First Class Soldiers, Japanese, American, etc

I’ve been reading Max Hastings’ Retribution, The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, copyrighted 2007. I expressed admiration for the Japanese warrior, but Hastings paints the Military dictatorship of the Japanese who went to war in World War II, in somber tones. We can see through Hastings eyes why they were caught off guard at the battle of Midway and why they ran out of supplies so readily. They disdained “intelligence,” thinking the will to win was all important. Also, the idea of protecting the ships that brought in needed supplies was beneath the dignity of a Japanese Warrior. Hastings quotes one individual with approval who called the Japanese a first class warrior in a third-class army.

The Japanese did surprisingly well economically prior to World War II. Also, their battles against the Chinese went smoothly. They made the mistake of thinking that all enemies could be defeated as easily as the Chinese were. It turned out that their army and navy were as inferior to the American Army and Navy as the Chinese were to the Japanese – not because the Japanese soldier was inferior to the American, but because the Japanese military and governmental structures were.

As I read about the training of the Japanese soldier, I was reminded of Marine Corps Boot Camp. By the time I graduated I was perhaps not quite willing to leap off a cliff if ordered to do so by my drill instructor, but I would have thought about it. I have had occasion to compare Marine Corps Training with French Foreign Legion Training as well as with Gurkha and Russian Training – also German training prior to 1945. Lest my Russian friend Michael question my bona fides, let me admit at once that they aren’t very good. I went through Marine Corps training and only read about training in the other forces, but I have read enough to respect these other forces. I don’t approve of the blind obedience that Hastings describes as being instilled in the Japanese soldier (also in the Russian and German through World War II). It is better from my standpoint to believe in what you are asked to do. You don’t just jump off a cliff because you are asked to do so. You need a good reason.

I was watching a “B” movie the other night – one of the many that seems derived from Herbert’s Dune novels. Gigantic worms are eating up the Taliban and the American soldiers who are trying to escape. At last the two Americans seem to be getting away – the main hero, a female officer, and also a young Afghan girl. The Helicopter rises, but here comes a worm. The hero, who happens to have a Taliban suicide-bomber vest on, leaps out of the helicopter into the mouth of the worm and detonates the vest. The choice was clear. The hero could have let the worm get the helicopter, in which case they would have all been killed. Or, he could have done what he did – sacrifice his life for the others. He jumped off the ‘cliff’ for a good reason. This was science fiction, but we know that soldiers in first class fighting units have fallen on grenades to save their comrades.

At Dien Bien Phu, the French and the French Foreign Legion “stood”. They were eventually defeated, but they fought well. There were some colonial forces however, who didn’t fight well. They didn’t believe in fighting for the French, fighting so that the French could regain a colony.

Some people, perhaps people who haven’t been through Marine Corps Boot Camp, have become overawed by the Japanese fighting spirit. I am mildly interested in learning more about what motivates George Friedman in this regard. He wrote a book in 1991 called The Coming War with Japan. He has written a recent book predicting the future of the next 100 years -- a war occurs in which Japan and Turkey fight against the US and its allies. I know Friedman has a civilian intelligence organization and has access to information denied the rest of us, but I can’t see Japan, or Turkey either, embarking on such a course. Friedman is obviously at odds with Fukuyama who saw Liberal Democracies like the Japanese remaining at peace with other Liberal Democracies (like the American). Friedman may be more intrigued with Samuel Huntington who saw the “Civilizations’ clashing with each other – and the Japanese, in Huntington’s presuppositions, are their own Civilization. Even so . . .

Russia's new arms race?

http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090717_2989.php

This article describes Russia’s latest attempt to improve their nuclear capability – a Bulava test that didn’t go well. Perhaps I can now see why Michael Kuznetsov and I seemed to have a verbal disconnect. Living in the enlightened age of Obama as I do, I had given up thinking about nuclear weapons as anything more than a relic of the cold war. Obama wants to get rid of them, and they do seem to be rather impractical in terms of the wars we are likely to have to fight.

