The fact of the matter is the soviets were the biggest winners to come out of the second war of wilsonian aggression, proportionally speaking. Things could have easily gone bad for them; USG could have made sure things went bad for them; it didn’t. USG at every turn went out of its way to ensure the soviet’s strategic situation was secured; it got almost every single one of the concessions it wanted during post-war arrangements. The whole arc of the 20th century can be described as an unbroken chain of simping for communism by whigs of the world united. This is not said in terms of what they thought they were doing, this is said in terms of what they did do.

Both FDR and Stalin undoubtedly thought to themselves that they were using the other. Certainly FDR thought he was setting the world up for conquest by his empire. But what was the nature of that empire? Something remarkably isometric with his marxian fellow travelers. Thus the ultimate effects we observe.

No you gay nerd, it was always about U.S. empire. The USSR as it was originally fashioned was a means to this end.

“Gnostic impulse for thanatos” is comic book speak. Jesus Christ have mercy, grow up and go read a book.

No you gay nerd, it was always about U.S. empire. The USSR as it was originally fashioned was a means to this end.

“Gnostic impulse for thanatos” is comic book speak. Jesus Christ have mercy, grow up and go read a book.

The retrospective analysis is that unofficially official State Department policy was for America to surrender to the soviet union in order to usher in the immanent eschaton of a global enlightened managerial state; only problem was the communist world was so sclerotic in reality that it never became capable of accepting that surrender, and in the span of a lifetime petered out with a fart, leaving all the whigs in the occident holding their dicks and wondering how they are supposed to satisfy gnostic impulse for thanatos now.

Lend lease did very little to help the USSR. It was primarily a means of prolonging the war so that none of the Allies would respond to German requests for peace talks. Apologists for lend lease always talk about food aid, but Kissinger’s memo on using food aid as a means of control shows the lie in this.

The reason the U.S. turned on its ally was Stalin’s rejection of Zionism after Meier visited the USSR. Stalin had supported the Jewish identity movement and the creation of Israel, but balked at letting Soviet citizens emigrate to Palestine as, at the time, he thought the loss of its Jewish citizens would weaken the Soviet Union. This caused a falling out with the largely Jewish Bolsheviks (Stalin also had Jewish heritage, though his ancestors converted). Since the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Zionists were allies, Stalin’s opposition to emigration lost him the support of prominent U.S.-based Zionist organizations.

Of course, he then responded by expelling many Jews from the USSR which gave the Zionists what they wanted but not in the manner they had expected, thus resulting in the hatred people like Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have for the Russian Federation.

Excellent question. One answer might be that the Movers & Shakers realized that nuclear weapons delivered by long-range bombers were little more than an extra-big bang.

Sure, there would also be dangerous radioactive fallout — but people were still dying from WWI gas attacks; radiation was just another mechanism to get to the same result.

In WWII, the Allies had already demonstrated they could completely destroy a city without the use of nuclear weapons — see Dresden, Tokyo. Building a nuclear weapon was an immensely huge task compared to building the required number of conventional bombs, but then it took only one bomber to deliver it. Swings & roundabouts.

So the US ability in 1949 to drop a limited number of nuclear bombs on Soviet cities really did not change the strategic calculus. Then the Usual Suspects went all anti-nuclear, and the rest is history.