Tag Archives: cold war

Gorbachev’s 1992 Speech at Westminster College

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From the New York Times archives, May 7, 1992:

Mr. Gorbachev spoke to an outdoor gathering and offered a range of proposals for strengthening the United Nations. These included the enlargement of the Security Council and the application of stronger sanctions and military force against wayward members…

In particular, he called for creation of a “special body” to use economic and military means to prevent regional conflicts and for a greatly enlarged Security Council, with nations like India, Japan, Poland, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Egypt as members, even if without veto power…

Today, Mr. Gorbachev stood at the same lectern as Churchill to symbolize the Soviet Union’s peaceful demise and to look no less uncertainly into the future, hoping this time that nations “made wise by bitter experience” might cast aside “egoistic considerations in order to arrive at the exalted goal that is man’s destiny on earth.”

A nice vision, and good advice. The world has not taken his advice and has not lived up to his vision.

It’s 1984 in Russia

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I like these explainer type articles in The Week. This one makes two interesting claims about Russia and Putin, the first of which I had kind of arrive at myself and the second of which I don’t recall ever hearing before, although it seems important.

First, Russia is a desperately poor country and Putin is diverting its extremely limited resources to military adventures in an attempt to look strong to the domestic population.

Putin has sought to bolster Russia’s power against the encroachment of the West, picking fights with nearby Georgia and Ukraine and intervening in Syria as a show of strength. His proud nationalism has made him very popular among Russians, although the international sanctions brought on by his seizure of Crimea — combined with a sharp downturn in oil prices — have badly damaged Russia’s fragile economy. Russia’s gross domestic product tumbled from $2.2 trillion in 2013 to $1.3 trillion in 2015 — lower than that of Italy, Brazil, or Canada. Only 27 percent of Russians have any savings at all, and the average Russian now spends half his or her money on food. Few Russians, however, complain.

Second, Putin, who is a KGB agent trained in East Germany, came to power through a KGB-orchestrated false flag operation that killed hundreds of Russian citizens and was used to justify a war.

How did he come to power?
Through the work of the FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB. Putin was an unknown FSB operative when the agency strong-armed an ailing President Boris Yeltsin into picking him as prime minister in August 1999. Putin had spent five years as a spy in East Germany. Just a month after he took office, a series of apartment bombings shattered Moscow, killing about 300 people. The FSB blamed Chechen extremists, although there is strong evidence the spy agency planted the bombs itself; the carnage served as pretext for a second ruthless war to put down the restive Muslim province of Chechnya. Putin became the face of the battle, vowing in his characteristically crude language to eliminate all the terrorists, “wherever they hide, even on the crapper.” By the end of the year, Chechnya had been laid waste, thousands of Chechen civilians were dead, and Yeltsin had named the now popular Putin as his successor as president…

Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB whistleblower who described how the agency staged the Moscow bombings to bring Putin to power, was poisoned with polonium in London; a British inquiry found that Putin likely personally ordered the hit.

election hacking

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Looking for the declassified report on Russian election hacking. Look no further. Here are a couple juicy phrases from the whopping 25 page report:

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence…

Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

I agree with Trump on virtually nothing, but I agree with him on one thing. These are the same people who brought us weapons of mass destruction. Which will always undermine their credibility in my eyes, along with the President, the State Department, Congress and the New York Times. I was a naive, trusting, patriotic young adult when I figured out that I had been lied to by basically all the branches of government and the media I trusted to keep an eye on them. And that was long before I read Legacy of Ashes and realized just how pathetic the CIA is and just how good the KGB is and always has been. And of course, that is who we are dealing with here.

Meddling in another sovereign country’s elections is one the worst things a country could do, right? Certainly the greatest democracy in the world, let alone the greatest democracy in the history of the world, would never do that, right? Well, the CIA isn’t good at spying, which is why the U.S. lost the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. They never really understood the motivations of the Soviet Union because they had no real intelligence on it whatsoever, whereas the KGB infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels all along. But the CIA was always actually pretty good at influencing elections and they have done it often, sometimes with and sometimes without the knowledge of the President and Congress.

Here’s an article about the U.S. and Russia meddling in elections around the world. So I don’t like the fact that the Russians meddled in our election, and I hate the outcome of the election, but there is some element of hypocrisy in our government expressing such moral outrage about it.

