I’m just putting this out there. (It may belong in Great Debates.)
What if both Putin and Trump had determined, together, that the Cold War *was *the good old days, and that their countries’ prosperity (and their personal prestige) would be better off if they could recreate it? It would explain that strange “I like you, let’s build ICBMs” vibe they’ve been giving off.
Whaddaya think?
I can’t see how exposing your population to an increased chance of nuclear war could be considered a good thing, but I used to think that electing a President Trump was also unthinkable.
Not that I think the OP is on to something, but wars (hot or cold) are good for economies, particularly those of the world’s two most prodigious weapons makers. Even more so, when they both tend to conduct their battles as away games in proxy wars.
In this case though, America and Russia would be allies against the Chinese.
The Cold War was not good for the Soviet economy and led to its early collapse. Perhaps Trump is trying to do the same to a much weaker Russia.
Well, yeah, of course losing a war (hot or cold) has negative economic consequences. It’s the waging and the winning of wars that you want to try to stick with.
ETA: Or perhaps it’s the same with Putin trying to do the same with a much more vulnerable US.
This is a myth. Annual inflation in the US economy has not exceeded 3.4% since the end of the Cold War (taken as 1990) even though it exceeded that in many years from the mid-'Sixties onward, on several years reaching double digits, all the while the gross domestic product per capita has steadily grown. The Cold War was, of course, devastating to the Soviet economy that never fully recovered from labor losses during WWII and was hampered by ineffecient central planning, poor resource utilization and quality control, and a tightly regulated domestic market where needed goods and services were constantly in short supply resulting in an active black market that drew money away from the Soviet Union.
The US benefited in the post-WWII environment by having an intact manufacturing infrastructure and a population that increased in available labor (due to women working outside the home) during the war, and continued to benefit from that until the mid-'Sixites. That had little to do with the economic contribution of the military industrial complex and more with being the world’s single unmanaged manufacturing powerhouse. The one thing you can say about the Cold War is that it did spur on technological innovations that would have been difficult to justify on their own fiscal basis but have since become massive industries in their own right (semiconductor manufacture, satellite telecommunications, GPS-enabled GIS and navigation).
The United States and Russia are not allies in any sense of the word. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have enjoyed a concurrence of interests in getting Trump elected to the US Presidency, albeit for different reasons, and once Putin lures US industry into Russian interests and then holds their interests hostage for extortion money, and Trump starts pulling his Art of the Deal nonsense with a plutocrat who isn’t going to be intimidated by threats of being sued or engage in stupid Twitter wars, that alliance of mutual affection, such as it is, will be as bankrupt as the Atlantic City Taj Majal.
The US had the opportunity to make the fledgling democracy in Russia into an ally, and floundered it through two successive presidential administrations which were too reluctant or incompetent to reach out and offer concrete diplomatic and economic support. Now Russia is a nation once more ruled by self-styled tsars with little legitimacy and almost no concern for the well-being of the Russian people, and we’re talking about a “Cold War” with a nation which is already probing our computing infrastructure for vulnerabilities.
Which is a dangerous game to be playing with a nation armed with a still-capable nuclear arsenal and a leader with a frankly kind of a “Fuck you, pay me!” attitude toward conflict. Putin could give fuck all if the Russian people are starving and freezing as long as he can convince them that it is someone else’s fault, and Trump is a less mettled pretender to that game who believes he can initimidate people by threatening to sue them or refusing to pay them. That kind of penny-ante domestic business horseshit isn’t going to carry water with the former head of the KGB who literally has people who disagree with him assassinated in such a way that the entire world knows even if he can deny an evidential connection. An international conflict is not a hostile takeover or the kind of scamming shakedown Trump is conversant with, and the best case scenario in that kind of conflict is that the US backs down from an unwinnable conflict.
Stranger
Apples, oranges and kumquats, here. The US contracts out, and pays lavishly, to have its war toys built. AFAIK, the Russian defense industry is still largely state-owned. I’m sure some micro-class of citizenski would profit personally, but not at the sweeping scale of economic boost that increased defense production would give the US.
Arms building is very good for the actual builders in the US - immense, almost wholly unregulated profit via secret cost-plus contracts. At, of course, the expense of the US taxpayer. The Russians would be a little more “one pocket to another” in their efforts.
Except for “black” projects, there are no “secret cost-plus contracts”, and goverment contracting has largely moved to firm fixed price or cost plus incentive fees which, at least in theory, penalize contractor profits by going over budget. (How effective the FAR regulations are depends on how vigorous and knowledgeable contracting officers are and how much pressure they receive politically to excuse overruns, but that’s going to be true regardless of how acquisition regulations are written.)
