The Domino Theory, Then and Now

Matt writes:

I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds -- emboldened -- were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.

Well, okay, the fall of Vietnam didn't lead to a Red Dawn-like scenario, with America standing alone - actually, alongside "six hundred million screaming Chinamen," if I remember the movie right - against the Soviet juggernaut. But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the world wasn't really going the Soviets way in the late '70s, as people on both sides thought it was - or at least that their internal contradictions prevented them from capitalizing on the opportunities that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam afforded them, and eventually led them into their own Vietnam-style overreach. Similarly, our enemies in al-Qaeda, Iran and elsewhere probably won't make the kind of gains that, say, Rick Santorum and other feverish voices anticipate if we pull out of Iraq, and they simply aren't strong enough to pose an existential threat to the U.S. over the long run. But they will win a real victory, just as Soviet Communism won a real victory in the early 1970s, and that victory will have real repercussions around the globe. I think we were right to pull out of Vietnam when we did, and wrong to be there in the first place, but it's too simplistic to say that the domino theory looks "completely wrong" or "crazy" in hindsight; there are an awful lot of dead people in Indochina, Latin America and Africa who would quibble with that assessment.

Comments

Vietnam "played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure."

How?

Also, Communist China and Communist Cambodia both went to war against Communist Vietnam. It's not clear to me that the Domino Theory was correct even in Southeast Asia.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 23, 2007 11:51 AM

Of course, the war itself killed far more people in Indochina than the post-war chaos did, and the people we were fighting in Vietnam actually SAVED Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge, but hey, details are boring. Heroic myths are so much more compelling.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 23, 2007 11:56 AM

"...six hundred million screaming Chinamen"

"I thought there were a billion Chinamen"

"There was."

Posted by goethean | August 23, 2007 12:36 PM

Elvis and LaFollette,

Cambodia wasn't "Communist" when we withdrew from Vietnam but their communist insurgents were armed and helped in all sorts of ways by the North Vietnamese commies. Later, it is true that when the Khmer Rouge became a problem for Vietnam, they helped get rid of Pol Pot and gang (to install another repressive communist leader).

As for whether or not the war in Vietnam killed more people than the post-war chaos, while I doubt this statement is true for Vietnam (the commies were very good at killing lots of people they didn't like) it is certainly NOT true of Cambodia. Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge take the prize for killing the most. Rent the movie "The Killing Fields" when you get the chance.

Posted by Jeff Singer | August 23, 2007 12:37 PM

"But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted."

Actually, the US inadvertently aided Communist advances in Cambodia and Laos by spreading the war to those countries. In those parts of Southeast Asia to which the war didn't spread [Thailand, for instance], the dominoes failed to fall. Citing Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Mozambique as "dominoes" simply shows how ramshackle the theory always was, based as it was on a notion that a huge range of local conflicts could be jammed into a single Cold War framework. In various countries indigenous groups tried to manipulate superpower conflict to their own advantage; to take Afghanistan, we basically sponsored an insurgency leading to a power vacuum that ultimately gave us the Taliban and Al Qaeda [which makes it even more ridiculous for Bush to claim that Vietnam gave us Osama]. In point of fact, the world is a complicated place full of countervailing forces, and actions leading to unintended consequences. The notion that there are only two sides, and that our relationship with the world is some sort of zero-sum game--a notion that conservatives cling to for reasons having less to do with reality than with their own ideological needs to enforce internal solidarity and external militance--has proven repeatedly false. Vietnam is now a *trading partner,* dammit, not a domino--and pretending that everything that happened since the 1970s is irrelevant is just plain silly.

Posted by David | August 23, 2007 12:49 PM

"But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted..."

Well, no, actually. Thailand did not, nor Burma, and they're considered part of Indochina. I guess there were Communist insurrections in those nations, too, but they never reached the kindof critical mass the Viet Cong did. In order for the domino theory--the Red Tide inundating all of Asia--to have transpired, conventional forces from Vietnam and China would have had to launch some actual invasions. Yes, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, but that was to end the insanity of the Khmer Rouge, not to prepare for the "liberation" of Thailand. No, I don't think the domino theory had much merit, because Vietnam was first and foremost a nationalist war to unify the Vietnamese under one government free from colonialism. The communist stuff was always secondary. Our big error was in not understanding that reality.

