The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

[Sunsettommy]

The USSR apparently had no plans to expand to take over Europe when the Truman Doctrine and NATO was set up,

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Anti War

The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

by David Stockman Posted onJanuary 23, 2025

This is the second part of a three-part article. Read part one here.

Excerpt:

The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland. And that’s to say nothing of maintaining bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

LINK

[PeteS in CA]

Was this article intended to be serious? Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe didn't happen? Stalin's attempt to take over Greece didn't happen? Stalin's attempt to take over Iran didn't happen? Stalin didn't set up puppet Kim I and support Kim's invasion of SoKo?

How stupid/ignorant does David Stockman think Americans are?!

[Sunsettommy]

Was this article intended to be serious? Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe didn't happen? Stalin's attempt to take over Greece didn't happen? Stalin's attempt to take over Iran didn't happen? Stalin didn't set up puppet Kim I and support Kim's invasion of SoKo?

How stupid/ignorant does David Stockman think Americans are?!

LOL, it is obvious you didn't read the article which lays out WHY the USSR did that, as it was a response to aggression by the Truman Doctrine which puts the USSR on the defensive.

The question never gets considered in WHY the over-the-top Truman Doctrine was created in the first place as USSR was a smoldering ruin at the time with no expansionist doctrine in place, their insistence in occupying part of German was borne on the fact that TWICE Germany made massive unprovoked attacks on then Russia then the USSR in both WW 1&2 wars when France invaded Russia in the early 1800 which was also unprovoked, there is a lot of history of the West attacking them without cause.

From the article you ignored:

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland. And that’s to say nothing of maintaining bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the inveterate out-of-power war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri. That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to a joint session of Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating web of entangling alliances that it fostered and the post-1947 American Empire that grew therefrom.

The USSR in 1947 was in no position to be a threat to anyone as they were in slow recovery from the devastation Germany inflicted on them, yet the West seemed determined to contain something what wasn't there thus Stalin who is a paranoid dipshit took it seriously to quickly rebuild their tattered military and take part of Germany as a buffer zone as they were brutally invaded twice in just a 25 year period UNPROVOKED.

That is how the cold war came into being, the West started it, and the Soviets had to react to it in a defensive manner as they were a greatly damaged nation.

[Puffy Fish]

The USSR apparently had no plans to expand to take over Europe when the Truman Doctrine and NATO was set up,

Let's remember that the Soviet Union had already laid claim to nearly half of Europe by that point.

It almost doesn't matter whether the Soviet Union had specific "plans" at that point to expand. Any sensible strategist would have expected and prepared for the possibility that they would. 

The Soviet Union was also actively involved in China, and was responsible for the establishment of the Chinese Communists (though the whole story is more complicated).

[Sunsettommy]

I find it amusing when article with the information gets ignored because Russia is bad no matter what.

Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

Again USSR at the time was in shambles a fact you ignored, they occupy a portion of Germany a nation that devastated them twice in a 25-year period UNPROVOKED.

During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

Meanwhile American homeland was virtually untouched with history's largest Navy was never in threat by the USSR small Navy with a large pond between them.

But while it did nothing for America’s homeland security, it did send off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike. Given the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.

Yes, it was the West/NATO that began the arms race and encirclement of the USSR who never encircled anyone.

[Camp]

The Soviet Union was expansionist by design and they made quick work of stealing nuclear weapon capability.

The concern was warranted.  Definitely over estimated Soviet capability.

[Physics Hunter]

If we have nukes, and they have nukes, and we both agree on MAD, there is a default case of Cold War. 

Further, the Soviet pledged to defend its puppets, this forces US to do the same.

Stockman is a Moron.