But Russia, perhaps after some paranoid war-games, has concluded it needs to get back in the war-race-game with some new nuclear capability. But they don’t seem to be managing very well. Their latest Bulava exploded in midair during a test yesterday. This means that six of their “missile runs” have ended in failure.

One of the disconnects I thought I saw in the exchange with Michael is that I spoke of the Russian draft as being obsolete. He then responded with a 2006 article that referred to the US nuclear “first strike” capability. Maybe Russia is using some of its draftees on their Bulava missile program. That would explain everything.

Russian Wilsonianism and US "First Strike" capability

Michael Kuznetsov left the following comment in response to my "Russia's Wilsonianism": I’ll comment below his response:

Lawrence:

You must be kidding, yet I appreciate your grim humor.

You conclude with this phrase:
"Save yourself some money, Russia: abolish your draft."
Oh, do you really mean this, Lawrence?!

You assert that there is no more threat to us?
Really?
How about this detailed plan how to smash Russia.

See this:

The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy

By Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary: For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending -- and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun.

An excerpt from the article:

The current and future U.S. nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike against Russia or China.
The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States' declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." To this end, the United States is openly seeking primacy in every dimension of modern military technology, both in its conventional arsenal and in its nuclear forces.

Source:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61508/keir-a-lieber-and-daryl-g-press/the-rise-of-us-nuclear-primacy

If you have any problems with the reading directly from the Foreign Affairs website, I could willingly provide you with the full text of the article.

Michael Kuznetsov

COMMENT:

Michael,

To begin with, while Foreign Affairs is a highly respected journal, but it does not represent official U.S. policy. Pravda used to represent the official policies of the Soviet Union, but the US has never had a publication that did that. Furthermore, the writers of the articles in Foreign Affairs are not all affiliated with the US government. The article you refer to was by Keir Lieber, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and Daryl Press, associated Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Typically, in American academia, Associate Professors aspire to become full professors. One of the paths to advancement is through writing. These two Associate Professors have written one book each (at least at the time of their 2006 article), and at least one provocative article. While some who write articles for Foreign Affairs do have some standing in the US government, that is not true of the two authors that have so alarmed you.

The Lieber-Press article garnered interest in Russia and elsewhere. The Defense Department was offended by it and issued a response. If you have access to Foreign Affairs archives, you will find the response to this article on page 149. It is by Peter Flory of the US Defense Department. Flory who does (or “did” in 2006) have some standing in the U.S. government. His response begins, “The essay by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press (‘The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,’ March/April 2006) contains so many errors, on a topic of such gravity, that a Department of Defense response is required to correct the record”; which Flory then proceeds to do.

Also, see page 167 of Olga Oliker’s Russian Foreign Policy, Sources and Implications, published April 2009. She wrote, “Russia’s concern about relative parity was highlighted in the country’s response to a 2006 Foreign Affairs article by U.S.-based analysts Keir Lieber and Daryl Press. Leiber and Press asserted that the combination of a U.S. preventive nuclear strike and NMD could destroy Russia’s ability to retaliate against an attack by the United States. The authors’ calculations were based on what they themselves said was a highly unlikely ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack that in no way reflected U.S. policy or planning. The article’s scenario, assumptions, and conclusions were heavily criticized by U.S. and Russian officials and security analysts. . . .”

I take it that the comment of mine that your are responding to was, “. . .can you honestly say that there are any Western nations today that are ‘aggressive’ in the sense that Germany was in the late 19^th and early 20^th century? Surely not.” You then referred to the Lieber-Press article as indication that the US was an “aggressive” western nation, and therefore necessitated the continuation of the “draft” in Russia. But that doesn’t make sense to me on any level. If you were worried about a nuclear “first strike” from the U.S.; then surely your Russian Army, however large it has become through the “draft’ would be no deterrent.

