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Blaming the collapse of the USSR on open markets and the profit motive is laughable. Yah know, you could at least do me the favor of reading the words that I wrote: Cpt_Obvious posted:I am not saying that reopening the economy led to the demise of the Soviets Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 20:22
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For what it’s worth, we read some of the late 70s to 80s analyses from the STASI in econ class back in the day, and the opinion seemed to be that central planning didn’t work (for the GDR at least) and also that the GDR was essentially bankrupt rather early. Not The Soviet Union of course, but this was from the horse’s mouth.
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Aug 22, 2021 20:35
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yah know, you could at least do me the favor of reading the words that I wrote: Yeah we read you and you've gone from: Cpt_Obvious posted:In fact, the Soviet Union only began to collapse after the free market was re-introduced. To Cpt_Obvious posted:To "re-rail" this derail, the Soviet Union underwent decentralizing reforms towards the end of it's reign and they did not save it from collapse because centralization had little to do with the economic failings of the Soviet Union. It was the external factors that did them in, namely their relation with the West. And you've been shifting that claim ever further away every time you get called out to explain precisely what it is about the USSR's relationship to the West that caused the failure of its economic model.
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Aug 22, 2021 20:58
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Also, the RSFSR and most of the other SSRs were a complete wreck after the Civil War and by the late 1920s were far further behind the West in terms of technology and capital investment. Ironically enough, it was the oil industry that was even close to competitive at that point. The Soviet Union had last resources on paper, but it isn't a question simply of resources but exploiting then exporting them in a way to gain hard currency. The Soviet Union was largely but honestly far behind the industrialized world until the 1950s. Also, the Soviets simply legalizing black markets wasn't going to make a huge amount of difference because the issue was often simply or rather domestically available supply. A lot of it was simply due to price caps for the entire system to work you needed prices/wages to be in a short range of each other. However, when have supply shortages you have a feedback effect. You could open it up to markets, and if production doesn't significantly rise you have people of different income levels fighting over the same pool of grain. They largely get the system going with the idea that they had hoped they could export more from certain key industries (with price controls) than they were importing grain. Nevertheless, the Kosygin reforms were pulled back in the first place because it was apparent that decentralization didn't make a vast difference in terms of industrial productivity and at times took more input to get the same amount of product back. Perestroika failed for similar reasons. A big part of it was simply that factories were usually price capped, and even if they had individual initiative, they had the same capital issues as before unless they were subsidized. However, the core issue for the Soviet economy was sheer capital, and with a complex trading relationship with the West that was difficult to find outside of energy markets. It is true the collapse of energy markets lead partially to the Soviet collapse but that is after it had mostly been boxed in terms of trade by issues of both access and competitiveness. It is just Perestroika didn't solve anything and may have actually worsen the situation. The situation for China clearly improved when they started getting more robust market access and in term had the leeway to open up more domestic agricultural markets. Pulling back from Eastern Europe didn't help the situation because those were some of the few economies that would openly trade with the USSR (although it was at times forced). Granted, I do believe the Soviets did spend too much on their military even their reasoning was they needed simply more armaments to compete with the US/NATO because their armaments were usually inferior (it really depends on the era and system though, in terms of fighters the Soviets were on par until the mid 1970s), That said, a pull back should have happened much sooner. I think China has taken this to heart and only has been militarizing after its economic development reached the point it can easily support it. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 21:35
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At this rate the thread isn't going to make it's expected daily quota of anti-Chinese racism.
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Aug 22, 2021 21:51
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Alchenar posted:And you've been shifting that claim ever further away every time you get called out to explain precisely what it is about the USSR's relationship to the West that caused the failure of its economic model. The goal of US foreign policy between 1945-1990 was largely to thwart the influence of the Soviet Union by robbing it of allies and halting the growth of communism across the globe. This resulted in a plethora of invasions and covert actions in Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and many others. Also the arms race.
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Aug 22, 2021 21:51
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Note that one communist country is curiously absent of cold war united states intervention: China.
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Aug 22, 2021 21:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The USSR inherited one of the wealthiest nations on earth from a pack of poo poo aristocrats and capitalists. It's not Cuba or Vietnam, the decadent west did not cause the fall. The USSR took the full force of the German suicide attack and lost over ten percent of their entire population with the major urban centres in the west utterly devastated. The fact that they were then able to stand up to all the remnants of the European empires, and the rising American empire, put together, is nothing short of miraculous.
