Foolishness
“It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.” Historian Will Durant.
For the first 40 years of my life, the world was engulfed in what was termed, The Cold War. This was a major geopolitical conflict between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic capitalistic countries of the world led by the United States. The two superpowers faced each other in a large number of incidents around the world and threatened nuclear war if each didn’t have its way. The near constant antagonization and deadly political jockeying was always something that lurked in the background of my life as I grew up, started working and settled down to marry and raise a family. The Soviet Union military, as I was constantly reminded, was huge, powerful and ready to crush the free world. The Russian nuclear forces were always ready to launch against the corrupt forces of capitalism and to destroy us entirely. We believed this to be actually possible and there was always the notion that we had better be ready to fight for our freedoms at any price.
Despite the utter horror that I have experienced watching the events of the last three weeks play out in Ukraine, it is with considerable satisfaction that I see the Russian military forces stagger through a comedy of errors in their invasion plans. They are however, more then capable of inflicting untold amounts of misery and outright death to large numbers of unarmed civilians and cause destruction on a huge scale. Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia has, predictively, threatened the rest of the world with nuclear destruction if they interfere. But we now see him as a poker player with a weaker hand these days. And now, nothing will ever erase the vision of his modern military ineptness from my mind. My youthful bogeyman has become somewhat clownish.
Was I and the rest of the world foolish to believe that the Soviet Union was ever that big of a threat? That is a very good question. After crushing the Nazis on the eastern front in World War II, the victorious Soviets had created a massive war machine. All of the Eastern European countries that they had overrun in the war they now occupied and were determined to keep them under their control. Other parts of the world beckoned, former colonial countries, unaligned peoples and resource rich areas of the world were ripe for the picking. The watchword for the U.S. was containment, keeping the communists from taking over the world, and we spent heavily to oppose them.
Yes, they were really that powerful, but even the powerful eventually grow weary. The shear cost of maintaining the Soviet Union caused it to collapse in 1991 and split into 15 separate countries, each independent of the others with Russia the largest. Now Russia wants to revive their former empire by threats, intimidation and outright invasion. This time around they have the same powerful military machine that they once had but the ability to conquer seems to be a bit lacking. The nuclear weapons are still there, but for the Russians to use them is to cause their own destruction as well as everyone else. That is one option that goes beyond the realm of sensibility and leads to nothing at all for anybody.
(The Soviet Union was our ally against the Nazis during WWII. But as soon as the war ended, the communists started to make sure that they would never be weak again and suffer invasion like Germany inflicted on them in 1941.)