I can understand why there may have been some cause for Russian concern during the Bush administration. Bush showed a willingness to use military force much as the Russians do on along their borders. But, since the U.S. has no draft, it pretty much used up all its available land forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had none left over for the invasion of Russia; which is a preposterous consideration which no one outside of Lieber, Press, and some paranoid Russians seems to have had.

Leiber and Press say that back in the 50s the US was seriously considering a first strike against Russia, but I don’t believe that is true. A first strike may have been “war-gamed” much as Russia war-games such matters but a war-game doesn’t represent official policy. War-games are necessary to evaluate one’s military capability. They are in a sense “neutral.” War games in Germany prior to World Wars One and Two were put into effect by aggressive military regimes, but if a government is not aggressive, a given “war game” may represent fear or paranoia. In the 1950s, we had Dwight Eisenhower as our president, and he was not an “aggressive” president. He was criticized during World War Two by some British generals as not even being an aggressive general; so the idea that he was seriously considering a first strike against Russia strikes me as preposterous. Eisenhower didn’t have the will for anything like that.

If anyone was going to do it, it was Truman. He did after all authorize the nuclear bombing of Japan, but Truman didn’t intend the use of nuclear weapons to be normal policy. When General MacArthur wanted to use them against the Chinese during the Korean War, Truman refused him permission, and, ultimately, fired him.

Also, this is no longer 2006. Maybe you had something to worry about when Bush was president (although I don’t think you did), but now we have Obama and Obama just signed an agreement with Medvedev, I believe, that schedules the reduction of nuclear weapons. The announced plane is to get down to zero eventually. If the US has a “first strike” capability and wants to retain it, why would the US agree to reducing their nuclear weapons arsenal?

The US concern is that some nuclear weapons from the former USSR or Pakistan might get into the hands of the Islamists. A reduction to zero makes sense from that standpoint. There would then be no “nuclear club” for the nuclear wannabes to aspire to. But it would make no sense if the Lieber-Press scenario had any basis in reality.

Turkish Ethnicities - a "threat" to Russia

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/07/blog-post.html

The above article by Paul Goble was posted on his website, Window on Eurasia, and entitled Urumchi Events Suggest Turkic Identities May be Greater Threat to Russia than Islamic Ones, Moscow Expert Says.” I’ll quote a few passages from the article and comment below:

“ . . . Clashes between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumchi suggest that pan-Turkic identities may turn out to be a more significant threat to the Russian Federation and its interest in stability than the spread of radical Islam because ‘Turkic language peoples live not only in Central Asia but in Russia as well’ . . .”

“. . . Yakov Berger, a senior Chinese specialist at the Institute of the Far East of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that ‘ethnic, social and political stability” in Xinjiang is’. . . important [to Russian stability].” (www.vremya.ru/2009/124/5/233063.html).

“. . . ‘the problem of Xinjiang Pan-Turkism can turn out to be more important than the threat of the distribution of radical Islam’ because there are Turkic minorities on both sides of the border and what happens in one place can affect others.’”

“ . . . ‘if [as the Chinese foreign ministry now insists] disorders are possible in Chinese Xinjiang as a result of support from the outside, then why could they not break out in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan?’”

“ . . .’If China adopts too tough an approach to ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, then there could be a repetition of the situation in the early 1960s when in response to Mao’s harsh crackdown non-Han refugees fled Xinjiang into the USSR.’”

“. . . ‘A few days ago, Turkish Prime Minister Redjep Taiip Erdogan said that Chinese actions against the Turkic Uyghurs were “a genocide” and promised to raise the issue at the UN Security Council.’”

“. . . ‘One Muslim rights activist in Russia, Kamilzhan Kalandarov, says that nationalism rather than Islamism is the primary motive force in Eastern Turkestan. In fact, he argues, “in the Chinese-Uyghur conflict, the religious factor plays [only] the role of one of the identifiers of national self-consciousness’ (www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=authority&id=1210) . . . he points out that ‘the ideas of political Islam were never popular among Uyghurs and that the local branch of Al Qaeda – the ‘Front for the Liberation of Eastern Turkestan’ – occupies an extremely insignificant segment within the national movement” in that region to this day.

