Again, I think our clandestine support for eastern european dissidents was a nice gesture to make, but it had little to do with the fall of the Soviet system or the liberation of eastern Europe. It didn’t put any serious pressure on the Soviets to reform, nro did they reform. Instead, they just cracked down harder. The only thing that made the Soviets finally try to reform was the realization that economically they were going nowhere and had to find some way to lessen their reliance on military spending. So Gorbachev made overatures towards lessening military tensions. They were bankrupt in every respect, but they could have kept going while being morally bankrupt if they hadn’t been economically and socially and militarily bankrupt. But it was too late by then. It wasn’t the dissidents who brought the Soviets down, it was the elite like Gorbachev who realized there was no “there” left in the Soviet state, that they had to try something different, but they were past the point of changing without collapsing even further, due to structural problems.

As for your former Soviet officials, yes, I would continue to say that they are clueless, incompetent fools who simply don’t want to take responsibility for running their country into the ground. It sounds nice to say the dissidents did it to them, but really, they did it to themselves.

As for calling you Gordy, I meant no disrespect. If anything, it’s a kind of term of endearment and familiarity. But if it offends you, I’ll not use it.

BTW, you keep calling me Gordy. If you want to debate adults you might want to consider communicating like one.

Yes, the army stopped Soviet expansion, allowing culture and economics to win the war. As for Solidarity, the greater point is that our support there didn’t do any good. For some reason, the Soviets didn’t respond to our moral condemnation of their suppression of Solidarity. The Poles appreciated it, but we can hardly say we backed up our support with anything meaningful. But the situation there was not an internal affair, as Iran is. It was the result of an external nation, Russia, dominating the internal affairs of Poland. It’s not comparable to Iran, where there is no external dominating force for us to oppose. Even so, it was a good thing we didn’t invade Poland as a response to the Soviet domination, don’t you think? Even Reagan knew that wasn’t an option. So “supporting” Solidarity wasn’t exactly a courageous position to take. Nor did it have much to do with the collapse of the wall years later. So “no action” was the best course there also. In general, Soviet suppression of Solidarity was extremely successful, until of course the Soviets collapsed internally years later for entirely different reasons.

The military comes in via our keeping the USSR’s expansion in check. We’ll just have to disagree about some of the side ventures. I don’t know a single Pole who regrets our help to Solidarity. And as far as Europe goes, Poland is the 51st State. Of course with Poland as an ally we may be in for real trouble! (just kidding)

Re: Iran, the only course of action, is no course of action.

“My point was that the failure to issue any condemnation at the governmental level is an unwise and imprudent policy, especially since it may lead the surviving Iranian protesters to curse the West for its callous indifference to their plight.”

This is what I don’t understand. Not issuing *any* condemnation might lead to this result (which raises the question why this should change U.S. policy), but that takes for granted that the protesters believe that inserting the U.S. into their struggle is a boon rather than a blow. We have good reason to think that most of the protesters do not believe this. What is wise or prudent about doing something that works to their and our detriment?

Iran’s government would not take our government’s protestations more seriously–they would use them as fodder for state television and use them as a pretext for glorifying themselves. Officially offering expressions of support is likely to be counterproductive. If offering this support can be done privately by citizens or through back-door channels of second track diplomacy, that could accomplish the same end–heartening the protesters–without providing resources for the regime’s propaganda mill.

For that matter, not even I have said that absolutely nothing should be said by the government. Condemnation of violence is permissible and appropriate within reason. Having granted that, it is incumbent on the advocates of action/speech to justify what they are proposing, and they ought to be able to meet a reasonably high standard. I have yet to see much of an argument in support of taking a stronger line that amounts to more than, “It feels like the right thing to do.” Those counseling restraint and silence have a much lower bar to clear.

I shudder at the idea that resource wealth and/or burgeoning military power make any state’s internal affairs “the world’s business.” Is Russia’s domestic politics “the world’s business”? Is Britain’s? Is Canada’s? Is ours? A good test for what constitutes an unreasonable intrusion into another nation’s affairs is to ask whether one would demand the same international intrusion in one’s own country under similar circumstances. In other words, if we were in the position of the Iranian protesters in a purely domestic political dispute, would we want Medvedev and Hu Jintao holding forth on what our government must do? Would we want the moral support of Beitullah Mehsud? I don’t think so. Would we not instead tell foreign governments and leaders to mind their own business? Would we not be horrified if the government of the official enemy of our country started speaking out against our government in our name?

