Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. According to the CIA (and you’d think they’d know), North Korea’s military spending was 33.9% of GDP for FY2002.
The Nazis get more attention because:
A) They made better enemies (Nazis are way eviler than Soviets; I mean come on, the rallies, the uniforms, Hitler, they were the perfect modern-day villain. The Nazis were the Joker, the Soviets were, I dunno, Dr. Octopus or something)
B) We actually fought them in a war where approximately 965 billion people died
C) TEH JEWS CONTROAL THE MEDIA~!!!@!
Or what CyberPundit said. :smack:
Absolutely. Man, they are the perfect villains and Hollywood knew that Nazis beat anything their writers could invent. The Soviets were drab. Boring. Way too hung up on wheat and tractor production. My folks subscribed to Soviet Life in the '60s and there was never a duller magazine. And their uniforms were ill-fitting and obviously designed to be cheap and warm. Feh. Bodycount isn’t everything. Gimme the Nazis any day.
I’m not sure that showing North Korean (I almost spelled it “North Koran”, heh) spending is at 30% helps the argument that the Sov Union could do that and succeed.
North Korea, lest we forget has been in the midst of decade-long famine, with reports of widespread cannibalism in some areas, and has basically destroyed any potential for growth or human advancement.
So, I’m just saying that NK isn’t really a good choice to argue on…
I agree, North Korea is a poor comparison.
But you still can’t simply say that 17% defense spending is inherently ruinous. We have spent this much during the last several years, and our economy is…oh, well.
But seriously, current defense spending as a percentage of total outlays has held pretty steady since Clinton’s day.
Well, the problem seems to have been not so much the relative amount, but that they could no longer afford to spend anything at all. They couldn’t spend money they didn’t have (since they aready owned the banks). And when they tried their finances collapsed.
Those numbers are also totally wrong. As a percentage of total government outlays, the military gets something like 5-7%. I've seen many people try to argue the higher number, but the fact is that the so-called non-discretionary spending is very discretionary, and only occurs because Congress doesn't want to bother tinkering with it every year.Boo Boo Foo sums it up, perhaps unintentionally, rather nicely. Carter was weak, and was percieved as being even weaker. Reagan was strong, and was percieved as being even stronger.
Sure, Carter increased defense spending in '79. Of course, that was after Nicaragua and Afghanistan fell to communists. His weak manner invited communist aggression, and when he finally decided to react, it was far too little, far too late. The American electorate took care of him. The ressurection of the Mightey Mo is one aspect of Reagan’s display of strength.
The Soviets could not deploy their 3rd generation of military equipement without destroying what was left of their economy. Mig-29s, Su-27s, Udaloy and Sovremenny class destroyers, Akula and other new classes of submarines, and all the other high(er) tech equiment needed to give some semblance of a chance against the new American gear (M1’s, 688s, F-15s and F-16s, not to mention stealth). The Soviets tried, and failed, to deploy the needed equipment on the needed scale. The end result was the collapse of their system. Heck, a decade later, and the Russians still haven’t fully upgraded to 3rd generation equipment. And it was Reagan who made sure that American forces were upgraded on a massive scale, forcing the Soviet attempt to keep up.
Reagan heralded a return to the ‘oppose communism, wherever and whenever’ approach, and he insured that the American armed forces would be ready to carry out that task. He backed that up with plenty of political backbone, something Carter sorely lacked.
If it were not for Ronald Reagan, if we had another weak Carter in the White House, surely the Soviet Union would have lasted longer. Gorby tried to institute reforms to keep the Soviet Union afloat; He certainly didn’t institute them out of some noble sense liberal reform, as revisionists would have one believe. If a weaker and less confrontational man were POTUS as the time, Gorby may have had the breathing room needed to do what was needed.
Was Reagan perfect? No. Was he one of the greatest leaders in our nations history? Of course. Attempts at rewriting history by the Left certainly doesn’t change that.
Nicaragua would never have fallen to the Sandinistas had the US not propped up the Somoza dynasty for so many years.