“Instead, he continues, what is behind the conflict there is ‘an entire complex of ethno-political and economic problems,’ reflecting the Uyghur’s lack of their own statehood and the divisions of that community “among various now independent states,” a situation that has created ‘a psychological complex which actively promotes radical nationalism.’”

“ . . .But regardless of which side of this argument is correct . . . the Russian government has joined its Shanghai Cooperation Organization in calling for the Chinese authorities to use all available means to maintain order. . . Next week, the Russian and Chinese militaries will take part in a joint “anti-terrorist” exercise “Peace Mission 2009, five days of maneuvers that will involve approximately 3,000 soldiers and officers on the ground in northeastern China (evrazia.org/news/9102).”

COMMENT:

Two things strike me as interesting in this article. The first is this is the sort of problem that occurs in autocratic nations. Europe, both east and west, has not been free of autocratic regimes for so long that they can welcome all ethnicities as equals. The problems caused by immigrants from North Africa and elsewhere in Europe are well known. Officially, Europe is egalitarian, but unofficial, that is, at the common-citizen level, egalitarianism does not rate very high. The same things is even more true in Russia and China, two nations which retain autocratic forms of government.

In a real sense we can trace all such problems back to Woodrow Wilson who stipulated in point 14 of his “14 points” “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

Also, Wilson’s Point 5 reads, “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”

These points aren’t crystal clear, but what was clear was that the U.S. opposed Imperialism and thought all former colonies should be freed. Wilson and the Presidents after him had such Colonies as India in mind, but other ethnicities, ethnicities Wilson had probably never heard of, thought these guarantees should apply to them as well. The former colonies of Britain and France are now independent. The Tsarist and Stalinist colonies are also independent – more or less. But there are left over ethnicities in such places as Turkey, and China that want the same rights that other ethnicities and nationalities enjoy.

If a nation that has multiple ethnicities becomes democratic, the further need to be independent seems to be ameliorated. I think of Scotland and Wales in this regard. They seem to be contented with the amount of freedom they possess without the need to be utterly free of England. Also, whenever there has been a vote in Quebec to obtain independence from the rest of Canada, the “sovereignty” cause has been defeated. Yes, Canada has passed some laws to make it even harder for Quebec to obtain independence in the future, but the Canadian “struggle” is a long way from what we see today in China with their Uyghur minority.

The second point I find interesting is that the Chinese, possibly abetted by the Russians may wish to submerge the Turkic ethnic struggles under the more recognizable Al-Qaeda-type terrorist rubric. We don’t know that much in the west about the Turkish minorities in China and Russia, but we do know about Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda would like to recruit Turkish Muslims in China and Russia, but their successes have been insignificant according to Yakov Berger. So if China and Russia engage in what they call a “peace mission” against “terrorism” which turns out to be against Turkish minorities in China, who is going to know?

Truman, Eisenhower and their Presidential Rankings

Whenever I read an historian who impresses me, I make note of which authors impressed him and usually make several orders through Amazon.com or half.com before I finish his book. Just yesterday I finished Fromkin’s In the Time of the Americans, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur, The Generation that Changed the World. This is the sixth of Fromkin’s books that I’ve read and may be the most impressive. I didn’t think he could surpass his A Peace to End all Peace, The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, but he may have done it with this book.

Fromkin is an excellent example of what Collingwood urged in his The Idea of History. An historian must understand his prejudices and do his best to set them aside. Also, he must strive to understand history as though he were living it at the time. We all have a tendency to superimpose our own prejudices over earlier times and peoples, but a good historian resists that tendency – and Fromkin is an excellent historian – although I would have preferred proper references in his text.

One of the books I ordered from Fromkin’s bibliography is Where the Buck Stops, the personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman. I admire Truman and have often described myself as a “Truman liberal.” I didn’t switch from Liberalism to Conservatism. Liberalism became Leftism and Conservatism moved in Truman’s direction.