If it is Iran’s instability that makes Iran’s internal affairs “the world’s business,” it hardly follows that “the world” should take up for the side of the protesters. More to the point, if purely internal political disputes in another country are now “the world’s business,” what in the world isn’t “the world’s business”?

My point about Madonna and western culture is that these are what won the Cold War. Our troops only prevented us from being overwhelmed, and losing to an invading force. But they could not, on their own, win. That took culture, economics, social progress, etc.

A better question is, what prevented American troops from marching all the way to Moscow at the end of the war (as Patton wanted to do)? We could have done just that, rather easily – the Red Army was a mess by then. The reason we didn’t is because we are a creative culture more interested, in the end – despite all the bastards we sometimes put into power – in creating a fertile cultural life that is worth living in, than in fighting and destroying others. We had a basic faith that our cultural way of life could prevail over the Soviet system without having to fight a war. All we needed to do was create a defense that could prevent any serious inroads into western territory. We overstepped that by engaging in all kinds of pointless interventions that often made things worse, all out of some kind of narcissistic need to be heroic messiahs to the world. Most every place we tried that, we ended up destroying much more than we saved. Fortunately, the basic freedoms of our culture were able to overcome these errors and produce a vibrant society that could overshadow most anything communism was able to produce, and in the end that was the real difference.

Havers simply does not understand Iran, he only seems to care about inside the beltway rhetorical games which he thinks are best won by bombastic “moral stands” that mean nothing, cost nothing, and help no one but the politicans and pundits who make them. Obama, fortunately, is willing to forgo this beltway moral gamesmanship in order to forge lasting relationships of respect and understanding with parts of the world which are sorely in need of such an approach, and are utterly disgusted with the kind of pompous opacity of people like Havers.

Considering what “bastards” we were, it’s amazing how things worked out. You are entitled to make up your own History if you choose. But conradg, what prevented the Red army from continuing on to the English Channel if it was American Troops? Or were they waiting for dungarees?

There are of course exceptions to every rule. But even among the ones you cite, there have been serious blowbacks. Our help to Solidarity in Poland led to its being crushed by both the Polish communists and the Soviets themselves. It did not revive in any purposeful way until after the wall came down. Our involvement in the Phillipines precedes the Huks, and was an remains a very black spot in American history, with serious consequences, including the tendency of many in the Philippines who are hostile to American imperialism to side with our enemies and thus with communism during the Cold War. If we hadn’t been such bastards, they probably would not have been terribly inclined towards communism in the first place. And our involvement with the Greek insurgency led to our imposing and supporting authoritarian regimes in Greece which led the people to hate us severely for a very long time. It’s the sort of thing that gave our side a very bad name during the Cold War, and led many people to sympathize with Communism not because of any merits in that system, but simply because it opposed our imperial reach.

And yes, we do differ in the weight we give to military action in places like Angola and Nicaragua, neither of which had much influence at all on the overall ending of the Communist threat. In Nicaragua, of course, we once again see the blowback of supporting authoritarian regimes simply because they were anti-communist, and the inevitable effect our interventions there had. It only goes to show that interventions actually work against our interests, and motivate people to fight against us, seeing us as the enemies of political freedom, for the simple reason that so many of our interventions have been against political freedom if it doesn’t end up being pro-American.

I would agree that Afghanistan had an immediate and almost final impact on the crumbling communist regime. But this and all other military considerations are of purely secondary importance in relation to what caused the communist regimes to crumble in the first place. The crumbling of the regime was not a military matter, and if the regimes had not crumbled internally, the military outcomes probably would have been quite different. That your ex-Soviet officials see the crumbling of their regime as a military problem is the best evidence I could point to as to why the regime crumbled – it was run by idiots who thought that a military solution could have saved the regime. These are the same people who ran their country into the ground, and then tried to blame it all on the West and the West’s superior military, when hardly a shot was fired in any remotely important place. These people destroyed their country all by themselves.

That was the beauty of Kennan’s whole containment policy. We didn’t need to destroy them militarily, we just had to grow a better society and economy while retaining a defensive posture that protected that society. Eventually, we would so overshadow them that they would collapse on their own, which is precisely what happened. That the Kremlin ended up bankrupting the Soviet Union through military expenditures simply underscores how stupidly they misunderstood the real battle. If they had used their resources to build up their society and make it prosperous (which might have been impossible given communism’s limitations, but at least they could have tried), they might have lasted quite a while longer, or even partially succeeded. But as I said, they couldn’t do that very well (witness all the failed five-year plans), so they tried to distract themselves from their internal problems by endless foreign interventions of their own, all of which ended up merely costing them money and political capital that would have served them much better if spent at home, on their own society.

