Suppose the US had said at the end of WWII, “OK, that’s it. We are out of here. We are going back across the ocean, and we have nukes to destroy anyone who messes with us. It is up to you Europeans & Asians to sort out your own problems”. Would the US today be a better place? How about the rest of the world?…”

Your most certainly right about the bad consequences for the US and the west for fighting the cold war but…look how many people died wherever they took over. You don’t have to be competent if you can just shoot anyone who us. And once they had enough power, countries and resources even the barely competent can defeat you.

I think we could have made detente work during the Brezhnev era but when they invaded Afghanistan then…well the gloves came off even Jimmy Carter, who surely believed he could make a deal with them, decided that they couldn’t be trusted.

In the Soviet Union, so long as you were a good Party member, you were insulated from consequences sourced in reality. Pissing off Stalin, or one of his lieutenants could get you killed, of course, but that was an entirely separate issue from whether or not you were “right”. Ask any of the Red Army leadership that got purged before WWII–Tukachevsky would probably have some interesting things to say about the way reality wasn’t penetrating through to the upper leadership.

We’ve done very much the same. If a member of our nomenklatura screws things up, so long as they remain ideologically pure, they’re never going to be held accountable. This is the fundamental issue with the whole of left-wing philosophy and conduct: Nobody ever pays a price for getting anything wrong. Learning does not occur, because they’ve short-circuited the feedback loop. So long as it is ideologically correct to touch that burner, the nerves will never inform anyone that touching the damn thing hurts.

You see the same thing across our society, in terms of there being a reality dysfunction. Want to discipline a black soldier? LOL… Better be damn sure you’ve got him dead to rights, have dotted all the “i’s” and crossed all the “t’s”, ‘cos if you haven’t, he’s going to get away with murder. Perhaps literally… All because of the fact that nobody wants to be the bad guy in holding him accountable, or, worse yet, run the risk of being seen as “racist” or “unfair to blacks”.

That’s a symptom of the mentality that’s pervasive throughout it all, these days. Zero accountability, zero responsibility, zero consequence.

I’d also suggest that the Chinese Communists are not much better, in this regard. If you’re a member of the Party, you’ll never pay the price for screwing up. Unless, of course, you’re like one of Stalin’s victims and wind up as a bad example for others. The Chinese are still on that upward half of the bell curve, where there’s a chance you’ll receive consequences for your stupidity or cupidity. That will undoubtedly change, and probably in a lot shorter time than you might think. Once it does, well… Yeah. Look out, it’s time for the Warlords again…

The root of the problem is in the fact that the “establishment” even exists. So long as there are “old boy networks” and hereditary positions to benefit from, you’re going to see this sort of crap. In the Army, you’d occasionally run into cases where the West Point Protective Association was actually a thing, and the right officer, usually a minority member, would literally have someone cover for their rank and arrant idiocy. No black officer is ever going to be disciplined for most of the things that would end a white male’s career, and if that officer is female and black? LOL… She could murder someone in a staff meeting, and most of the people attending it would just look the other way and profess ignorance to the investigating officer.

Suppose the US had said at the end of WWII, “OK, that’s it. We are out of here. We are going back across the ocean, and we have nukes to destroy anyone who messes with us. It is up to you Europeans & Asians to sort out your own problems”. Would the US today be a better place? How about the rest of the world?

My evolving view is that Competence is more important than Communism or Capitalism, especially in a world in which everyone is drifting towards the functional equivalent of Fascism.

What brought down the USSR was incompetence — bad decisions they made on agriculture, which required the USSR to import large amounts of food. When the price of oil was high, the USSR could afford to do that. When Saudi Arabia drove down the price of oil, the USSR ran out of money and collapsed. Killed by incompetence.

On the other hand, nominally Communist China has benefitted amazingly from competent leadership after Mao died. They know what their long-term goals are, and they are focused on achieving them.

Meanwhile, the West (including the US) has suffered from a real dearth of competence in its Political Class, including bureaucrats, academics, lawyers, and business people as well as elected officials.

Where does Competence come from? Why do some societies at some stages have it, while others do not?

I still believe that Communism was a Hellish evil, and that the Cold War, in some form, was necessary, but seeing how things have gone since its end, I’m less and less sure that we fought it the right way, or for the right ends. McCarthy was essentially right; domestic Communism was the larger threat, if not exactly in the way he believed. I’m a lot more open to your viewpoint than I would have been even five years ago.

How much of what happened in the Cold War was due entirely to our own paranoia? How much was actual fun-house mirror reflection of our own issues?

Not to argue that the Communists weren’t utter bastards bent on subverting the rest of the world, either–Just that I suspect a lot of our reactionary BS was entirely self-referential. “We can do it, so they must be doing it, too…”. Ya gotta wonder just how much of the military-industrial complex stems from that nuttiness, especially when you look at the things that are open-source and public, like the whole “Build the MIG-25 to counter the cancelled XB-70…” thing, with the rest of the various packages we copied from them. It’s like a solipsist self-reinforcing circular cluster-f**k of a firing squad.

The other question is, what the hell would have happened had we been open and honest about it all, and just patted the Soviets on the head, said “Isn’t that special…” to all their claims of economic and demographic superiority, and then let them go on to collapse without us warping our society to compete with them and spending trillions of borrowed dollars on weapons? How much of that BS was really necessary?

The whole idea of Communism was eventually going to come to a bad end, once all the many and sundry internal self-contradictions caught up with them. Maybe we sped things up, maybe we didn’t. We certainly spent a shed-load of money, and did vast damage to our cultural commons in the fight. Was it worth it?

At the age of near-sixty, there’s a lot of reconsideration of things on my part. I’m not so sure that the things I was taught and came to believe were either accurate, or really, truly necessary. I suspect that Communism was going to collapse anyway, hard though that may have been for 20 year-old me to believe. Should we have done what we did? Was spending all that money, all that effort, all that damage to our civil rights, really necessary?

It’s an interesting thing to consider, heretical though it may be.

But we don’t have to go out looking for fights. The fights will come to us.