US Politics: He's Trump, he's Trump, he's Trump, he's in my head

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

6 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

They didn't have to be an ally or an enemy.

Granted two imperial mindsets will probably eventually run out of neutral space if given enough time, but those mindsets don't have to be givens and there are still better paths to the one chosen. In fact that arguable architect of the whole containment policy himself, and the first real Soviet alarmist in the USG (Kennan) himself said that power players took his advice and hyper-escalated it, and that without that a much less hostile state of disagreement was readily within reach. He personally thought that the US had neither the need nor the licence to set about 'containing' communism in the global sense, and that it did so more out of a desire for power/acquisition than because of any inevitable idealogical rift*. It's sort of hard to wrap your brain around the idea that it's not really the US's planet to control/police as that assumption has basically been the bedrock of USFP since the Long Telegram.

*which is not to say he didn't see a rift...he was in fact one of the men who really believed there was and spent a lot of time convincing people of same. But streaming that towards a war mentality was not at all necessary, and it's been in the rear view mirror for so long that people now kind of assume it had to be this way. But it was, very clearly, a deliberately chosen path.

Eh, without Nazi Germany as a buffer, they were almost certainly going to end up as an enemy. Right off the bat you had East Germans sneaking over into West Germany. You had a Soviet occupation that was much harsher than its' Western counterpart (and for really understandable reasons, if you study the Eastern Front) You had two ideologies that couldn't be further apart politically, and the Soviets controlled a huge chunk of Europe. I can't really envision the circumstance where they don't become our ideological enemy.

[DMC]

I don't really see how the US-Soviet relations that led to the Cold War have much to do with the topic we were discussing, beyond Kennan's role in both I guess.  We offered Marshall Plan aid to the Soviets and their satellites, they refused.  Point is, the post-WWII reconstruction in areas in which we had influence worked out very successfully.  Achieving successful post-conflict outcomes in such a way was the topic at hand.  As for the policy of containment, arms races, proxy wars, and most everything else about the Cold War, sure - there's lots to criticize.

[James Arryn]

2 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Eh, without Nazi Germany as a buffer, they were almost certainly going to end up as an enemy. Right off the bat you had East Germans sneaking over into West Germany. You had a Soviet occupation that was much harsher than its' Western counterpart (and for really understandable reasons, if you study the Eastern Front) You had two ideologies that couldn't be further apart politically, and the Soviets controlled a huge chunk of Europe. I can't really envision the circumstance where they don't become our ideological enemy.

Well, I don't think it's quite that linear. Potsdam was in place and the Soviets were abiding fine when Dulles, Churchill (Iron Curtain/Sinews of Peace speeches) et al were actively and publicly agitating for a hostile stance, then the the LT, the abandonment of the Morgenthau Plan for the Marshal Plan in what (SecState) Bynes himself admitted was a decision to go to 'idealogical war' with the soviets over German minds because of the belief that communism was 'infectious'...then the Truman Doctrine et al. I don't see how we can look at so many over conscious choices and then later undermine their significance by saying it was all in inevitable. I can see why it would be preferable to see it that way, but there were a lot more options on the table than 50 years of pseudo-war. A couple worse than how things turned out, but many much better from the POV of the Cold War battlefield nations across the planet.

[Sivin]

New thread.