On the Cold War

On the Cold War

One of the most interesting aspects of that period, which really lasted from 1917 to 1994, in my reckoning, is (a) that the U.S. made various quantitative and qualitative modifications to many of its core political, military, and economic institutions – starting with the Nye Commission in 1924 – which made us somewhat “like the Soviet Union” on the theory that we had to do this in order to beat the Soviet Union; and (b) that the Soviet Union mirrored this – starting with the New Economic Plan – using much the same reasoning. This was all deemed “practical” and “necessary” without much deep thought, other than George F. Kennan’s.

By the late 1960’s this sort of mutual consent was called “convergence” and animated people at the very highest levels of bi-partisan wonkdom but also fed no end of “conspiracy theories” on the far left and right. I do not buy into the conspiracy theories but, with Michael LIND, I understand that when history is forgotten and political power is exercised obscurely or, in the case of our and other Central Banks, secretly, it is easy to imagine conspiracies all over the place.

I say this mindful of using a broad brush, well, a mop in a paint can, but the interesting aspect of convergence now is the considerable difficulty that the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. are both having getting back to something “normal,in our case, or just “viable” in the case of the former Soviet Union.

For instance, the Soviet Union is run by a KGB man with support from the military and wallows in “mafiya capitalism”. This is not a happy and, maybe, not a stable situation. It has the latent possibility of a free market in man-portable nuclear devices or naval ordnance. This is the worst thing I can think of today from either a Russian or American patriotic perspective.

And, the U.S. has its own comparable problems: Our external finances are probably as unsound today as the Soviet Union’s ever were, and the effects of our 7xGDP “OTC Derivative Book” are, I think, as crippling and distorting of our economy as the Soviet “Five Year Plans” were of theirs. Alan Greenspan and I disagree about this, and he is our lunatic financial “Tsar”, while I am merely eccentric.

Still, the scary part of all this financial extremism and secrecy is that our post-Cold War triumphalism has led to perpetuating and even extending the compromises that were supposedly temporary -- “for the duration”. We are further perverting our republican democracy and distorting our market economy when we should be systematically undoing a lot of what we did. Pathetic as things are in the former Soviet Union, they have actually been trying for something we would consider normal.

The quaintest example of this “World Turned Upside Down”, to my mind, is what was the Soviet Union’s exceptionally capitalist ordnance sector and what still is our exceptionally Stalinist ordnance sector. This topsy-turvy was an example of us emulating what we figured they were doing and were, in fact, doing with, say, agriculture. Only they decided to suspend the rules and allow their ordnance sector to function like capitalist enterprises. Legally and decoratively, their defense plants were, of course, “socialist” much as ours were and still are superficially “capitalist”, but in both cases these appearances were and, remarkably, still are a sham, in our case.

Actually, the former Soviet plants are doing better at converting to a sort of private enterprise than other ex-Soviet firms or, whatever you call nodes on their political-economic taxonomy. They are downsizing, globalizing, getting into very efficient international supply-chains, improving the fit and finish of their products, and, yes, exploiting, say, the Kalashnikov™ brand, for instance, on up-scale, export-grade vodka. Irbil now co-produces the Su-39 with a French engine and up-armored by Israel Aircraft Industry. This is the world’s most dangerous and marketable military aircraft today. It is not cheap, but it is very affordable.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to adhere to “Spinney’s Law” and marching relentlessly towards the day when both the U.S. and the U.K. will share (probably not actually fly) one single airplane, a joint/stealth/supersonic/day/night/fighter/bomber/scout/VTOL monstrosity costing the customary 15% of the total combined defense budgets of Anglo-America and piloted by a rotation of several hundred Major-Generals (1 hr of computer-simulated “flight-time” per year) from six services. Actually, Spinney’s chart extrapolates out to that point a little before the supposed “bankruptcy” of Social Security.

I am unlikely to be around then. But, students need to be able to think ahead but also to study history at least to the extent of their own expected life-spans.

Of course, all our retrospective and prospective studies could be suddenly interrupted by detonation of a nuclear weapon – probably of an unknown provenance -- or, in the case of the “OTC Derivative Book”, by what Warren Buffett – another eccentric who thinks Greenspan is a lunatic – calls a “thermonuclear” event involving derivatives.

Study hard, while you still have a chance. The generations of the Great, World, and Cold Wars did not, finally, blow up the world, when we could have, But, we have left a lot of things worse than we found them. Our republican democracy is one of them. It is more "inclusive" now, but less robust.

::JRBehrman