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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (3729)	1/27/2001 8:12:19 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

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. Ah, but- -accidentally, I believe- -the Reagan administration found an application they had to match or somehow defeat: ballistic missle defense. Remember that it has been called destabilizing because, if it works, those missles you were so proud of are now so much junk, so maybe you should launch a first strike. The Reagan administration insisted it would work; the Soviets didn't know, but couldn't take the chance of being left with useless junk and no defense of their own, so they stepped on the gas. The problem was the American defense establishment had a Ferrari and the Soviets had a poorly-maintained Model T; the wheels came off when it was pushed. 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. We would not have had to; the game of Great Powers is more about blackmail and extortion than it is actual war. The Soviets understood this perfectly; they remembered the Cuban crisis. 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. With a working BMD, we could overthrow their installed regimes and they would be impotent. 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. Precisely. This would not have worked if their economic system worked.