Posted by Claudius | August 23, 2007 1:02 PM

If winning in Vietnam was so important, why did George Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, et al. avoid service? If George and the others had been willing to die in Vietnam, we would have won. But they weren't willing to die there.

The Administration has done nothing but lie about this war from the beginning--lying about the threat that Saddam posed to the U.S. (none), lying about nuclear weapons, lying about its goals for the invasion, lying about the number of troops needed, lying about the cost, lying about the progress of the war, lying about everything.

The current "surge" is an exercise in political PR, prompted by the Democratic victory in 2006. If the Republicans had held Congress, there would have been no surge, and Donald Rumsfeld would still be Secretary of Defense. The only real strategy the Administration has is kicking the can further down the road. We can't quit now, because after four years of sacrifice, we're finally making progress! The next six to twelve months will be critical!

Posted by Alan Vanneman | August 23, 2007 1:16 PM

"But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted, and it played a role in the Soviet advances across the Third World during the rest of the 1970s - from Ethiopia and Mozambique to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, with various other proxy wars thrown in for good measure"

Even if this were true: What did it matter? In what respect did this, all things considered, weaken the west stratigically? I'll tell you how: Not at all.

The strengh of the west was (and is) its economical and technological superiority, protected by enough firepower for the USSR never risking a direct military challange after the Cuba crisis.

That was the central weakness of the whole proxy-war game: Both sides vastly overestimated the importance of the proxies. The "victories" of the USSR in places like Central America or Africa were propaganda victories, nothing more. In real terms, they weakened the USSR, because the new sattelites (if you could call them that), just as the old ones, had to be subsidised to keep them in place, which in the end overwhelmed the Sovjets' meager economic base. Imperial overreach, anyone?

Posted by Patrick | August 23, 2007 1:26 PM

More conflation of disparate elements....

In the Vietnam war, was the U.S. fighting the Vietcong, or fighting "Soviet Communism"?

And in Iraq, are we fighting Al Qaeda? or is there a messy war between coalition forces, Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, Sunni militias and Shia militias?

Vietnam wasn't really a two-sided conflict, and the current war in Iraq certainly isn't.

Posted by Warren | August 23, 2007 1:34 PM

Jeff Singer- Official estimates for the number of Vietnamese killed in the war from 1960-1975 range from 1.5 to 5 Million. This does not include Laotians or Cambodians killed by US bombing, or the nearly 60,000 US troops killed. Any attempt to claim that the Vietnamese regime executed more people than that after 1975 are completely and utterly ludicrous.

The Khmer Rouge reign of terror killed an estimated 1-2 million. It is also indisputably true that the US bombing of Cambodia and support for the unpopular Lon Nol regime contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which controlled much of the Cambodian countryside before the fall of Saigon. It is highly doubtful that the US would have had any more success propping up the Nol regime than they had propping the RVN.

The Killing Fields is a terrific film, but I strongly suggest you look to more authoritative sources than Hollywood to understand what actually happened in Indochina.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 23, 2007 1:36 PM

I have a simple question for Ross, how many more Vietnamese were you willing to kill to stop the spread of communism?

Posted by Pritesh | August 23, 2007 1:54 PM

LaFollette Progressive to Jeff Singer: "The Killing Fields is a terrific film, but I strongly suggest you look to more authoritative sources than Hollywood to understand what actually happened in Indochina."

Jeff's other sources include "The Green Berets" and the wicked awesome Rambo movies. He's working his way up to the Chuck Norris "Delta Dawn" flicks.

Hawks reveal so much of themselves on these sites, don't they?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 23, 2007 2:08 PM

Pritesh asks: "I have a simple question for Ross, how many more Vietnamese were you willing to kill to stop the spread of communism?"

The old con phrase "better dead than red" gives a clue, I think. There have been lots of others, too - the threat to turn Vietnam (or Iraq) "into a parking lot" is one I still hear. And, of course, the yahoos just love the idea of using nukes.