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Aug 22, 2021 21:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The goal of US foreign policy between 1945-1990 was largely to thwart the influence of the Soviet Union by robbing it of allies and halting the growth of communism across the globe. This resulted in a plethora of invasions and covert actions in Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and many others. None of that list of countries are in the Soviet Union and we pre-emptively dealt with 'also the arms race'. Also this is not an argument explaining why the USSR planned economy didn't work. Cpt_Obvious posted:Note that one communist country is curiously absent of cold war united states intervention: China. Lol. You might want to read about the Chinese Civil War. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 21:54
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Alchenar posted:None of that list of countries are in the Soviet Union and we pre-emptively dealt with 'also the arms race'. Also this is not an argument explaining why the USSR planned economy didn't work. Alchenar posted:Lol. You might want to read about the Chinese Civil War.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:13
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It seems like a real stretch to call China a communist country.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:15
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I guess it depends on what you want to call a communist country at this point. Pretty much all of the second world has adopted liberalizing reforms of various degrees at this point, Vietnam is pretty much up there with China.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:22
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Cpt_Obvious posted:
Blaming the US for the history of Sino-USSR relations is not helping you get out of this hole at all. e: and you don't have a containment strategy argument because your claims don't survive the basic historic fact of the USSR being a major supplier of oil and gas to Western Europe, or the US of grain to the USSR. You don't actually have anything, all you are doing is asserting that 'containment' worked, which is ironic because I think most people would assess the containment strategy as an abject failure outside of South America. Your narrative is one that neither side that actually fought the cold war seriously believes. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Aug 22, 2021 |
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Aug 22, 2021 22:24
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I'm arguing that the strategy of containment strangled the USSR by cutting off trade partners and allies. Yes and you have yet to tie this to your assertion that central planning is a viable economic system, or would be if it weren't for the pesky meddling of those drat Westerners.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:24
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Yes and you have yet to tie this to your assertion that central planning is a viable economic system, or would be if it weren't for the pesky meddling of those drat Westerners. “Pesky meddling” is certainly one way to describe the actions of Nazi Germany; to exclude them from the panoply of “capitalist countries that wanted to throttle communism before it could be achieved” would be ahistorical. Because that’s the key point really. The Idea that any nation at all could take that kind of damage and then take on an enemy that was almost completely unscathed is bizarre. The British completely crumbled in the aftermath and they hadn’t taken nearly the level of damage that the USSR did. Market/command economic considerations are really secondary to the material reality of a fight between two forces where one has just been crippled and the other hasn’t. The real question is not “why did the ussr fall” but “how the hell did it survive so long”.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:42
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Alchenar posted:Blaming the US for the history of Sino-USSR relations is not helping you get out of this hole at all. The Great Autismo! posted:*starts masturbating furiously*
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Aug 22, 2021 22:46
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Cpt_Obvious posted:
Yeah... I wouldn't recommend going this route
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Aug 22, 2021 22:57
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Disnesquick posted:“Pesky meddling” is certainly one way to describe the actions of Nazi Germany; to exclude them from the panoply of “capitalist countries that wanted to throttle communism before it could be achieved” would be ahistorical. The argument you seem to be inadvertently advocating for seems to be that central planning can't work if it is operating under any pressure, or takes any significant wounds, and otherwise seems to require a international world order friendly to it? In which case, what's the justification at all for being authoritarian police states if the hard ball politics argued as "necessary" to "defend the revolution" from outside influence doesn't actually work? You're inadvertently conceding that free market/laissez-faire economics is more robust, more versatile, and more adaptable than central planning. Like it seems to me you're just digging a deeper whole argumentatively speaking; because there's no arguing around the fact the USSR collapsed and China reformed and opened up. And all reasons and explanations seem to try to hand wave away uncomfortable and inconvenient truths that central planning outside of fighting total war was non-viable for a prosperous society with a high standard of living. You're describing a system that seems to be unable to compete with capitalism even under fair circumstances, because as seen, China abandoned central planning well before the West decided to turn its eye on them again. China could have easily have kept going as it was in the early 1970's until the late 90's but it didn't, good for them, they made the right decision. The British Empire crumbled, but capitalism did not. If the USSR had collapsed but there remained like 50 different socialist countries afterwards that would allow us to make a distinction between its government and geopolitics and its socioeconomic system but basically every former warsaw pact nation and former soviet republic embraced some form of capitalism. No central planning economic system survived from its inception to present day; there wasn't some Great Filter that came down and destroyed central planning in an act of deus ex machina, it was its own contradictions and short comings. At the end of the day though, the point was again, China is not a centrally planned economy so the meme post of "China existing" is not a refutation of straw libertarians claiming central planning is non-viable; and in fact is probably evidence of their argument being correct.