Brutus,
You are not providing any evidence but just repeating your basic assertions.
“The Soviets tried, and failed, to deploy the needed equipment on the needed scale. The end result was the collapse of their system”
Why was this the end result? As noted above the Soviets didn’t increase their military spending during the 80’s and there are other countries which has survived with comparable levels of spending. Even with conventional superiority the US didn’t have the ghost of a chance of successfully attacking the USSR. The US has a far greater degree of conventional superiority over Cuba and North Korea than it did against the USSR and they are still Communist.
“He backed that up with plenty of political backbone, something Carter sorely lacked.”
How much backbone did Reagan show after the Marines bombing in Lebanon? As for Carter here is his NSA on his policy:
"I think, on balance, it was much tougher than most people realize. Not only did he take some historic decisions which no other president had before - such as the decision to aid directly the Mujaheddin against the Soviet army - but he took a very tough position in December 1980, when the Soviet Union was poised to invade Poland. He took that decision, and it was a very tough decision, and we did all sorts of things to convince the Soviets that we wouldn’t be passive. In addition to it, he took the decision to engage in a strategic relationship with the Chinese, and it was again directed at Soviet expansionism. But what is even less known is that even in the early years, when he was generally perceived as being soft and overly accommodationist, he took some very tough-minded decisions which were simply not known publicly. Robert Gates, the subsequently director of the CIA, and at that time a member of my staff, reveals in his book that as early as 1978, President Carter approved proposals prepared by my staff to undertake, for example, a comprehensive, covert action program designed to help the non-Russian nations in the Soviet Union pursue more actively their desire for independence - a program in effect to destabilize the Soviet Union. "
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-17/brzezinski2.html
“I’m not sure that showing North Korean (I almost spelled it “North Koran”, heh) spending is at 30% helps the argument that the Sov Union could do that and succeed.”
The Soviet Union needed only to continue spending at 15-17%. No one has provided a shred of evidence that this was “unsustainable”. I think the example of North Korea spending at 33% and the regime still surviving is an extreme example of what a dictatorship can do if it wants to. Note that the USSR was a lot richer than N Korea so it could afford to spend a large percentage of GDP on the military without causing mass starvation.
I might as well say what none of us want to admit: Stalin played the most important important part in ending the cold war.
If he hadn’t killed those 20 million+ Russians and knocked the Russian economy into the toilet, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
I used to be proud that I could say that with a straight face, but looking at Brutus, I can see that some people take the exact same line of reasoning in perfect seriousness. At least Russia was LESS doomed when Stalin took the helm than it was with Reagan. It might have stood a chance with Trotsky or Bukharin, but then again, B might not have gotten into it in the first place.
Don’t think anyone else really stood a chance of taking over after Lenin.
-all coming from someone who’s mother keeps a room full of Socialist campaign posters and has an autograph of Norman Thomas AND Eugene Debbs. So I might be dismissable as a psychopath, by some standards.
!st; There’s been a lot of talk about whether 15 or 17 or 31% of GNP would’ve been sustainable, but the fact is - even 31% of not much is still hardly anything. My impression has been that Gorbachev tried to modernize the Soviet economy (through glasnost and perestroika) because he recognized that in the long run (assuming we didn’t want to blow up the planet) the cold war would be won by whoever could throw the most money at it. The Soviets were losing that war.
2nd; Maybe this is just wishful thinking here, but I wonder whether he actually realized that the Soviet system would never be able to compete. Maybe he had intended to let the Soviet Union step down gracefully. Maybe under his guidance the Russian people wouldn’t have suffered the horrible economic melt-down they’ve lived through.
Maybe, if given enough rope, he could have been a hero instead of a goat.
Why does every argument suggesting some kind of a bias end with “conspiracy”?
My guess would be, Hollywood being what it is, they don’t see any market for depressing historical dramas that paint their Communist heros as anything but champions of the people. Who would pay to see that?
Nazis, everyone hates them.