As for the economics of oil prices in the 80’s, and trade restrictions with Europe, yes, these contributed to the final fall, but they only succeeded because the Soviets were never able to build their own internal economy, and were thus reliant upon selling natural resources and commodities. And this was due to our ability to grow a highly diversified manufacturing and service and information economy, while the Soviets were not. Because of that, we were also able to build a highly attractive cultural life that was envied not just in the third world, but in Russia itself. And it was this that led to the fall of the Empire. John Lennon, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Levi Strauss were much more the cause of the fall than any soldiers we put into Germany.

I agree about withdrawing our troops from places that have no strategic value. That would of course include most of the world. We have to wind down our commitments, but the idea that we can intervene successfully around the world remains one of our most enduring and pernicious national myths.

Part of the problem was vagueness on my part. The Spanish civil war beginning in 1820 was what I had in mind when I mentioned Spain, and the insurrections in Italy that followed were what I was thinking of when I mentioned the Italians. One of these was at least partly liberal revolts against Bourbon monarchs, and my guess is that these uprisings would have won no less sympathy than the Greek cause. You are correct that the beating down of liberal forces was not complete in Spain until 1823, and had not yet begun when Adams gave this speech. I thought the comparison between the fate of the Spanish liberals and the Iranian protesters was an apt one for this discussion. I appreciate that Adams would have also been referring to the Greek War for Independence, which had begun in earnest a few months earlier.

The Communists were as you point out, very much outer directed. They seemed to think that their system could only survive by expansion. Where we differ I think is in the role of our military counter strokes in places like Angola, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. This and the buildup of American conventional and strategic might caused them to foolishly try to keep up in a race they couldn’t win. Whatever you thought of Star Wars, they took it very seriously and bankrupted themselves.

I would add two other shoals on which the USSR broke up. The first is the masterful way in which we drove energy prices down while denying them European markets. The other was in Gorbachev’s bungling of reform. Unlike the Chinese who seem to have understood that “The Party” can survive within a semi-capitalist system, Gorbachev really believed he could reform a deeply sclerotic socialist system without it breaking down entirely.

All Ex-Soviet officials visiting Princeton that I have spoken with have emphasized the centrality of the military competition as the reason for the eventual collapse. I tend to believe them. The Soviet example is a good example of military adventurism damaging a national interest of the adventurer. We should withdraw troops from areas where our vital interests are not engaged and where our allies are strong enough to defend themselves. The Cold War is over.

Larison also believes that mere words of encouragement which are not backed up by concrete assistance may lead to false hopes and even loss of life in Iran if the protesters act on these words. My only response here is that it depends on what these words of encouragement amount to. I was not advocating a war guarantee of the sort that Britain and France gave to Poland in 1939. I was only suggesting that the West should offer moral support, as opposed to promises of military assistance. A show of moral solidarity would be far more inspiring than official silence on the breakdown of democracy in Iran. Indeed, this silence is a callous insult to the victims of violence there.

Larison also believes in a very strict and impractical version of “internal affairs,” or situations into which other governments should not intrude. In other words, the US should NEVER give moral support to any people fighting for liberty, lest that be seen as a dreaded act of interference in its “internal affairs.” Based on this logic, American politicians during the 1920s and 1930s, who tended towards isolationism, should not have condemned the Bolshevik atrocities in Russia.

With respect to Iran, the world cannot treat her instability as a mere “internal affair,” since this is an oil-rich nation with a bellicose government suspected of enriching uranium for the eventual production of nukes. Surely what happens in this country, which has threatened Israel and the Persian Gulf region, is the world’s business!

One last historical point: I would be careful in portraying John Quincy Adams as an avatar of non-interventionism. This doctrine has been very selectively applied throughout US history anyway, and Adams was no exception. In 1842, Adams condemned China’s trade exclusion policy as immoral because it violated the golden rule and the right of nations to trade freely. This ideological defense of free trade was a perfect precondition for later acts of intervention in the Pacific Rim.

As to my status as Feudal Chieftain, I’ll have to check with my relatives. Whatever their decision, at best I can only be a retired Feudal Chieftain.