Of course the US rained hell on North Vietnam for years, and they took it and kept on fighting. In the end, as any sane and decent person could have predicted, they cared more about their homeland than we did.

There's no question the same is true in Iraq. But then as now, cons may be sane or they may be decent, but a decent and sane one is a very rare beast.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 23, 2007 2:13 PM

"With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the world wasn't really going the Soviets way in the late '70s, as people on both sides thought it was - or at least that their internal contradictions prevented them from capitalizing on the opportunities that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam afforded them, and eventually led them into their own Vietnam-style overreach."

The overreach thesis is correct. The Soviet Union acquired expensive obligations in Afghanistan and elsewhere that it could not sustain. These added burdens contributed significantly to the crisis Gorbachev perceived, leading him to set in train the events that led to the demise of the Soviet Union and a unipolar structure of international power.

In reaction to the Vietnam debacle, US military spending slid to a low of 4.6 percent of GDP in 1979. Reacting to the Soviet advances you note, it rose to about 6 percent in 1983-1987, and then began to fall to a low of 3 percent of GDP in 1999-2001. In fiscal year 2002 it rose (the Republican party in power raised it) to 3.4 percent, by 2004 it had risen to 4.0 percent and now stands at an estimated 4.2 percent--still below its Cold War low. Moreover, conscription was discontinued in 1973 (partly in response to a 1971 one-man filibuster by Mike Gravel), though the United States still put 500,000 troops on the ground in Kuwait in 1991. (After the Cold War, army troop levels fell by a third.)

It's not clear that the Islamists--Muslims who aim to kill us westerners--will gain from the failure of an American occupation to install a stable government of its choice. The government there will presumably be Shiite, but also Arab and disinclined to take orders from Tehran. As an offset to Iranian influence it doesn't exist today, and might after our departure. Possibly Sunnis will be able to maintain effective control of three or four governorates, but it doesn't follow that al-Qaeda, or militant Islamists of any stripe, will exercise this control.

We might worry too about Islamist ascendancy in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. But one can scarcely imagine the dispatch of troops to the last two, nor advisedly to first three.

It is clear, I think, that using our troops for purposes of conquering and occupying any predominantly Muslim country--and no non-Muslim country need worry us enough to consider an invasion--would be ill-advised. If the Iraq experience reduces the chances they will be so used, that's to the good.

At the macro-level, the destabilization of non- or anti-Islamist regimes, the "fall" of Iraq will make little difference. America's reputation isn't the chief factor determining the stability of these regimes. As to the recruitment and training of terrorists by unauthorized leaders, perhaps they'll benefit for a year or two from what they'll portray as their victory in Iraq. But they will also lose from the removal of an apparently imperialistic presence of American forces in Mesopotamia. Remember Gerges's interviews showing how the invasion of Iraq revived al-Qaeda's sagging fortunes within the Islamist movement.

Posted by Unworried | August 23, 2007 2:27 PM

By 1975, capitalism looked like a much better economic system relative to communism to Asians than it had in, say, 1965. Japan was an economic superpower, and the four "tigers" had emerged to show it wasn't a fluke: Asians and capitalism were a good mix. The contrast between South and North Korea was becoming too obvious to ignore.

That's a big reason that the dominos stopped at 3 in Southeast Asia, and didn't extend into Thailand and beyond.

In contrast, capitalism wasn't much of a success in Africa at the time, so communism seemed more relatively appealing than in Asia. That made siding with the Soviets seem more plausible, so the Soviets had more successes there in the late 1970s. But, it turned out that Africa was mostly just a sink hole of empire, costing far more than it was worth to the Russkies.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 3:04 PM

"Cambodia wasn't "Communist" when we withdrew from Vietnam but their communist insurgents were armed and helped in all sorts of ways by the North Vietnamese commies. Later, it is true that when the Khmer Rouge became a problem for Vietnam, they helped get rid of Pol Pot and gang (to install another repressive communist leader)."

This is patently untrue. Most of our forces left by 1973 but we had a presence in Vietnam, including military adivsors, until April 30. The Khmer Rouge had already taken Phnom Penh by that date.