Back in 2000 I read Man of the People, a Life of Harry S. Truman by Alonzo L. Hamby; which was being touted as possibly the best biography on Truman. His life didn’t seem all that interesting, and his struggles in business and in his personal life would depress most people, but he had an inflexible resolve to do the right thing as he saw it. He always thought of himself as a common man and as such he was willing to listen to the advice of experts and people with more experience than he had, but he always made the final decision. The title of his book is indicative of his presidency. He would make the decision when the “buck” stopped at his desk.

Truman wasn’t much of a speaker and he was an even worse writer but he had some things to say after he was out of office and began working on his book with the help of some people, the last of whom was his daughter Margaret Truman. She did know how to write, but she left her father’s style as she found it. She did, thankfully, reduce his “book” from about 1000 pages down to the present 374.

One of Truman’s interesting prejudices was against Generals becoming President. He discusses the various Generals who became President and the only one who impressed him was Washington. The rest, especially Eisenhower, he accused of treating the presidency as though it were soft retirement duty. Fromkin wouldn’t agree with Truman’s assessment. He said that Eisenhower liked to give the impression that he spent all his time golfing, but he was very much in charge of his administration. Fromkin suspected that Eisenhower may have tried to give that impression of doing nothing so that when things went wrong, he could plausibly blame someone else. That seems a rather harsh assessment, but he wasn’t as harsh as Truman was.

Truman’s opinion of Eisenhower was rather shocking. My impression was rather different from his; so I sought out the following rankings of presidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents I think the current 2009 CSPAN rankings would surprise both Truman and Eisenhower. It ranks Truman 5^th and Eisenhower 8^th. Eisenhower had a low opinion of Truman; so he would be surprised that all the rankings rate him lower than Truman. On the other hand, Truman would probably have given Eisenhower no higher ranking than 30.

If Dewey had won in 1948

Fromkin interestingly speculates that had Dewey won the 1948 election, we would have been “spared some of the more ugly by-products of the cold war . . . .” On page 650 of In the Time of the Americans, Fromkin writes, “Much of the anticommunist hysteria whipped up by the frustrated Republican losers of the 1948 elections in an effort to discredit the Truman administration – and, on the other hand, indulged in defensively by the administration to prove itself more anti-Red than its critics – might have been avoided had the Republicans won. The height of the Red-baiting era in the middle of the century corresponds almost exactly with the presidential term that Truman took away from Dewey: 1949-53.”

Fromkin, at least in 1995 when he wrote this book, didn’t take a position in agreement with Arthur Herman (Joseph McCarthy, Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator, 2000) or Haynes and Klehr (In Denial, Historians, Communism & Espionage, 2003). Haynes, Klehr and a few others got a look at the KGB archives which established what McCarthy and other “red-baiters” had been saying, namely that our government and American Industry were rife with soviet spies. Some people have reviled McCarthy for so long that the effort it would take to reexamine what he said and did seems beyond them. I don’t know if Fromkin is in this mold or not.

Fromkin seems to think that there would have been no anti-Communism, no searching for spies, if Dewey had been elected, if I understand him correctly on this point. If I do understand him, I would hope he would have been proved wrong. Even if Dewey had been elected, there really were soviet spies in American government and industry, and the idea that these spies might have gotten a free pass if Dewey had been elected seems hard to believe. But perhaps he is merely suggesting that Dewey’s administration would have gone about the spy-hunting business with less drama than we actually experienced. If that is what he is saying, I wouldn’t disagree.

Another interesting counterfactual pertains to the “loss of China.” The Communists defeated the Chiang Kai-shek forces in 1949. This occurred on the Democrat’s watch. Fromkin tells us that “The communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 was confusing and troubling to Americans, and it was exploited by the McCarthy wing of the Republican party. [Gad! Was there a “McCarthy wing of the Republican Party”? I hadn’t thought so. He was pictured by Herman as being largely on his own.] Had Dewey been President, perhaps such partisan bitterness could have been avoided. It should have been evident that no matter which party held the White House, the United States could have done nothing to prevent Mao Tse-tung’s victory.

