George Rebane

[This post is really a focused continuation of topics raised by James Currier in the comments to ‘Obama, you gotta love him!’.  For now I will simply characterize James as an educated, left-leaning, successful capitalist, although he may correct me as he has in the past 😉  His views are important to those of us on the conservative cum libertarian side, because they represent what has emerged as the dominant mindset of the intellectual left and also many of those whom our President-elect is appointing to high office in his upcoming administration.  To understand these perspectives may help us anticipate and understand what Barack Obama intends for us in the coming months and years.  And to those of us predisposed and already anointed as critics-in-waiting of everything from inside the Beltway, we should prepare ourselves with this knowledge so that our future tirades may contain more light than their inevitable heat.]

Regarding world changes:  Here it seems to me we may be confusing prediction of change with the actual change or the ‘change event’.  I disagree wholeheartedly with the notion that the Berlin Wall’s fall and 9/11 did not embody a ‘world change’.  Yes, many people predicted the fall of communism, as did many predict the conflict between the US and Japan.  (In 1935 Will Durant predicted the inevitability of that conflict in his first volume of Story of Civilization.)  But when 7 Dec 1941 arrived, the world did indeed change with the US entry into both theaters of WW2, and we are living with the strong echoes of that entry to this day.  Things would have been different had we not unequivocally thrown our weight on the side of the Allies.
 
With regard to the “common knowledge that they (USSR) were done” in 1980, nothing could be further from the truth.  The cold war had two crisis periods where the likelihood of WW3 peaked.  The first was very public and occurred when Krushcev tested Kennedy and Johnson in the early 1960s (lasting longer than the Cuban missile crisis).  Overshadowed in the public eye by the oil crises, the second occurred during the latter part of the Carter presidency in the late 1970s.   Many reputable analysts and historians persuasively argue that the second crisis was the more dangerous of the two, precisely because the USSR was economically weaker and saw a weak American president as fortunate coincidence during which to roll the tanks through Fulda Gap.  (I was in a position to witness both of these crises from the ‘inside’.)  Most educated people on the right had known for decades that the USSR would end either ‘hard’ (WW3 with civilization in tatters), or ‘soft’ with its economy in tatters and an internal putsch.  It was always their call during which time we wanted to present them with the MAD outcome for the ‘hard’ alternative, while waiting for the inevitable ‘soft’ resolution to realize.  This strategy was common knowledge in the educated world.

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