08-22-2017, 10:24 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-22-2017, 12:08 PM by Bob Butler 54.)
Kinser.
Too many stripes. I’m going with essay format.
The big thing missing in your analysis is the Cold War. The big lesson falling out of World War II was the domino theory. Supposedly, the military must be maintained to contain autocratic rule, mostly in the form of communism. The domino theory was first challenged by the peace movement during the Vietnam era. It was challenged again externally, by France and Russia, during Bush 43’s Iraq war, as well as domestically in the stay the course v cut and run debate. Both France and Russia were dealing for Iraq’s oil before the war started, and took exception to a sole superpower playing at neo colonialism. Iran had it’s own ideas on local balance of power. The western world was to a great extent willing to look away from the American Empire while the Cold War was in effect, but even an extremely competent and practiced Bush 43 foreign policy team didn’t anticipate how much opposition they would face when the sole superpower seriously twisted arms going for neo colonialism.
I can sympathize a lot with an alternate history shifting our heavy military spending and light domestic spending with the fall of the Berlin wall, but your partisan spin on history neglecting the Cold War is incomplete. The West was going to contain communism.
If you are willing to let places like the middle east and North Korea be handled by the locals, shifting the US domestic / military spending balance far more in line to the global norm is very much worth considering. Of course, that wouldn’t happen on a Trump / Republican watch. It runs too counter to the unraveling memes and Republican base.
Similarly, the Great Depression and New Deal are illustrations of a national level addressing of a national domestic problem. That too seems to have gone missing somewhere.
You’re hardly alone on this forum in being eager for a violent crisis that solves problems and make’s one’s own partisan viewpoint dominant. I find destroying stuff easy to wish for. It’s plausible resolutions that are hard.
I agree human hoarding power and wealth an animal instinct. This is to a great extent why I advocate feedback mechanisms that allow the common people to say no to elites. Changing the identity of the elites without building support for better feedback mechanisms seems futile.
Too many stripes. I’m going with essay format.
The big thing missing in your analysis is the Cold War. The big lesson falling out of World War II was the domino theory. Supposedly, the military must be maintained to contain autocratic rule, mostly in the form of communism. The domino theory was first challenged by the peace movement during the Vietnam era. It was challenged again externally, by France and Russia, during Bush 43’s Iraq war, as well as domestically in the stay the course v cut and run debate. Both France and Russia were dealing for Iraq’s oil before the war started, and took exception to a sole superpower playing at neo colonialism. Iran had it’s own ideas on local balance of power. The western world was to a great extent willing to look away from the American Empire while the Cold War was in effect, but even an extremely competent and practiced Bush 43 foreign policy team didn’t anticipate how much opposition they would face when the sole superpower seriously twisted arms going for neo colonialism.
I can sympathize a lot with an alternate history shifting our heavy military spending and light domestic spending with the fall of the Berlin wall, but your partisan spin on history neglecting the Cold War is incomplete. The West was going to contain communism.
If you are willing to let places like the middle east and North Korea be handled by the locals, shifting the US domestic / military spending balance far more in line to the global norm is very much worth considering. Of course, that wouldn’t happen on a Trump / Republican watch. It runs too counter to the unraveling memes and Republican base.
Similarly, the Great Depression and New Deal are illustrations of a national level addressing of a national domestic problem. That too seems to have gone missing somewhere.
You’re hardly alone on this forum in being eager for a violent crisis that solves problems and make’s one’s own partisan viewpoint dominant. I find destroying stuff easy to wish for. It’s plausible resolutions that are hard.
I agree human hoarding power and wealth an animal instinct. This is to a great extent why I advocate feedback mechanisms that allow the common people to say no to elites. Changing the identity of the elites without building support for better feedback mechanisms seems futile.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.