Arms building is generally quite profitable for companies in the so-called “military-industrial complex”, and are beneficial for many criticial Congressional districts where those systems or components for them are manufactured, but as a measure of economic importance overall it isn’t nearly as significant as agriculture, medicine, construction, or finance. The idea that posturing for war spurs on the economy in anything but a very transient fashion is simply not borne out by the evidence. Real economic growth comes from producing goods and services which feed value progressively into the economy, e.g. construction of new buildings and facilities, ensuring public well-being and reducing economic losses through labor downtime, increasing available monies available for investment, et cetera. Building warfighing machines to sit in a warehouse until some politician decides to engage in a conflict in the ass-end of nowhere doesn’t really create any progressive value, except for the people who want to sweep end to the post-battlefield environment and enrich themselves on government rebuilding contracts or taking natural resources at a fraction of open market value.
Stranger
No, actually war is very rarely good for the economy. The USA experienced a rare case, one in which WW2 help drag us out of the Great Depression, which led to the widespread but erroneous belief that military spending is inherently healthy.
But war leads to economic disaster more than to prosperity.
I’ll put it simply:
if either or both Trump and Putin think that reviving the Cold War will revive the “good times,” then they are incredibly ignorant about the facts of the Cold War period.
The relative prosperity of the US especially, was only partially and peripherally due to animosities between the most powerful nations of that time.
I think there’s a simpler model: Trump 100% believes in the 1955 model of both US prosperity and world dominance. If you pass the promises (and most efforts) of most politicians through the 1955 filter, you’ll realize that a vast number of them, on both sides of almost every divide, are promising to “return” the US to the wholly anomalous situation of 1948-1970 or so.
Which, simply, can’t be done. But we’ve been sold on the idea that that era was “normality” and anything less is because we’ve fucked up.
This new and terrifying idea of returning to the height of the Cold War is a variant for a later generation whose fortunes were made in arms/defense contracting of the 1960s-70s.
They’re like those people who watched Mad Men and thought, “Look how cool the clothes and cars and style is! I sure wish I lived then!” rather than, “Look how cool the clothes and cars and style is, and yet all these people are miserable and self-destructive assholes who are going to die of emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver by 1980.” (Except Joan; she’s going to run the most successful independent production agency in New York, and maybe the country, and live to triple digits while bedding men half her age like a Manhattan Mae West.)
Stranger
And have never read MAD Magazine’s decades of acid analysis of the industry and its players. Let’s see if I can find the iconic panel…
…nope. I think MAD is diligent about copyright violations on the web. Anyway, it’s one of their “primers” of an industry, with the ad man running for the train so he can get to work on his ulcers in the city… after a breakfast of scotch in the club car.
The Soviets didn’t want the cold war. The Americans imposed it for two perfectly logical and self-serving reasons. First, to support the military-industrial complex, to support the prevailing inequality of wealth in the homeland economy. And second, to force the less developed Soviets to waste their resources on defense, rather like a chess player with a one-piece advantage forcing exchanges to magnify the ratio of power.
That is a very skewed view of the causes of the Cold War which handily ignores the fact that Stalin made an agreement with Hitler’s Third Reich government to divvy up Eastern Europe and subsequently occupied the nations they had invaded during WWII under the pretext of suppressing pro-Axis movements; in reality, the Soviets needed the more capable economies of nations like Poland and what became East Germany, and also wanted to maintain a buffer zone against invasion. The Soviets installed and supported puppet governments in the Warsaw Pact states, suppressing dissent through control of internal politics and on occasion military intervention (most notably Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), which certainly fed Western paranoia that the Soviets actually believed their rhetoric about worldwide Communist revolution.
While the development oc the “military industrial complex” that Eisenhower famously warned of was indeed politically self-serving for politicians in districts where military contractors were powerful, the Soviets certainly offered copious justification for concern and development of a large defense establishment.
Stranger
Plus, the “Cold War” was not so much about the US-USSR arms race as it was about the myriad proxy wars waged around the globe, as both the US and the USSR attempted to spread their spheres of influence at the expense of the other.
Before I comment on the thread, let me point out that one aspect of the US in 1955 was the 91% marginal tax rate on the highest incomes. I happen to think that that is closely related to the rapid growth of that era.
I shudder to think of how the US could lose out in a game that pits a guy who has spent his while life scheming to get ahead–and with marked success–against an idiot who thinks himself a great deal maker, but is really just a great intimidator, and who doesn’t have a long enough attention span to run a picnic.
Regardless of their different origins they are both powerful people w/ greater means at their disposal than most of the population of their given countries; they want still more power and more means and do not care how the poor and less-powerful people are used in the process, so long as there is no rebellion w/ a chance of success.