Russia again

As others dispute why the world war ended, I weigh in.

The end of the cold war? I think Russian economic weakness was the overwhelming factor, but the US belief otherwise has exercised a baleful foreign policy influence since. The average American thinks we won WWI, WWII, and...the cold war, giving false confidence - and gave the neocon fish sea to swim in.
The false idea that the cold war was won through armament led to flase lessons being learnt that dog America today.

It is important to remember that during the Cold War neo-cons had adamantly opposed d�tente. They didn�t believe that the US should learn to coexist with the Soviet Union, insisting instead that it could win an uncontested victory. Coexistence, they argued, implied accommodation, which would turn into appeasement, which would soon dissolve into capitulation. After the Soviet Union unexpectedly fell apart, they did not revisit, or apologise for, their overestimation of the Communist system�s resilience and strength.

On the contrary, they felt totally vindicated. Although they had been spectacularly blind-sided, they concluded that they had been brilliantly prescient.

Excessively pleased with themselves, the neo-cons drew two lessons from the collapse of Communism.

#First, threats should be eliminated, not managed.

#Second, American security is invariably enhanced by the transformation of autocracies into democracies.

That the democratic transformation of Eastern Europe was triggered not by an invasion but by the withdrawal of a foreign Russian army apparently made little impression on them. All they knew was that the threat to the US from the Communist bloc had been eliminated by the more or less successful transformation of its former members into democracies.