“It should have been clear, too, that whatever else might be said against him, Mao was not really Stalin’s man but an indigenous leader with an agenda of his own. The Kremlin in fact had supported Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao had won leadership of the Communist Party only by defeating the Moscow-anointed faction. Observers with a long view of history foresaw that China was potentially Russia’s most dangerous adversary.

“Yet the Democrats were blamed – successfully – for having let Nationalist China be driven from the mainland. Even in the absence of evidence (and there seems to be none), it is hard to believe that this did not affect Truman and Acheson in their decision the following year to take a stand in Korea.”

This is very interesting speculation – very impressive, and I am once again jealous of Fromkin, for I never thought of this before. No, there is no evidence, but it was out there: China’s agony. I have an uncle that was stationed in China during the Second World War. We had an affinity for China for quite a long time. We were supplying aid to Chiang Kai-shek, so how is it he was “permitted” to lose the civil war with Mao’s forces? I once read Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s difficulties (The Stilwell Papers, 1948) in trying to get the Chinese to effectively fight against the Japanese. He had more luck with Mao than he did with Chiang. Chiang fought against Mao as Mao fought against the Japanese. That is an over-simplification but that was the impression I retain from having read Stilwell in 1962; so I didn’t believe that the U.S. had “lost” China. Chiang Kai-shek lost it despite our trying to help him. I do recall that some argued that we (the Democrats) lost China and if their arguments were as intimidating as Fromkin suggests, perhaps Truman and Acheson were influenced in the direction of not wanting to lose South Korea, but I read no one before Fromkin who makes that connection.

Is Fromkin suggesting that Dewey may not have assisted South Korea against the North? Gad, Fromkin. I hate to think what our world would look like if Kim Jong-il were ruling the entire Korean Peninsula – unless you could come up with a counterfactual that suggested a less radical regime might have assumed power. . . hmmm. But short of a persuasive argument along those lines I believe we were right to support South Korea and hate to think that a Dewey administration would have done anything different in that regard than Truman’s administration did.

Russia's Wilsonianism

As World War II progressed, the US became stronger and stronger such that toward the end, the other allies saw it as the most powerful Western State. And indeed most nations in the West saw the US as wanting to “export” its brand of government. FDR constantly measured himself against Wilson, and one of those measurements had to do with the postwar process. FDR sought to improve upon what Wilson tried to do. In focusing upon Wilson, FDR, the League of Nations and the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, etc. We lose sight of the fact that another nation was just as ambitious in these regards as the US was. On page 607 of In the Time of the Americans Fromkin writes, “Western Leaders blinded themselves to the obvious: it was not just the United States that wanted to remake the world in its own image; so did the Soviet Union. Unlike a Woodrow Wilson – or a Leon Trotsky – Stalin was no believer in trying to change the world at once. He moved a step at a time. Victory in the Second World War would bring him control of neighboring countries. He would give priority in the years afterward to consolidating that control. In twenty years there might be another major war, in the chaotic aftermath of which he could annex an additional large portion of the globe. In the end his regime was destined to have it all; his version of Marxism told him that. So he could wait.”

But in the meantime, Stalin sought to take as much of Eastern Europe as he could, in his own brand of Wilsonianism. Like Hitler and the followers of Mohammed, he believed that land once conquered should never be relinquished. This was a foolish and impractical strategy. Denying the German Army the option of retreating, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. We have only to think of Stalingrad to see the disastrousness of that philosophy as practiced by Hitler.

In the case of Islam we see that there are still Muslims who like troubled ghosts haunt Andalusia. Much of Spain had once been conquered by Islam and now, according to Islamist and perhaps even much traditional Islamic ideology, Spain has no right to it. One day, according to their version of Islam, Andalusia will be returned to them. They too believe they can wait.

