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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (16059)1/11/2002 5:42:30 PM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
Hi Maurice Winn; Re: "Actually, the USSR and China and communism won in Vietnam and North Korea."

You're being silly here. The cold war was not about the 3rd world, it was just fought there for convenience. I suppose you'd say that Britain lost WW1 because they failed to defeat Turkey. Or that Japan won WW2 because the Chinese never beat them. Examples of this sort of thing exist in every major war throughout history. For example, the Athenians were quite successful against the Spartans in certain subsections of the (very long) Peloponnesian war. But who cares. These long wars do have winners, and there is no doubt who won the Cold War. Nor is it necessary to march through the enemy's capital in order to signify a victory. Making the other guy give up territory or allies (as happened in spades to the USSR) is enough. Most of England and France's wars ended with that sort of result. Both countries had successes (like when France split the US off from England), but the overall result was obvious to all.

Note that the US has not been forced to give Alaska back to the Russians, or to dissolve NATO. You can't say the same thing about Lithuania, for instance, or about the Warsaw Pact.

Another way of looking at it is to note that the defeats you're talking about were marginal. (And they were fought in marginal territory as well.) The Vietnamese never marched through Washington or even burned the White House. The North Koreans ended up bottled up reasonably close to their prewar boundary with South Korea.

It's only rarely possible to fight a war while winning every single battle.

-- Carl
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