The North Vietnames may have had a tactical alliance in the early 1970's but the two sides deeply distrusted and hated each other (read, "Brother Enemy").

As for your statement "that when the Khmer Rouge became a problem for Vietnam, they helped get rid of Pol Pot and gang"... well that's a bit of an understatement. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, it was only after the Khmer Rouge had killed nearly every single Vietnamese in the country and had begun gruesome cross border raids into Vietnam, where they massacre entire villages, beheaded Vietnamese civilians, and were known to eat the organs of those they killed. It's hardly that the "Khmer Rouge became a problem for Vietnam." The Khmer Rouge were more than a problem.

In fact, only 1 day after the North took Saigon (May 1, 1975) and the Khmer Rouge attacked the Vietnam Island of Phu Quoc and massacred 500 people. Vietnam had nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge after the U.S. pulled out.

Posted by Mike | August 23, 2007 3:04 PM

Matt Yglesias frequently gets the past wrong because he's so young. If you were alive between 1975 and 1979, it was clear that there was a domino effect going on, scattered around the world. The wind seemed to be blowing in the Soviets direction.

In hindsight, we know that the Soviets were picking up the crummy countries, while capitalism was strengthening itself relative to communism in countries that really counted like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and West Germany.

Yglesias doesn't understand the subtleties of the history at all.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 3:09 PM

Steve, are you arguing that the Domino Theory was technically true, but unimportant? Or that in the 1970s you thought the Soviet Union was going to overpower us?

I'm not quite sure I get why Yglesias is wrong, in your view.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 23, 2007 3:17 PM

There was a domino effect if you conflate any military style leftist movements in any country on any continent with what happened in Vietnam. In this view, countries with deeply individualized circumstances, be it Nicaragua, Angola, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, etc. are all lumped together as if a monolith, a deeply ahistorical world view.

The reality is that none of these movements posed a security threat to the U.S. despite the hysteria of right wingers.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | August 23, 2007 3:34 PM

Steve,

The "I was alive then, I know better" line of arguments is probably better suited for another type of forum. Among other things I too was alive back then and it was not clear at all that there was a domino effect.

Posted by Gabriel | August 23, 2007 3:36 PM

Ross: "But the Communist victory in Vietnam did lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, as the domino theorists predicted,..."

Truth just ain't your strong point, is it?

Just to pile on:

After S. Vietnam fell, the only country in Indonesia which went commie was Cambodia - and it's been shown above that this was as much due to US actions in fighting there as anytyhing else. Laos was (IIRC) already communist.

Posted by Barry | August 23, 2007 3:59 PM

The "domino effect" is predicated on the concept that communism or socialism is on equal strategic footing with capitalism. As a populist movement it certainly had advantages in the support of poor and disenfranchised populations, you could argue it did mighty well in the area of "ideology upon which to base a revolution." However, if history has shown us one thing, communism is pretty weak against capitalism when we're talking about things like manufacturing, technology, economic robustness and long term viability. Simply put it is not a practical economic model at least when it exists in competition with capitalism in any area. This is why Lenin said communist revolution needed to happen worldwide, all at once, or it wouldn't succeed; it just couldn't compete with the economic power of capitalism.

Anyway, it was one thing to think of the domino problem in 1970. We didn't have the guide of history to tell us that just because communism was popular with all the poor people around the world that it really didn't matter, that capitalist industrial might would win in the end. We didn't need to defend Vietnam, we could have let the entire communist world go the way of China, which is to say somewhat peacefully and eventually come to emulate US capitalism to their own betterment and detriment.

Today, however, it seems like a joke to cite the domino theory at all, doesn't it? Whatever dominoes there were did not matter. The millions and millions of lives lost in SE Asia in the 60's and 70's, the millions lost in America's Latin American neo-conservative laboratory in the 80's, they were taken in somewhat paranoid attempts to respond to a threat that in the end was no threat at all. That that blood was shed under somewhat false pretenses, with dubious motives, by people unwilling to stand up to 100% accountability for their actions, who were acting in un-elected proxy for a public they (wrongly) felt didn't have the stomach to live in the harsh reality of the world, should be enough to tell us that citing that theory today is simply 100% incorrect. It was incorrect back then when it could be argued we didn't know any better (even though I think we did). Now that we do know better, what is it? Paranoia? Neurosis? Fascism? Pathetic?

