Let’s say that Brezhnev didn’t interfere with the Prague Spring, Dubceks reforms to implement ‘Socialism with a Human face’ in Czechoslovakia are successful which initiates a wave of reform across the Eastern Bloc, culminating in the collapse of the Warsaw pact in the 1970’s rather the early 90’s, how different would the world be today if this did indeed pan out?
Actually, the Soviet Union was experiencing economic difficulties in the early 1960s-it was rescued by two things: the sale of gold bullion, and the rise in oil prices. While NS Kruschev was celebrating the USSR’s triumphs in space, food riots were breaking out in Ukraine and Belorussia. Kruschev acknowledges this in his memoires-the Russian were buying food from Europe at the time. The 1970s brought skyrocketing oil prices, which allowed the regime a second life. The final collapse came about because the regime was bankrupt.
Another area that bears examining would be the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Would the absence of a steady supply of AA missiles have changed the course of the war any? Without those missiles, US aircraft could roam and bomb with fair impunity over the skies of North Vietnam.
Let’s suppose that after Carter pulled out of the Olympics and the Soviet economy collapsed Reagan didn’t step in to give them wheat and open up trade to prop them up for another 9 years.
As well as billions of dollars in funds, supplies, weapons plus advisers. Might have made some difference.
[QUOTE=Ryan_Liam]
What if the Soviet Union Collapsed 20 years Earlier?
Let’s say that Brezhnev didn’t interfere with the Prague Spring, Dubceks reforms to implement ‘Socialism with a Human face’ in Czechoslovakia are successful which initiates a wave of reform across the Eastern Bloc, culminating in the collapse of the Warsaw pact in the 1970’s rather the early 90’s, how different would the world be today if this did indeed pan out?
[/QUOTE]
I think you’d have had Tiananmen Square, i.e. the Soviets at that time (the Soviet Communist Party, the military, etc) wouldn’t have had any issue sending in tanks to literally crush protest. The Chinese in 1989 sent in tanks and killed thousands of protesters…the CCP ordered it and the military carried it out. When push came to shove in the real time line the Soviet Communist Party DID order troops and tanks in to halt protest when things started to fall apart, but the military wasn’t up for it by then and it all fell apart. 20 years earlier though? Before Afghanistan? Before the apathy really set in on the whole Soviet system? I think that the party would have ordered in the tanks and they would have gone, and any protest either in the Soviet Union or in the Eastern Bloc would have been crushed as brutally as anything the Chinese did in 1989 or since.
One factor is there wouldn’t have been a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. That wasn’t the sole reason for modern Islamic radicalism but it was a major factor.
There probably would be a much more hardline communist regime in China. When Mao died in 1976, there was a political struggle between the radicals (led by Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and the “Gang of Four”) and the pragmatics (led by Deng Xaioping and the “Eight Elders”). The pragmatics won and modernized the Chinese economy.
If China had seen the Soviet regime collapse in the early seventies, there would have been a fear that any attempts at reform in China might cause a similar collapse. The radicals would have argued that China needed to stick to Marxist doctrine and suppress any dissent and they probably would have beaten the pragmatic faction. China would have a Stalinist totalitarian regime like North Korea’s.
Assuming Watergate still happened, Ford would have been re-elected, since he would not have made his blunder in the debate about Poland. The same shit would happen in Iran, and it is hard to see how Ford would handle it differently. Assuming he didn’t, then Carter is elected in 1980, he pisses and muddles his way thru the recession, runs against Reagan in 1984 and loses, and we recover anyway. Probably more strongly - the peace dividend would coincide with the recovery.
Regards,
Shodan
I also wonder of the implications of how we would perceive the ending of the Cold War earlier, whether we’d have a similar personality to Francis Fukuyama who declared the ‘End of History’ and the triumph of neo-liberalism.
That’s an interesting thought.
The Cold War would not have ended for the same reasons in 1971 as it actually did in 1991 (if you pick the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as the end of the Cold War). So to a certain extent, we would have to perceive it differently if it ended in 1971 as we do in 1991, because the reasons would be different. In 1971 Nixon was President, and he went to China - perhaps that would have been seen as part of the reason.