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Aug 22, 2021 23:21
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Disnesquick posted:The USSR took the full force of the German suicide attack and lost over ten percent of their entire population with the major urban centres in the west utterly devastated. The fact that they were then able to stand up to all the remnants of the European empires, and the rising American empire, put together, is nothing short of miraculous. And Stalin didn't do that, he died shortly after and spent the postwar period watching cowboy movies and forcing high leadership to slam vodka with him. You don't need to remind me of the loving eastern front, the RKKA is the reason I was ever born, my gf and her dad were born in the USSR and she loves the old system enough to have gotten a big rear end sickle and hammer tat on her rib cage. But drat it's intriguing seeing them talk about the USSR and communism vs online westerners.
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Aug 23, 2021 00:04
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Ardennes posted:I guess it depends on what you want to call a communist country at this point. at a baseline i'm gonna say that no credible system of worker's ownership of production, ongoing purges of actually marxist thought from academic and public circles, full state adoption of the sundry capitalist incentives that would make your staunchest corporatist blush, precipitous economic stratification, etc lead to a real interesting conversation about what we should consider the minimum viable thresholds for a country being actually communist and for what reason china gets to be considered within them. i don't fish for attitudes on it often but an embarrassingly large portion of the time the response i get back is hey it's OK because they pinky promise that the wealth-protecting authoritarianism and remarkable quantity of billionaires we all just watching is of course just part of the vanguard plan to True Communism
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Aug 23, 2021 00:05
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Staluigi posted:at a baseline i'm gonna say that no credible system of worker's ownership of production, ongoing purges of actually marxist thought from academic and public circles, full state adoption of the sundry capitalist incentives that would make your staunchest corporatist blush, precipitous economic stratification, etc lead to a real interesting conversation about what we should consider the minimum viable thresholds for a country being actually communist and for what reason china gets to be considered within them. i don't fish for attitudes on it often but an embarrassingly large portion of the time the response i get back is hey it's OK because they pinky promise that the wealth-protecting authoritarianism and remarkable quantity of billionaires we all just watching is of course just part of the vanguard plan to True Communism I am going to have to request you phrase posts into a legible form with some basic punctuation.
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Aug 23, 2021 00:13
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At a baseline, I'm gonna say that: 1. no credible system of worker's ownership of production, 2. ongoing purges of actually Marxist thought from academic and public circles, 3. full state adoption of the sundry capitalist incentives that would make your staunchest corporatist blush, 4. precipitous economic stratification, etc lead to a real interesting conversation about what we should consider the minimum viable thresholds for a country being actually communist—and for what reason China gets to be considered within them. I don't fish for attitudes on it often, but an embarrassingly large portion of the time, the response I get back is: "hey, it's OK, because they pinky promise that the wealth-protecting authoritarianism and remarkable quantity of billionaires we all just watching is, of course, just part of the vanguard plan to True Communism" _ i have shamefully, in my weakness, left "we all" intact and sub-appropriately recolonized to appropriate white english standards but the rest of it should be, as they say, more accessibly legible now
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Aug 23, 2021 00:22
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The best argument I’ve seen that China is “actually communist” in some sense is that Xi seems to be a true believer in Marxism as he understands it. This doesn’t mean being against inequality, or even, in the short term, being against capitalism, really. Xi and people in the party believe (or so the argument goes) that History follows laws, and that the CCP more or less understands those laws. Marxism in this sense is basically a fantasy of being Hari Seldon. I’m not sure how true this line of argument really is; some other posters here doubtless know more than me about both Xi’s biography and CCP ideology. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 03:09
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Raenir Salazar posted:The argument you seem to be inadvertently advocating for seems to be that central planning can't work if it is operating under any pressure, or takes any significant wounds, and otherwise seems to require a international world order friendly to it? In which case, what's the justification at all for being authoritarian police states if the hard ball politics argued as "necessary" to "defend the revolution" from outside influence doesn't actually work? You're inadvertently conceding that free market/laissez-faire economics is more robust, more versatile, and more adaptable than central planning. I'm not making that argument at all. This whole screed is a complete strawman. What was even the point of writing it? Edgar Allen Ho posted:And Stalin didn't do that, he died shortly after and spent the postwar period watching cowboy movies and forcing high leadership to slam vodka with him. I'm not sure what point you're making here? I'm genuinely confused, as I didn't mention Stalin doing anything. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 14:52
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my dude, fingers need exercising (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 23, 2021 14:54