Maybe all of the above.

Posted by bakum | August 23, 2007 4:00 PM

"The wind seemed to be blowing in the Soviets direction. In hindsight, we know that the Soviets were picking up the crummy countries".

Maybe, but this is not about blaming the politicians in the 1970's for having been stupid. It's about what (or better: what not) can be learned from Vietnam for the future. And for that, it's pretty irrelevant if it's "just" hindsight or not.

Posted by Patrick | August 23, 2007 4:32 PM

"After S. Vietnam fell, the only country in Indonesia which went commie was Cambodia - and it's been shown above that this was as much due to US actions in fighting there as anytyhing else. Laos was (IIRC) already communist."

Just to nitpick... the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia before the U.S. completely pulled out of Vietnam.

While nominally communist, the Khmer Rouge sided with the Chinese while the Vietnamese were aligned with the Soviets. Thus, the Vietnam-Cambodia-China War, documented so well in Brother Enemy. A communist-communist war which completely undermines the idea of a monolithic communist brotherhood.

Posted by Mike | August 23, 2007 4:38 PM

There was clearly a bandwagon effect going on in the later 1970s. People like a winner and want to jump on the bandwagon of the winning side.

During the later 1960s and early 1970s, the global balance between the Soviets and their communist system and the Americans and their capitalist system in terms of allies and puppet states was quite stable, despite the big shift to the left culturally seen around the world in that period.

This stais was likely due in large part to the Vietnam War, which was seen around the world as a test of strength of the two sides. The success of the North Vietnamese invasion beginning in December 1974, and the lack of aerial response from an America self-crippled in the wake of Watergate, gave the impression that communism just might be the wave of the future.

So, you rapidly had a series of communist victories scattered around the world, in Laos and Cambodia, in Latin America, in Central America, and especially in Africa, where Cuban forces in the pay of the Soviets showed up in 16 different countries.

Today, basically, we believe, even if we are too polite to admit it publicly, that these kind of Third World countries that the Soviets were picking up just don't matter all that much strategically: they're backward and they aren't going to become economically important any time soon. What really matters strategically is northeastern Asia (and its cultural offshoots) and Europe, along with the Persian Gulf for oil. And in Europe and northeast Asia, things were quietly going our way as the economic gap between our allies and their allies widened. But that wasn't conventional wisdom at the time -- John Kenneth Galbraith was telling us that the Soviet economic model was pretty successful.

Moreover, back then, it wasn't so obvious that, say, Africa was irrelevant. In fact, it seemed kind of racist then to say that all the Russkies were going to get out of their new puppet regime in, say, Guinea-Bissau were a bunch of Soviet pilots with strange tropical diseases that the doctors back home in Moscow had never seen before.

It's clear now that the Soviets frittered away their money in a lot of useless Third World hellholes. They would have been better off saving up for a single big push down through chaotic Iran in 1979 to the Persian Gulf to grab all the oil. Then they could have strangled the capitalist world economically and survived their own economic incompetence.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 5:08 PM

It's pretty clear now that the US withdrawal from Vietnam didn't do long term damage to US interests. My guess is the same will be true if we withdraw from Iraq today.

But this ignores the moral side of the question. It's pretty clear that while US withdrawal from Vietnam didn't hurt us much, it was a disaster for untold numbers of Vietnamese. As much as I'd like to be done with it, I'm concerned the same would be true if we left Iraq now. I don't want to stay forever, but neither do I want to wash our hands and watch chaos ensue.

Posted by chris | August 23, 2007 5:11 PM

Mike,

You say, in response to my comment concerning the withdrawal of U.S. support for South Vietnam leading to North Vietnamese support for the Khmer Rouge:

"Most of our forces left by 1973 but we had a presence in Vietnam, including military advisors, until April 30. The Khmer Rouge had already taken Phnom Penh by that date."