Partisan electoral interventions by the great powers: Introducing the PEIG Dataset

Six decades of rigorous scholarship have greatly increased our knowledge about the causes and effects of various military and non-military forms of foreign interventions.

One blind spot in the international relations (IR) literature on interventions has been interventions designed to affect election results in foreign countries; i.e. as most famously occurred in Italy’s 1948 parliamentary election and more recently in the 2009 Afghan presidential elections. Despite a few, very recent exceptions (Corstange and Marinov, 2012; Levin, 2016; Shulman and Bloom, 2012), such interventions have not been studied by quantitative IR scholars who have preferred to focus on more violent or usually more overt types of interventions.2

However by not studying partisan electoral interventions, quantitative IR scholars miss an important, common form of intervention. Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections. Partisan electoral interventions have been found to have had significant effects on election results, frequently determining the identity of the winner (Levin, 2016). Overt interventions of this kind have also been found to have significant effects on the views of the target public toward the intervener (Corstange and Marinov, 2012). Some qualitative scholars who have studied particular cases of electoral interventions at times credit, or blame, them with playing an important role in the subsequent nature of the regime in the target country and influencing the direction of its domestic and foreign policies (Rabe, 2006: chap. 5; Trachtenberg, 1999: 128–132). With the growing realization among IR scholars of the importance of regime type (Huth and Allee, 2002; Park, 2013 Ray, 1995; Reiter and Stam, 1998; Russett, 1993) and, more recently, the nature of the leader in power (Chiozza and Choi, 2003; Colgan, 2013; Horowitz, 2014; Keller and Foster, 2010; Potter, 2007) for their countries’ foreign and domestic policies, electoral interventions are a factor that cannot be ignored.

giants of Cold War era nuclear strategy

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This New York Times Book Review article goes through some of the key architects of Cold War era nuclear strategy.

The theories of Cold War defense intellectuals now seem the stuff of a surreal madness that seized Washington during the last half of the 20th century. The core doctrine of nuclear deterrence was Mutual Assured Destruction, aptly known as MAD. It postulated that the best way to prevent a nuclear war with the Kremlin was to build an enormous atomic arsenal that would annihilate the Soviet Union if it dared attack the United States. Effective, yes, but a White House or Kremlin miscalculation would have left millions dead, nations destroyed and the planet reeling.

Albert Wohlstetter, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, was one of the most formidable of the nuclear policy savants. A combative champion of defense spending, he argued that the balance of terror inherent in MAD was unstable. Instead of assuming the MAD standoff would assure a durable cold peace, he feared a Pearl Harbor-like Soviet attack outside the imagined scenarios of defense planners, and he pressed for a nuclear war-winning policy. His ideas coursed through American defense strategy for decades, swaying presidents, attracting acolytes, infuriating opponents and igniting furious debates that ricochet through official circles to this day…

Robin, president of the University of Haifa in Israel, recalls many of the thinkers and baroque theories of the nuclear age. Some attracted national attention at midcentury, including Henry Kissinger, whose 1957 book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” became an unexpected best seller, and Herman Kahn, whose chilling ruminations on winning and surviving a nuclear conflict made him an oracle of the unthinkable. Bernard Brodie, the intellectual father of nuclear deterrence theory, played a pivotal role in shaping Cold War nuclear policy.

the U.S. and Russia are at war

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It’s kind of donned on me slowly that the U.S. and Russia are at war. We have military forces operating in the same places inside Syria, in support of opposite sides in that war. We have the ability to stop the fighting at any time by negotiating directly with each other. The only thing we are not doing is intentionally targeting each other’s forces directly. The idea that we are both there fighting a shadowy third side that we both oppose defies logic to me. This is getting more and more dangerous. Still, I’m glad it is being discussed in the Security Council which seems like the right venue.

U.S. Central Command admitted Saturday that airstrikes conducted that morning by American-led forces unintentionally hit Syrian government targets instead of members of the Islamic State.

“Coalition forces believed they were striking [an ISIS] fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike,” Centcom said. “The coalition airstrike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military.”

Following the announcement, which threatens the recent U.S.-Russia cease-fire deal, Moscow called an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, criticized Russia for the meeting request, and Moscow in turn bristled at her slam. The mistake has potentially big ramifications because Russia and the United States support opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, though both oppose ISIS.

 

Curtis LeMay

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This article in The Daily Beast has some terrifying quotes from Curtis LeMay, who massacred hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Japanese civilians in World War II and almost started World War III in 1969.

