Hi Maurice Winn; Re: "Well Carl, we can all believe what we like, and if people think Gorby was at war, cold or hot, with the USA, then I think that's not far off paranoid schizophrenia." The cold war was fought, at least in part, over the question of who would be the dominant force in Europe. The war could not end until the Soviets gave up, and removed their troops (who were suppressing democracy) from Eastern Europe. It was only after Gorbachev had his economic reforms fail that he started pulling troops out of Eastern Europe, and the Berlin Wall didn't fall until 4 years later.
Re: "It was worrying in the mid 1980s when Gorby took over and the USA didn't understand that the world was different. Even now, people right here, [like you Carl], thought there was still a Stalinist-style cold war on."
It's been so long that I don't even recall what I thought about US / Soviet relations at that time. Certainly you have no idea and can only speculate. As far as the end of the cold war, you should probably go to the trouble of looking up when the first free elections were held in Eastern Europe. The fact that there were no free elections in Soviet occupied Europe was a key cause of the cold war. Nor were there any such elections under Gorbachev until years after he took power.
Gorbachev didn't change the Soviet Union's foreign policy instantaneously. It took him years to get out of Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe was under Soviet occupation for years as well. None of those things were acceptable to the US, so you could hardly have expected the cold war to have ended in 1985.
But if what you're doing is complaining that the cold war didn't end in, say 1986 instead of 1988 or 1991, then I say you're (1) making a big deal out of nothing, (2) ignoring the reality of the immediate improvement in US and Soviet relations in 1985, and (3) ignoring the reality of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and in the periphery states of the USSR. Gorbachev's first efforts were not at reducing Soviet power in Europe, and he certainly had nothing to do with the freeing of Estonia. What he tried to do at first was simply to improve his broken economy.
Re: "Estonians and other soviet states were part of an internal civil conflict leading to their independence. They were not agents of the USA or Nato." (1) You're ignoring the fact that the Estonian occupation was one of the many causes of the cold war. (2) You're being rather unrealistic (or naive) in assuming that the freedom movements in Estonia and elsewhere didn't get covert US support. You know the facts in Afghanistan, why would you assume that the US had no part in the other movements?
Re: "It's a bit scary for innocent bystanders when big, powerful, paranoid schizophrenics go ape." It's a bit scary for all involved, but the fact is that the US and the USSR managed to get through their conflict with the least damage (percentage deaths as a percent of total civilians in involved countries) that any two well-balanced military powers have ever required. As far as history goes, this was one of the more pleasant chapters. If you don't like the fact that the US is the big kid on the block, well, you can take us on, or you can go find another block to live on.
-- Carl |