In regard to Russia and its conquering of Eastern Europe, we see that those lands were a mixed blessing to them. On the one hand, they represented the advance of Communism as the USSR saw it. On the other hand, these conquered nations did not choose to be Communistic so they chafed under the Stalinist chains. The USSR had the largest land army by the end of World War II and needed to keep it large in order to keep the Eastern Europeans under control, ward off any threat from the US and Western Europe, and be in a position to expand in the next war when that opportunity arose.

Of course that opportunity never arose for the USSR. Communism turned out to be a failure. When the violent domination provided by the Red Army was removed, the Eastern European nations, one after the other, chose Western-style governments. But like the Muslims who long for the return of Andalusia, many Russians long for the return of their “buffer states.” They give the appearance of feeling insecure if their borders abut nations not under their direct control. They feel a need to keep a large army poised on any such borders to not only repel invaders but to invade any such threatening nation and exert such military influence as to render it more agreeable to Russian wishes.

From one standpoint, what Russia has done and seems to wish to do in the future, seems strategically wise, but this is 19^th century wisdom – a time when nations were a constant threats to each other. That isn’t the situation on Russia’s borders in these modern times. The “trouble” Russia is faced with is not the threat of invasion, but the threat of independence. Russia’s former ‘buffer states” want to be buffer states no longer. They want to be independent nations. They want to be free to do whatever they like, and since they fear being dominated by Russia, perhaps more than Russia fears losing its buffer states, they choose to do whatever they can to prevent Russia from ever dominating them again. They strive to become members of the EU and NATO. They strive to gain the protection of the US.

COMMENT:

Communism was an interesting experiment, but that’s all it was. And it turned out to be a failure. So I would inquire of Russia why it wishes to retain Stalin’s version of Wilsonianism. Is there anyone in Russia today that feels that “Sovereign Democracy” is exportable? And if so, must it be exported by military force as Stalin sought to export Communism? Perhaps, but my impression is that there is nothing so coherent in the works in Russia. Their foreign policy is in an inchoate state. Many of us when we don’t know what to do in a given circumstance, fall back on what our parents told us. I wonder if that isn’t what is occurring in Russia today. They don’t know what to do about the loss of their buffer states so they are falling back on what their political (Stalinist) parents taught them.

Imperialism has an aura of seeming lucrative. It was commonly believed that Britain remained rich because it had an empire. FDR found it hard to believe that Britain had gone broke fighting the Germans, but we know now that only 1 % of Britain’s GDP came from its Empire during WWII, and as it developed the British empire was much more trouble than it was worth. The same was even truer of the French Empire. And something like that seems to be true of Russia’s buffer states. They don’t provide direct income to Russia – not in the sense of a possession that can be mined. There are trade benefits, but surely these can better be maintained by peaceful traders than Russian generals.

The old Stalinist posture of having a huge army poised on every part of the Russian border seems to have had its day. Not only does it not seem necessary in 2009, but it seems rather paranoid. Do you have serious enemies at your gates today? If so, I don’t know who they are. China has a large army, but is more concerned about India and the Uyghur than you Russians. If they comprise a threat to you, surely it isn’t imminent. What else is there? Some border disputes and civil wars internal to some former buffer states? Hardly reason for a massive invasion by the Russian army, I would think.

But, you might say, there is the threat comprised by NATO. Cough, cough, wheeze [trying to keep a straight face but failing]. Well, if you find NATO any sort of threat, then you see things in it that I don’t. What sort of threat is comprised by a force where the various national elements must call home and get permission for acts before they take them?

NATO does have some sophisticated weapons, so I probably shouldn’t laugh at them too much, but they seem more of a club than an effective fighting force. NATO is good for building understanding between the various European nations, but it does not provide a truly effective fighting force. But even if it did, can you honestly say that there are any Western nations today that are “aggressive” in the sense that Germany was in the late 19^th and early 20^th century? Surely not.

Save yourself some money, Russia: abolish your draft