They were doing good work there.
We should have helped them
and not the Islamists.
The Iranian Revolution should have taught us all we needed
to know about Islamic fundamentalism.
Even then, the Islamists were an added threat in regions of
the world where the Russians were not or were already in check.
Sure, it was nice that they bled each other for us.
But it would have made more sense to let the Russians have
their way in Afghanistan, so long as they didn’t actually put much of a
permanent occupying force there, than to let crackpot Islamism get another
country to control, all by itself.
Why didn’t Reagan and his gang see it that way, though like everyone
else they had just lived through the long agony of the hostage crisis?
My guesses.
First, a grotesque underestimation of the long-term threat
of Islamism – a threat many of Reagan’s people would go on to wildly exaggerate
post 9/11.
And second, as Jimmy Carter once put it, an “inordinate fear
of communism” in Europe where we stood toe-to-toe unnecessarily (Europe could
have handled it) with the Warsaw Pact.
Recall that the primary reason for the American role in the
Cold War and the vacillation of the American ruling class between policies of stupid
containment and stupider rollback was that they felt both mortal terror of and
moral hate for both the planned economy and the utopian delusions of Marxism,
for which Soviet Russia at the time still stood.
Of course, another is that they did not want Europe to emerge as an independent super-power capable of facing off the Soviets all by itself.
We are currently a world with one super-power, and that is the way our ruling class likes things.
Of course, another is that they did not want Europe to emerge as an independent super-power capable of facing off the Soviets all by itself.
We are currently a world with one super-power, and that is the way our ruling class likes things.
Why is China OK today - though maybe not so OK tomorrow?
Not a super-power (yet), not in Europe, and no Far Eastern version
of the Warsaw Pact exists (yet).
But perhaps most important of all, China is not a global advertisement for or champion of an economic full-scale
alternative to capitalism.
And is not really likely to become one, so far as one can foresee that sort of thing.
And is not really likely to become one, so far as one can foresee that sort of thing.
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