gourimoko
Fighting the good fight!
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I'd agree with that -- we cannot really know how something with so many moving parts would have worked out if we'd taken substantially different actions.
Agreed.
I'd simply say that for the people/leaders alive during that time, who did not have the benefit of after the fact revelations about the internal operations of the Soviet Union, and who were confronted with making those kind of geopolitical decisions with potentially catastrophic results if they were wrong, I do not judge them too harshly for when they got it wrong.
Those were incredibly difficult decisions to make.
Q-Tip, I think my only problem with your view here is that you are evaluating the situation from an historically inaccurate viewpoint. That viewpoint would be what we knew of those decisions in the 1980s and 1990s. Had we had this conversation 15-20 years ago, I would undoubtedly agree with you.
However, we now know a lot more, and we can look back at the policies of the Truman, Eisenhower (middle of his tenure), the Dulles brothers, Angleton, Acheson, and the joint chiefs (50s->60s) and see a policy of aggression and escalation that was unwarranted.
When Eisenhower warned the American people of the forces at work to create a permanent American military industrial economy, it was too late.