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Disnesquick posted:I'm not making that argument at all. This whole screed is a complete strawman. What was even the point of writing it? I don't know what you mean then, given you charged in to inform me or the thread about the USSR winning the war against the nazis and then recovering. As a response to me making a post directly referring to praise of Stalin's economic acumen. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 15:04
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Apparently US interventionalist foreign policy in the 60's to 80's was wildly successful, a bold claim being made by left wing groups.Silver2195 posted:The best argument I’ve seen that China is “actually communist” in some sense is that Xi seems to be a true believer in Marxism as he understands it. This doesn’t mean being against inequality, or even, in the short term, being against capitalism, really. Xi and people in the party believe (or so the argument goes) that History follows laws, and that the CCP more or less understands those laws. Marxism in this sense is basically a fantasy of being Hari Seldon. So in the grand scheme of things when we talk about 'opening' and 'liberalisation' of markets in China it's worth stepping back and remembering to frame that the public sector (I presume including state-owned enterprises) is roughly 2/3 of the Chinese economy, whereas in the Western world it's 15-20% (typically depending on whether health is counted as public or not). As we've seen and what the thread was discussing before we decided to start talking about the USSR, in practical terms the state can and will intervene in the private economy whenever it chooses if it thinks that decentralisation is taking China away from the CCP's long term strategy. Everyone in China knows they are operating in a system where the state can exercise totalitarian authority if it chooses to do so, it just often does not. I think the ultimate question is therefore probably 'is the long term vision the CCP has for China still a Communist state that they are deliberately building towards utilising 'what works' as intermediate steps, or is it really now just all about stability, one party rule, and a bit of nationalism?' Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 15:31
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Alchenar posted:Apparently US interventionalist foreign policy in the 60's to 80's was wildly successful, a bold claim being made by left wing groups. Contras, Panama, Pinochet, Cuban missle crisis, repositioning China against the Soviet Union. I'm sure someone smarter than me could go on. The US won the cold war and the victory was complete and absolute. Seems sort of weird to downplay the success
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Aug 23, 2021 15:48
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Disnesquick posted:I'm not making that argument at all. This whole screed is a complete strawman. What was even the point of writing it? Can you elaborate on your argument, while I was both responding to you and other arguments by other posters posted in this thread I certainly don't think it's unreasonable to derive from your post that you believe: 1. Capitalist countries tried to throttle communism, and this was a handicap that affected the success of the USSR and other communist countries. I countered that that how is this supposed to suppose that central planning (the thing being discussed, not socialism or communism more broadly, as clearly China's Socialism with Capitalist Characteristics is doing well for itself) was in any way viable if it couldn't handle non-direct military invasions? 2. That the USSR had an additional handicap as a result of the Hitlerite Invasion during the Great Patriotic War which by implication doomed it from the start when it came time to compete with the West. Which again, how is this supposed to mean that central planning is viable if it couldn't recover quickly and robustly from such a handicap, China also lost millions of people and had been oppressed by Imperialist powers for over a century before the Japanese invasion (and had to deal with multiple Japanese invasions) while Russia at least was a Imperialist Great Power in its own right prior to the first world war. Yet, China is today a super power comparable to the US, while the USSR collapsed; China also had a "decentralized" structure as Dengist reforms were mainly about allowing reforms to happen in a bottom-up fashion. Additionally, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, every nation except for the USA all had been economically devastated as a result of WW2; and all of them likewise had to recover considerably before they could effectively form any kind of military deterrent to the USSR through NATO and economically via the EEC in the Treaty of Rome; the USA had to spend a massive amount of resources to economically recover those other powers. 3. The argument that Well Actually Central Planning is Really Good because otherwise how could have the USSR survived for so long thus doesn't make any logical sense when we consider China's economic growth and ask the simple question how could central planning be good for the USSR when the USSR clearly would have been considerably better off embracing capitalism? A more nuanced take is that the Soviet economy did allow it to recover considerably quickly from the Second World War, especially when you factor in Lend Lease and it looting Eastern Europe and Japanese occupied Manchuria for economic material but once it had used up its surplus manpower and reached a certain level of development they hit the wall of development central planning and arbitrary production metrics could provide for sustained economic growth which suggests central planning is great at bursts of considerable economic and capital heavy infrastructure developments but bad at actually sustaining it. These three points are points you absolutely made by any plain reading of your post(s) so if its incorrect I invite you to elaborate on the shortcomings of my analysis of your post; but I am pretty sure I responded to the points you actually made.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:13
