If they wanted to take a dump on Vaclav Havel’s grave, it would have been cheaper just to fly to Prague and do it.
The occasion here is the 20th anniversary of the break-up of the Evil Empire, but I like to think of it as a parting gift to Kim Jong-il. Where are you when we need you most, ruthless-Stalinist-counterweights-to-U.S.-power? Over to you, Mikhail Gorbachev:
This event led to euphoria and a “winner’s complex” among the American political elite. The United States could not resist the temptation to announce its “victory” in the cold war. The “sole remaining superpower” staked a claim to monopoly leadership in world affairs. That, and the equating of the breakup of the Soviet Union with the end of the cold war, which in reality had ended two years before, has had far-reaching consequences. Therein are the roots of many mistakes that have brought the world to its current troubled state…
Within such a matrix, the United Nations and its Security Council become expendable or at best an impediment, while international law is viewed as a burdensome legacy of the past. That was the attitude taken by the United States and its supporters in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in Iraq in 2003. American pundits started talking about the United States as more than just a superpower, calling it a “hyperpower” capable of creating “a new kind of empire.”…
In short, the world without the Soviet Union has not become safer, more just or more stable. Instead of a new world order—that is, enough global governance to prevent international affairs from becoming dangerously unpredictable—we have had global turmoil, a world drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 made that abundantly clear.
The West must undertake a critical reassessment of all that preceded this painful crisis. It is more than just a crisis of global finance or even a crisis of an economic model based on a race for hyperprofits and excessive consumption that grinds down the earth’s resources and ruins nature. The crisis grew out of the arrogant conviction of “the collective West” that it had the recipes to solve all problems and that there was no alternative to the “Washington Consensus,” which claimed to work equally well for all countries.
The Soviet Union: Guarantor not only of international stability but of western prosperity. It’s not clear to me how the world is less safe when one superpower is free to intervene in Yugoslavia or Iraq than it is when two superpowers are forever at risk of being dragged into nuclear war by conflicts between their client states, but the good news I guess is that in another decade or two we’ll be able to test the theory again with China.
I don’t think China needs to worry us. If you’ve been following the economic news, China is collapsing as we speak. Their real estate bubble is collapsing and the debt levels are threatening. As recession hits the west, their trade balance is in trouble as well-not to mention the problem of not enough wives for the men due to the “one child” protocol. if I were Russia, I’d be keeping a close eye on my southern border. If the Russians were dumb enough to get involved in a european or mideast war, China might just take advantage of the situation. I am far more concerned with what we are doing to ourselves in gutting the military and supporting an educational system that yields little but brain dead sheeple.
We have met the enemy and it is us.
PS. I am a recovered libtard baby boomer. My daughter spent 6 years in the Navy as a EM nuclear and came out an E5. She has a good technical job with great bennies, a pile of savings bonds, and no debt.
Gorby has a lot of nerve talking about profits and consumption grinding down the earth’s resources and ruining nature.
I have friends who lived in the USSR and escaped before its fall.
The ecological disasters there, under communism, were horrific!
(Let’s skip over Chernobyl.)
Those smaller soviet republics, like the Baltics, the Ural and the ”stans,” were where the Russian soviets chose to build industries that polluted excessively.
Ah, that ”central planning!”
And those same Russians didn’t care how much pesticide needed to be poured on their eastern farmlands.
They just poisoned that area.
They used their inland seas as irrigation sources beyond what they could bear.
They also thus destroyed fisheries.
The Russian soviets made the plans for industrial development, the local republics paid the price of development, and the Russian soviets took all the profits.
No wonder the Russian mob arose so quickly after the breakup of the USSR.
Bookdoc
welcome to FA, your daughter is as smart as you, I see,
bye