The Soviet Threat

At the end of World War II, many feared the western world would plunge, once again, into the Great Depression which the war had set aside. Millions of soldiers would return, seeking employment. Government deficit spending which had been done at unprecedented levels would largely dry up, shrinking the very aggregate demand which would be needed to provide work for returning servicemen. As it turned out, the US didn't dramatically cut it's military spending, but, instead continued and expanded it. The US established a huge, draft based standing military, something unprecedented in US history. This military posture was necessary to meet the Soviet Threat, or the threat of International Communism.

Churchill famously said "from Trieste in the Adriatic to Stettin on the Baltic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent." Surely, the Soviet Union expanded westward after WWII, absorbing Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and so on. This expansion was understandable from a Russian historical perspective. Russia always looked at the Warsaw Pact nations as part of it's "buffer" to the west. The Soviets had been invaded by the Western Powers after WWI, and saw the Baltic nations as necessary for their security from the Western Nations.

This is not to argue that the Warsaw Pact was a democratic venture. It was certainly not, at least from our perspective. On the other hand, neither was Russia itself. But that's not the point. The point is this, what and how real was the Soviet Threat? Did the Soviets intend to "bury us" in a literal sense, through physical force; or was Krushchev speaking metaphorically in the sense that their system would win, and ours fade away. The arms race was real enough.

I remember crouching under my desk at school in the air raid "kiss your ass goodby" ritual. I also remember being sent to my empty home since the school had decided that it was better that I was incinerated at home than at school. I remember the "missile gap" of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. I can personally recall much of the public rhetoric about the need to match Soviet power. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) comes quickly to mind. It was all worth literally trillions of dollars. Defence became a huge industry. Defense expenditures hovered at $300-400 billion a year. All this raises the question of Soviet aggression.

The Soviets kept a firm grip on their Warsaw Pact neighbors, even sending in the troops on several occasions to quell democratic uprisings. They also aided various leftist rebel groups around the world--so called Armies of Liberation. Considering the nature of the governments these rebels opposed--governments we largely supported--it might be entirely appropriate to call them Armies of Liberation.

We had wars, as well. We fought the Commies in Korea and Vietnam. The Korean War was likely not a Soviet project because on the day the Security Council of the UN voted to initiate a UN Police Action to push the North Koreans out of the South, the Soviet delegation was boycotting the Security Council. Something to do with US support of Formosa, I will guess. Were the Soviets in on the attack, they would have certainly been at the UN to veto the Security Council resolution.

Overall, there weren't many examples of Soviet military actions against other nations. Clearly, they attacked their Warsaw Pact partners, but the Soviets didn't really see these as independent nations. They attacked Afghanistan, but this was an effort to aid the leftist government there which was being toppled by the Taliban. The had, for what it's worth, a treaty which allowed the Afghan governent to invite Soviet military assistance.

This involvement isn't just a Soviet thing. The US overthrew the democratically elected Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 (for having the audacity to nationalize Iranian oil), installing the Shah of Iran in his stead. We tossed out the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, installing Castillo Armas as dictator in 1954. The CIA overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile, installing Augusto Pinochet in 1973. This is a partial list, but one that illustrates that the US was hardly the champion of democracy we like to paint ourselves as.

The Soviet Threat, was, I suspect, largely a myth. We needed to construct an enemy after WWII to continue the defense spending which many economists felt was necessary to avoid a return to depression. The Soviet Threat provided the rational for maintaining a huge standing military and military related industrial complex. It has, now, become our national industry and export.

The collapse of the Soviet Union presented the specter of greatly diminished military spending. This didn't happen. We got new enemies, and discovered a way to make warfare far more profitable than it had ever been before.

Stay tuned...