End of the Cold War

Current US. political leaders insist that the United States "won" the Cold War. They give the lion's share of credit to the Reagan Administration's battle against the "Evil Empire," otherwise known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R., or Soviet Union for short).

The Cold War mesmerized U.S. policy makers for more than 46 years. It cost approximately 110,000 lives of American soldiers killed in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It cost trillions and trillions of dollars spent to shore up U.S. insecurity. The legacy is an aging U.S. infrastructure, a tattered domestic economy, and a foreign policy so focused on fighting mythical monsters as to be unable to recognize that the Cold War is not yet ended.

Mikhail Gorbachev took most of the steam out of the Cold War by voluntarily dismantling the Soviet's communist empire: The tribute owed him is that he did it without the help of the United States. He did it because communism failed to generate a strong economy that could provide the Soviet people with the fruits of their labors, and that could enable the U.S.S.R. to compete successfully in the global economic system. U.S. claims of defeat of communism are disingenuous, at the least, and a purposeful political falsehood, at the most.

The former U.S.S.R. is struggling to fashion a substitute for communism. It has embarked, under the current leadership of Boris Yeltsin and the former leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, on an herculean effort to reconstitute its political and economic system. Success or failure has profound implications for the United, States and other nations. This fact has not yet been grasped by U.S. political leaders or the American people.

Reluctance on the part of the Bush Administration to provide more than minor assistance to the effort of the former U.S.S.R. to re-make itself is only now (March '92) being displaced by reported consideration of a proposal more likely to benefit the future of the United States as well as the former U.S.S.R. According to a report in the Washington Post dated March 20, 1992, the proposal would provide additional agricultural credit guarantees, remove a long list of Cold War restrictions on trade, grant $620 million in humanitarian relief and technical assistance, and provide a 12 billion dollar increase of U.S. commitments to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), part of which would finance a major IMF program for Russia this spring.

The proposal appears to be a Bush Administration reaction to pressure from a few members of Congress and a few former American political leaders—and perhaps from European political leaders who are mystified by U.S. foot-dragging.

Future stakes are profound. If the former U.S.S.R. becomes, as a result of failure to achieve its self-set goal, once again antagonistic to the West, a new "cold war" most likely would begin. So the opportunity for the U.S.A. is now, realizing that it may not come 'round a second time. If we fail to take advantage of it, more than an opportunity will have been lost.

There is a parallel between the current global political circumstances and those existing at the conclusion of the Second World War. At that time, U.S. political leaders persuaded themselves that the stakes for the future were high. Enlightened foreign policy was the result: the Marshall Plan for reconstruction of Europe, including former foe Germany, and the Japanese Peace Treaty, that reconstruction of former foe Japan. Both policies had multiple benefits for the United States, and they will find an exemplary place in the annals of American foreign policy.

America's political leaders and people cannot afford to drag their feet on assisting other nations to assist former foe (ally), the U.S.S.R. The land area it occupies, approximately 8.5 million square miles, constitutes one of the strongest geopolitical positions On the globe. Europe is its western border, the Arctic its northern, Asia its eastern, and the Middle East its southern. Natural resources are abundant. About 280 million people are preparing to exploit them, using Western technology and techniques. Although there is a long hard road ahead, those 280 million people could create a formidable political and economic entity of great power on the globe.

Not a matter of overriding concern for the United States is the form of the political and economic system the former Soviet Union constructs. Of crucial concern is that the system be cooperative not antagonistic toward the U.S.A.

Gorbachev put forward ((Perestroika, 1987) the concept of a European Family of Nations, to include the former U.S.S.R. Remaining to be seen is whether Yeltsin steers in that direction. Even if he does not but still constructs a political and economic system cooperative with the West, then—and only then—can the United States say the Cold War has been "won."

U.S. national interests dictate assistance to the former U.S.S.R. in its effort to reconstitute itself in a different form. Surely the cost of assistance will pale by comparison to the cost of the Cold War.

...Robert H Sturgill...

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A Covenant with Each Other, the Nation, and the Earth

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IdT is a volunteer association where you are invited to help write the ecological contract. A contract between individuals and society; humankind and nature, and society and nature. IdT champions the rights of individuals by asserting that We the People are the sovereign endowed with certain Creator given unalienable rights and that our government was established to secure these rights to us. IdT reinforces the idea that opportunity to participate in free enterprise is the bulwark of a thriving economy which in turn succors freedom of choice in democratic institutions. IdT asserts that education is the prime ecological factor that shapes our lives, the lives of our society and nation and is the mother process guiding our individual and national being. Our ability to establish Justice, insure the domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and to sustain our political and economic hegemony depends directly upon our system of education: IdT dedicates itself to the defense and promotion of the ecological exposition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence is identified as living law waiting for creative humane ecological interpretation.

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© Copyright 1992
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