The Cold War ended for a number of reasons -
[ul]
[li]The economic expansion of the West showed that the USSR could not produce ‘guns and butter’ at a level competitive with the Western democracies.[/li][li]Solidarity was a groundswell of the satellite nations under the USSR, that could well eventually have required Soviet intervention similar to the crushing of the Prague Spring et al.[/li][li]Star Wars in the US scared Gorbachev into thinking that the huge edge the USSR had in conventional weaponry was about to be superceded by technological advances that the USSR couldn’t match.[/li][li]The IT boom in the West signalled that there were other advances forthcoming that would equally have offset the Soviet advantages. The first Gulf War, which pitted a Korean War-era army against a 21st century army, was an example of what they feared.[/li][li]Gorbachev was a young leader, by Soviet standards, and recognized that the sclerotic policies of the Brezhnevs and Andropovs had mired the USSR in stagnation.[/ul]So Gorbie tried to open up the economy, and it got out from under him. He tried to ride the tiger, and it ate him. [/li]
None of those things were clear in 1971, nor were there leaders in place to take advantage of them. If the Cold War had ended in 1971, then it would have been for whatever reasons were present back then. Not to resist the hypothetical, but they weren’t, so it didn’t.
“Predictions are hard, especially of the future”, but so is predicting the past, so to speak.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree an early ending of the Cold War would have had an interesting effect on American politics but I’m not sure I agree with all of Shodan’s conclusions.
I think it’s safe to say Watergate would have played out the same way - there was no real Cold War aspect to it. So Nixon would have resigned and I think Ford had no chance of re-election. The Poland gaffe hurt him but there were other much bigger factors at play: the shadow of Watergate, the fall of South Vietnam, OPEC and the rise of oil prices, the Church hearings, the Mayaguez fiasco. The voters looked at all this and said “We want a change of leadership.” So I think 1976 was Carter’s year.
But 1980 would have been an open issue. It’s possible that there could have been a “peace dividend” and an economic revival and Carter could have benefited from that. But I don’t think it’s certain. Which would have left an opening for Reagan.
I think Reagan could have been a strong contender in a post-Cold War 1980. The end of the Cold War would have removed one of the main planks of his platform - his strong opposition to the Soviet Union. But Reagan was a fundamentally optimistic man and he could have played the end of the Cold War as a vindication of his views. In a sense instead of saying “Vote for me because I’ll defeat communism” he would have said “Vote for me because I was right about communism being defeatable.” Reagan’s optimism would have matched well the optimism the people would have been feeling after the end of the Cold War.
And this would have played into the other strong plank of Reagan’s platform - his economic plan. His supposed plan was to combine tax cuts with a reduction in government spending. In reality, he failed to do this. He enacted tax cuts but he also increased government spending to fund the military and the result was a huge deficit. But with the Cold War won, Reagan could have followed through and cut the budget. Reagonomics might have actually worked.
One bad possibility might have been an earlier round of American adventurism. Let’s assume that OPEC would have been founded and would have raised oil prices as it historically did in the mid-seventies.
There were people at the time who were saying “Fuck those people. We should just invade and then we’ll have all the oil we need.”
In reality, the likelihood of a Soviet response restrained us and we didn’t seek a military solution to the OPEC problem. But if the Soviet Union had collapsed, I think there would have been a much stronger sense that we could do what we wanted in the world. So we might have seen American troops invading Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, or the Gulf States in the seventies.
The counterbalance to this was that we were just getting out of Vietnam at the time. There would have been strong opposition to us getting started in a new and much wider war.
No “Red Dawn”
No Ivan Drago in “Rocky IV”
No “Rambo III”
It would have been a nightmare.
Probably no Watchmen.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
One bad possibility might have been an earlier round of American adventurism. Let’s assume that OPEC would have been founded and would have raised oil prices as it historically did in the mid-seventies.
There were people at the time who were saying “Fuck those people. We should just invade and then we’ll have all the oil we need.”
[/QUOTE]
I suppose it depends on how you mean this. If you mean the US would have invaded the ME in a war of conquest for oil then no…that’s complete bullshit. If you mean the US would have engaged in a series of CIA covertly funded attempts to shift the various governments in the region to be more friendly towards us and our interests then I could see that, though I’m unsure what exactly we could have really done about it.
The thing is, the US doesn’t really have a government structure that allows us to easily exert direct military power via invasion. To do that you really need to have both parties and the people on board. Vietnam wasn’t an invasion, recall. Iraq II and Afghanistan of course were, but there were special circumstances that allowed us to do what we did…circumstances that Bush took advantage of to our collective detriment in the case of Iraq (and Afghanistan hasn’t been a very happy memory for us either).
I don’t see any convergence of politics and the will of the people that would have enabled any feasible administration and Congress that would enable the US to simply invade a bunch of countries, or even a single country to pillage it’s resources. Consider Iraq…we invaded it, and arguably under one of the worst of the Republicans ever to be President. Yet we get no breaks on the price of oil, and in fact, we don’t actually buy a lot of oil from Iraq in any case. The Iraqi’s don’t pay any sort of tribute to the US, and most of the contracts that folks question from American companies in Iraq actually were paid for by US tax payers. We also haven’t monopolized, say, the oil contracts for our own US flagged companies in Iraq…Iraqi companies as well as other foreign flagged companies have contracts in Iraq as well.
