The Allied powers could have stopped Hitler when he remilitarized the Rhineland. William Schirer, who was a CBS correspondent in Berlin at the time, later revealed that high level contacts in the Nazi party had told him that Hitler was prepared to retreat had the French challenged him. Instead, they let him get away with it. This emboldened him to pursue the Anschluss with Austria, and later to demand the Sudetenland. By the time he invaded Poland, he was convinced that the Allied powers were paper tigers, and would constitute no threat. As it happened, he was nearly right. France collapsed after invasion, and Britain was rife with defeatism, which only Churchill was able to counter.
If you cannot see that the Allies were determined not to make the same mistakes they had made after World War I, but attribute everything to cynical manipulation, I cannot help you. We got the Axis powers back on their feet in order to avoid the kind of smoldering resentment that fed the rise of Hitler; we refused to gut our armed forces, as we had after WWI, and lapse into unpreparedness; we entered into ongoing alliances, in order to discourage Soviet adventurism, as in NATO; in short, we were determined not to make the mistakes with the Soviet Union that we had made with Nazi Germany.
You are deluded about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yes, they were suffering in the commercial economy, and were limping along economically, generally. However, they were far from economic collapse. For one thing, they were spending about a quarter of GDP on the military, compared to a little less than 7% at the height of the Reagan build- up. They could easily have reallocated resources. For another, the black market was extensive, and kept things moving, so it is hard to make a valid calculation of GDP. Also, the Chinese example of political repression with economic liberalization was working, and their economy was taking off, and the Soviets never really tried that expedient, although they studied it.
No, the crisis was political, with economic elements. Reagan, in a manner of speaking, created Gorbachev, that is, the challenge represented by Reagan helped to favor reform elements in the Kremlin, in order to make a "Peace Offensive" and get the West to relax its competition. Reagan was willing to respond, which kept Gorbachev in power long after glasnost and perestroika were getting out of hand. Reagan continued to challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet Empire ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall"), and to promote SDI, which would have put unpredictable pressure on the Soviet budget. Gorbachev went much further than Khruschev in his thaw, before the Kremlin tried to move against him, and by that time it was too late, Yeltsin led a rebellion against the Kremlin in the very heart of Moscow. It was the beginning of the end.
For the rest, I think I will move on, right now....... |
