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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (3707)	1/27/2001 7:29:15 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Ronnie's pushing of Star Wars and his defense build-up did cause the collapse od the Soviet Union. Even that is debatable. My own belief is that the root causes of the collapse were the fundamentally non-viable economic and political systems imposed on the Soviet Union by the Communist Party. The additional economic pressure brought about by the Party's perceived need to keep up with American defense spending may have pushed the edifice over the edge, but it could not have done so if the edifice had not been tottering on the edge in the first place. Another odd aspect of the whole case is that the Soviet drive to match American defense spending was driven by paranoia and knee-jerk reflex, not necessity. They had no need to match our spending. We would not have attacked them in any case; it would have been politically unacceptable to our people and our allies, without whom no such attack could have been mounted. They could have just as easily cut their defense spending, watched us push ourselves into deficit, and gotten their jollies by subsidizing third-world revolutions, which would cause the US us a great deal of trouble at very little cost. This being the case, what caused the collapse? Ronnie's aggressive defense spending or the ossified and unimaginative mindset that led the Soviets to respond as they did? It is fashionable, at this point in this discussion, for someone to trot out testimony from the people who ran the Soviet Union at that time, many of whom have publicly claimed that Ronnie brought them down. I should point out, before anyone tries this, that these people have an enormous vested interest in attributing the fall to an outside influence. They sure as hell aren't going to announce that their government flopped because of their own ineptness, even if that is actually the case.