We are probably the worst, most idiotic invaders wrt looting and pillaging of our conquests of any country in the history of this planet. Many of our former enemies were rebuilt using our own funding and several of them have become economic competitors (as well as strong allies of course, which was the actual point)…and nearly all of them we’ve TRIED to help once the dust settled, even though we are generally pretty clumsy and fumble fingered in any sort of foreign adventure.
I think in the US there is ALWAYS a strong opposition to a foreign adventure. The caveat to this is if you get both political parties riled AND the people are riled then you have to watch out. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately wrt Obama’s popularity numbers concerning how he’s dealing with ISIS. I’ve noticed they are dropping, even on the Democrat side, and I’ve noticed that the numbers for us to Do Something™ have been nudging up. I think it won’t be a problem unless ISIS does something incredibly stupid and really riles up both parties and the average Joe Citizen and basically paints Obama into a corner…or, worst, if it happens on the next guys/gals watch in that environment. I really, REALLY don’t want us involved in another large scale ground war in the ME, but I can see how we could be given the right circumstances and how things are right now.
However, I think that, short of something like 9/11 happening as well as the other things that have transpired in the region (Iran/Iraq war, Iranian revolution and capture of US prisoners, various ME terrorism, Iraq invasion of Kuwait, etc etc) we wouldn’t have just invaded for oil. The other thing is, if the Soviet Union collapsed 20 years ago, the world would have been even more unipolar than it is today…and the flip side to the US being so difficult to wield direct military power is that we have abused the use of indirect military power a hell of a lot. So, we might have been screwing around even more in the ME as a sort of CIA jobs program if the Soviets went tits up. 
Obviously I disagree.
That said, I do agree it wouldn’t have been presented to the public as a war to grab resources. Our argument would have been that by imposing an oil embargo against the United States, OPEC had declared economic war on us and we were just responding to their attack.
And we wouldn’t have said that we had any intent for long term conquest. Our stated goal would have been that are intervention was directed against the hostile regimes that had attacked us and we would publicly state our intent to leave as soon as responsible regimes were in place. There would be some precedent for the United States doing this. Look at Latin America. There have been numerous occasions where we’ve sent troops in order to topple a regime we didn’t like and replace it with a pro-American regime.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
And we wouldn’t have said that we had any intent for long term conquest. Our stated goal would have been that are intervention was directed against the hostile regimes that had attacked us and we would publicly state our intent to leave as soon as responsible regimes were in place. There would be some precedent for the United States doing this. Look at Latin America. There have been numerous occasions where we’ve sent troops in order to topple a regime we didn’t like and replace it with a pro-American regime.
[/QUOTE]
I think most of our interventions in Latin American fall more into the covert as opposed to the overt…in almost none of those cases did the US invade, overthrow the government, install our own and then exploit the country. The only examples I can think of where we did stuff like that are the Spanish American War (where we got a number of territories, including the Philippines and Cuba) and the Mexican American War (where we got a lot of territory in the South West). But that sort of adventurism kind of went out of style, and I don’t see the the US doing that sort of thing post WWII…I just don’t see how you could get a convergence of political will along with the will of the voters to go for it unless there was some sort of extraordinary circumstance that enabled it.
One (extremely) positive side-effect would be the fate of the former Eastern Bloc. Without the ideological dominance of neoliberal thinking in Western economic discourse in the late 80s and early 90s there would be less of a pressure for the former Soviet Union and its satellites to liberalize their economies as fast and as completely as possible without paying any attention to its potential effects. In fact, with the experience of World War II fresh in the minds of policymakers, there may even be a sort of a new Marshall Plan for the Eastern Bloc helping them to transition in a more orderly way to a market economy. This, in turn, would entail there being no such mass social and economic collapse in Russia as there was in reality with among other things massive inflation that wiped out the savings of millions of elderly Russians, economic decline that was worse than the Great Depression, countless premature deaths due to the end of social welfare provisions, a massive increase in murder and other crimes as a result of the economic chaos (as a sort of anecdotal evidence, I have a book that chronicles strange deaths that was published in the late 90s which includes a chapter on cannibalism. Of the few dozen accounts of cannibalism given there all but two are from Russia or Ukraine), and the capture of the economy by oligarchs and organized crime, being all in all an excellent example of the sort of neobarbaric anarchy that social conservatives argue will happen when society moves too fast on change. Ideally this would mean there would be more of a chance for actual liberal democracy to blossom in Russia rather than the horrors of the transition to democracy and capitalism naturally resulting in the rise of Putinism.
I see what you did there. 
Exactly, Jeffrey Sachs and his ilk have a lot to answer for.