  • “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”
  • “When the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb and yet didn’t have any stockpile—that was when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.”
  • “My solution would be to tell the North Vietnamese that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.”

Syria as a proxy war

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Jeffrey Sachs says the war in Syria has morphed into a proxy war between the U.S., Saudi Arabia and allies on one side, and Iran and Russia (and the Syrian government) on the other side. He also says the U.S. role is much larger than the public has been led to believe, and the media is not doing its job of asking questions.

the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times finally reportedon a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama’s orders, provides organizational support and training…

Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America’s allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported…

The stakes of this war are much higher and much more dangerous than America’s proxy warriors imagine. As the US has prosecuted its war against Assad, Russia has stepped up its military support to his government. In the US mainstream media, Russia’s behavior is an affront: how dare the Kremlin block the US from overthrowing the Syrian government? The result is a widening diplomatic clash with Russia, one that could escalate and lead – perhaps inadvertently – to the point of military conflict.

Obviously, the U.S. and Russia are massive nuclear powers. Iran may have nuclear weapons, and rumor has it Saudi Arabia has a nuclear arsenal ready to go in Pakistan. So in addition to the human tragedy unfolding, the risk of World War 3 appears to be a real one here.

more cold war redux

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Here are some more disturbing rumblings of U.S.-Russia confrontation in western Europe. But I also like the quote below by a German foreign minister.

More than 31,000 troops from 24 nations took part in Nato’s Anaconda-16 exercises in Poland, from 7 to 17 June.

The day after they ended, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned Nato against “sabre-rattling and warmongering”, calling for exercises to be replaced with more dialogue and co-operation with Russia. “Whoever believes that symbolic tank parades in Eastern Europe bring more security, is mistaken,” he told Bild newspaper.

Blowback Economics

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I’m nearing the end of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Towards the end he makes some novel economic arguments that I will have to think about. Basically, he argues that the rhetoric of free trade and globalization that arose after World War II was at first political in nature, acting as an ideological counterweight to communism. It supported a geopolitical strategy which was to get industry off to a fast start in Japan and later Korea, open the U.S. market to their exports and allow their economies to grow quickly, creating strong Cold War allies in Asia. The U.S. itself was highly industrialized, growing fast, and its markets were by far the largest in the world, so at first it could absorb these exports and drive growth abroad just fine. But over time, Japan and Korea grew large relative to the U.S., and other economies like Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong began to copy the model, and later the nations of Southeast Asia and of course China. Johnson argues that the U.S. kept its own markets open without insisting that these countries do the same. The result was the slowing of growth in the U.S., loss of the industrial base, loss of well paying blue collar jobs, and inner-city and small-town poverty. Meanwhile, he argues that because labor costs stayed low in Asia, which by now western multinational corporations were insisting on, the middle class in Asia was not growing fast enough to be able to afford the things they were making. With the U.S. stagnating at the same time, the U.S. couldn’t afford to buy all the things being made either. All this led to manufacturing over-capacity in Asia and under-demand globally, which he sees as leading directly to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. So in his view, the free market, free trade ideology we somewhat take as a given now began as a cynical propaganda campaign, which outlived its usefulness with the end of the Cold War. He blames the financial industry for pushing the system over the edge, but does not see financial speculation or risk taking as a root cause. Publishing in 2000, he suggests that 1997 may end up being seen by history as the high water mark of the American empire, after which it went into decline.

Like I said, I have to think about all this. For one thing, while the U.S. might have directly subsidized the rise of Cold War allies like Japan, Korea and Taiwan to some extent, you certainly can’t make that same case for China, which followed almost exactly the same trajectory a bit later. And the economic theory behind free trade is pretty elegant and appealing. You can’t base a national economy on subsidized, inefficient domestic industries forever and expect to remain competitive. You need to adapt to change rather than resist change. On the other hand, you need strategies to slow the rate of change so you have time to adapt, retrain as many workers as possible, educate the next generation of workers, build public infrastructure that allows the private sector to operate efficiently, and provide a safety net for those who are still left behind. The U.S. clearly failed to do these things, at least in the city centers and small factory towns that used to depend on heavy industry. To some extent I think Chalmers is right that we believed our own Cold War propaganda and let ideology prevent us from taking the measures that would have allowed us to adapt better.