Cold war: Who is to blame

[litost]

I am not exactly disputing the facts. I find the “this was done to protect the world from an evil power” slant disingenuous. This was a war between two powers aiming to go one up on the other. One power was oppressive… there is no moral equivalence.

FTR, your list omits US interventions in overthrowing democratic or popular regimes in Latin America and Asia. Your list also speaks of “communists taking over and invading”. These communists were not Soviets… they were post-colonial, post WW-II local forces supported by the Soviets aiming to expand their influence in much the same way as US supported the rebels who were also trying to “take over”.

The good versus evil was more happenstance than the causus bellum for the Cold war.

[Beagle]

I don’t want to hear old-school interpretations of Soviet planning from without, I want to hear from the horse’s (bears?) mouth whether the USSR had any realistic plans to invade the U.S. Maybe their plans changed over time from the 50’s to the 80’s?

I present a completely unbiased assessment paid for by you and brought to you by the CIA. It discusses some of the close calls during the later Cold War. They view the Soviets as somewhat paranoid and dangerous, but do not think they wanted to “invade” the U.S. Of course, we were somewhat paranoid and dangerous also.

John Walker turned over the kind of material that made some Soviet leaders consider a first strike.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Walker was celebrated as the KGB’s most successful Cold War spy. From 1967 until 1985, he had provided the KGB with vital U.S. cryptographic secrets that had enabled Russian agents to decipher coded military messages. Soviet KGB General Boris Aleksandrovich Solomatin, who oversaw Walker, later called him the “most important” spy ever recruited by Russia. John Walker gave away the “keys to your most secret code machines,” Solomatin bragged, “giving us the equivalent of a seat inside your Pentagon where we could read your most vital secrets.” KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko was more blunt: “Walker was the greatest case in KGB history. We deciphered millions of your messages. If there had been a war, we would have won it.”

If the nuclear subs can be taken out, then the deterrence of the US is fairly vulnerable.

The Cold War played out differently in particular places. Sure, in Africa, the lines were blurry. In Berlin or Poland, the lines were clear.

[The_Ryan]

*Originally posted by minega *
**Smiling bandit…
Saying you had no other choice but to support brutal dictators is not a fact…thats the problem i have with your post. **

But he didn’t say that. He said that we felt that we had no other choice.

litost:

but please, to think that the US was on a good guy mission to save the world is disingenuous

How is it disingenuous? Yes, self-preservation was a major policy concern, but that doesn’t mean that the US wasn’t genuinely concerned with the well-being of other countries.

[Guinastasia]

Many of the reasons why the US supported third world dictators had less to do with preventing the communists from causing more bloodshed and more to do with big business and controlling the economic situation.

Guatemala and the United Fruit Company comes to mind.

[mrblue92]

The Cold War was caused by those damnable glaciers. Thankfully, global warming is clear evidence of our victory!

Seriously…

“Or maybe both sides were to blame fo their excessive paranoia.”

This is closer to the truth that what the majority of the posts here seem to indicate. To paint the Cold War (or almost any conflict, for that matter) as simply good vs. evil is the intellectual equivalent of Dick and Jane.

“See Americans good. See Soviets bad. Bad, Soviets, bad! See Soviets fall. Dance, Americans, dance! Good Americans.”

The Cold War is better viewed as a contest between two competing ideologies, neither side with a monopoly on virtue. Were actors on the Soviet side more brutal in practice? Certainly. Men like Stalin and Beria were not cute little puppies by any stretch of the imagination–they were murderous bastards who, in their own twisted and self-deceiving way, had convinced themselves that the good of the state (and their own personal skin) was more important than any individual. Or any million of individuals.

It is unlikely any of us will approve of heavy-handed Soviet methods. But this is not the entire issue at hand. We can not necessarily say that the Soviet Union was expansionist because of the nature of its system. Curtis LeMay (the infamous head of the US Strategic Air Command) was not alone in his desire to crush the communists with nuclear weapons while we held the ability to do so without risking a response in kind. Would we argue these decidedly expansionist notions were inherent to the American way of life? I think not. We had no need to resort to such drastic measures, and thankfully cooler heads prevailed.

Ironically, the main difference between the Soviet and American systems may have been a 140 year head-start. American subjugation of its native population in the years following democracy’s inception is eeriely similar to Soviet subjugation of its population, though of course the latter took on a different style–it was mechanized, organized inhumanity. Our brand of ideology had already completed its expansionist phase while that sort of “sword and civilization” philosophy wasn’t particularly frowned upon. By the time the Soviets got around to it, the barbarity of it was all too apparent to Western eyes. In the Communist mind, putting down the occasional democratic revolt in Prague in the 20th century was all for the greater good, not for evil–just as Americans of the 19th century would have viewed the destruction of the Apache… or just as the WW2 Allies would have viewed strategic bombing that had little regard for civilians.

If we argue that the Soviets of say, the 1950s, acted as agents of evil in Eastern Europe, it would be difficult to argue that America did not too do its share of evil, even if in the name of good, whether it be in Iran, Korea, Vietnam, or any number of lesser known interventions. As an American, it is all too easy to blame the Cold War on the obvious Soviet aggression because we want to be the good guys. To at least some degree we were good guys and the Soviets were brutal. But let’s not oversimplify, either.