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Terminal autist posted:Contras, Panama, Pinochet, Cuban missle crisis, repositioning China against the Soviet Union. I'm sure someone smarter than me could go on. The US won the cold war and the victory was complete and absolute. Seems sort of weird to downplay the success If you look at your list (and I'm discounting China because it's really getting cause and effect wrong - Nixon went to China once the US perceived there had been a diplomatic breach between it and the USSR) you are essentially claiming that a string of successful actions in preventing the spread of communism to South America somehow caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. People like to selectively up-play the effect of US foreign policy because it lets them off the hook for having to engage with the fact that the USSR collapsed under its own contradictions.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:17
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Terminal autist posted:Contras, Panama, Pinochet, Cuban missle crisis, repositioning China against the Soviet Union. I'm sure someone smarter than me could go on. The US won the cold war and the victory was complete and absolute. Seems sort of weird to downplay the success And even when they didn't "win", the US slaughtered 10% of the North Korean population and over 2 million Vietnamese, and completely annihilated both of their infrastructures. So to handwave them away as "failures" ignores the impact many of those interventions had in weakening Soviet allies. Edit: rechecked those numbers. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 16:23
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Yeah lets look at Cpt_Obvious's post from earlier, I didn't have time at the time but lets unpack it on how absurd this argument is.Cpt_Obvious posted:The goal of US foreign policy between 1945-1990 was largely to thwart the influence of the Soviet Union by robbing it of allies and halting the growth of communism across the globe. This resulted in a plethora of invasions and covert actions in Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia, and many others. Vietnam: Was a French colony, developed for the sole benefit of France. Eventual Soviet ally to counteract China. The US largely only intervened as a result of the North communist half with Soviet backing and encouragement, deciding to militarily invade the South. Korea: Was a Japanese colony, developed for the sole benefit of Japan. Eventually Soviet ally in the northern half, US ally in the South. The US largely only intervened as a result of North Korea under Soviet backing and encouragement, deciding to militarily invade the South. Cuba: Independent country but de facto US protectorate under the Monroe Doctrine. Aligned with the USSR after Castro overthrew Baptista. Is the US really supposed to just do nothing and let the USSR extend its influence into its own backyard? Also recall that Castro would've been fine remaining on good terms with the USA if the US didn't take any hostile actions towards the Castro regime. Chile: "Allende's government was disappointed that it received far less economic assistance from the USSR than it hoped for. Trade between the two countries did not significantly increase and the credits were mainly linked to the purchase of Soviet equipment. Moreover, credits from the Soviet Union were much less than those provided to the People's Republic of China and countries of Eastern Europe. When Allende visited the USSR in late 1972 in search of more aid and additional lines of credit, after 3 years, he was turned down" Iran: "The Soviet Union was the first state to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran, in February 1979. During the Iran–Iraq War, however, it supplied Saddam Hussein with large amounts of conventional arms. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini deemed Islam principally incompatible with the communist ideals (such as atheism) of the Soviet Union, leaving the secular Saddam as an ally of Moscow." Guatemala: I don't see much evidence they were ever Soviet aligned under Arevalo, or were economically developed enough to have been an important trading partner for the USSR; the 60 year long civil war almost certainly didn't economically benefit the USA. Venezuela: Hugo Chavez didn't enter power in 1999; and I don't see any Socialist movement that might have aligned them with the USSR during the cold war. Afghanistan: Received significant development aid from the USSR during the cold war, but was otherwise neutral until the Soviet invasion and probably never contributed to the Soviet economy. Nicaragua: Another small country, probably not a significant source of economic activity for the USSR, and almost certainly even if the Contra's never happened the USSR likely would have sent more in aid to them than they recieved in turn from trade. Laos: Like Vietnam, being a french colony any development it had was for the benefit of France and likely would've required significant development before it could be of any benefit to the USSR, and the USSR spent most of the period sending aid to Laos. Cambodia: Chinese ally, not Soviet. Even in Eastern Europe and East Germany, many of whom were developed European economies after recovering from WW2, mainly received more in aid from the USSR than they gave back in economic trade. I think on one hand its a little weird to view the USSR trying to proactively expand its influence as a good thing when that has only ever existed as setting up authoritarian governments; and on the other hand I don't think there's ever been the case that the USSR ever economically could have benefitted regardless of the US. Obviously the US intervening in clear cut cases of peoples exersizing their right to self-determination is also wrong but in those cases which appear to have been mainly in the America's they also weren't going to be of economic benefit to the USSR or prevent the problems that eventually caused the USSR to collapse. And of course some of the examples Cpt_Obvious listed are just wrong and weren't going socialist during the Cold War or were even actively hostile to the USSR.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:55
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Or to put it another way, Soviet allies were virtually all net burdens and recipients of subsidies/aid and it is unclear how having more of them would have been a good thing.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:25
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Alchenar posted:Or to put it another way, Soviet allies were virtually all net burdens and recipients of subsidies/aid and it is unclear how having more of them would have been a good thing. Gee, I wonder how that happened.
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Aug 23, 2021 17:53
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