[lit-ideas] The prescience of the Soviet Union

Athens had the greatest Navy at the time and Sparta the greatest Army.
Hanson (op cit., p. 20-22) in trying to enable the reader to understand the
difficulty the two city states had in fighting each other drew a modern
comparison:  ". . . it would be as if in a world without nuclear weapons the
old Soviet Union at some point before the 1990s had presciently accepted
that ultimately it could not compete with the freewheeling democratic and
capitalist juggernaut of the United States.  Thus, the Soviet hard-liners
would have felt it necessary to send 300 divisions into Europe before their
own allies, and the world at large, shared this pessimistic appraisal of
their future and thus abandoned allegiance to their empire."

 

Comment:  That's a difficult comparison to accept whole-heartedly (for one
who is feeling lit-ideas-quibblish).  This "point" couldn't be 1945 because
Patton was quite sure he could keep going and defeat the Russian army in
that year or the next.  And could it have been after NATO was in existence?
It's true we would have had difficulty fielding 300 divisions, but European
divisions were part of NATO.  

 

Athens and Sparta shared the same land mass (which gave Sparta an inherent
advantage) but that was not true of the old Soviet Union and the U.S.; so it
would take some extraordinary act on the part of the USSR to get the US
involved in a land war over there.  Hanson thinks he's provided it with his
300-division-invasion into Western Europe, but I also remember that we did
not appear at all "freewheeling" during the Vietnam War which went on
between 1965 and 1975.  They would have had no reason to fear our defeating
them at that time.  And then in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan -
their own Vietnam - and after that failure which ended in 1989 they didn't
feel up to invading anyone else.  

 

So I guess that to appreciate Hanson's comparison it won't do to think too
carefully about it  -- and one must imagine the Soviet Union to have been
really really really prescient - and have felt really really really lucky.

 

Lawrence Helm

San Jacinto

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