I did sort of imply a simple correlation between the end of U.S. troops in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge take-over and you rightly point out that my timing is wrong. However, I still think the broader point holds, which is that without U.S. support for either Lon Nol or the South Vietnamese government, these governments fell before the commie onslaught. As for those commies, let us not forget that whatever their actual support in their respective countries by the "common man", they would never have succeeded in waging war all those years without Soviet and Chinese support and without the use of terror and political repression.

LaFollette Progressive,

To blame the total death toll of war dead on U.S. involvement in Vietnam is silly. Believe it or not there really was a South Vietnamese government and their people really didn't want to be governed by a bunch of crazy commies. So the war between the North and the South was about much more than U.S. (or Soviet and Chinese) involvement. In the end, the real blame for Vietnamese war dead falls on the DRVN and Ho and gang. And while the total number of folks dead post-1975 due to political persecution and collectivization in Vietnam doesn't total the war dead from 1960-1975, it is true that millions (yes, plural of one million) South Vietnamese fled their country to AVOID death.

MoeLarryAndJesus,

"The Killing Fields" is just one of my sources for what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, although it is a pretty good source considering it is based on the real life experiences of Dith Pran. As for my other Hollywood sources, I've always been a big fan of the much-maligned "Rambo III", which has the Soviets as the bad guys (and a pre-Taliban Afghan guerilla force as Rambo's allies!) I can't wait for "Rambo IV", in production right now!

Posted by Jeff Singer | August 23, 2007 5:17 PM

The left suffers a bad case of convenient amnesia on this topic. The current claim is:

"We knew that capitalism was so much superior to socialism economically that capitalist was inevitably bound to win, so we didn't need a huge military to win the Cold War."

Well, I remember the 1970s vividly, and that isn't what the respectable left was saying at the time at all. From 1929 onward, much of the left had considered communism superior to capitalism economically. Even in the 1970s, the respectable left thought capitalism's edge over communism in productivity was only modest. With all the economic troubles visible in the capitalist world (and the communist world's troubles largely hidden), few at the time were boasting that capitalism would bury communism in a sea of high quality consumer goods.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 5:19 PM

Steve Sailer claims: "Well, I remember the 1970s vividly, and that isn't what the respectable left was saying at the time at all. From 1929 onward, much of the left had considered communism superior to capitalism economically. Even in the 1970s, the respectable left thought capitalism's edge over communism in productivity was only modest. With all the economic troubles visible in the capitalist world (and the communist world's troubles largely hidden), few at the time were boasting that capitalism would bury communism in a sea of high quality consumer goods."

Gee, that's funny. I also "remember the 1970s vividly," and I remember being very much aware of the economic problems Communist countries were having, and wondering why the war-crazed righties were so worried about a system with such obvious weaknesses. The fact that toilet paper was a luxury Russians were willing to wait in long lines for was a well-known joke during those years.

Of course righties always need an apocalyptic enemy to point at, and the Commies served that purpose then. Now it's the dreaded Islamofascists, who are weaker by far than the previous Horrific Menace.

So after the "we'd all be speaking Arabic if Gore/Kerry/Clinton/Obama" nonsense passes, who do the righties have lined up as the next Super Bad Guys? Zoroastrians? Nigerian beekeepers? Let us know, guys.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 23, 2007 6:06 PM

Steve Sailer,

Your pretense to speak for what the respectable left thought in 1979 is just nonsense. As a self-identified democratic socialist at that point in time it never occurred to me that the Soviet Union was admirable, the wave of the future, or economically admirable. People were quite aware of the fact that the Russians offered nothing to consumers, could barely feed itself, and had to keep its people captive in order to prevent them from fleeing either the USSR or its Eastern European satellites. Support for dissidents in the Eastern bloc was quite strong among lefty labor types. Soidarity was a union after all.

I think there were very few victories for the Soviets in the late 1970s and that the ones that were perciveved as such by the right were explained not by a sense that the USSR was the wave of the future but as a result of indigenous conditions that led to some leftist movements gaining power in a few African countries and one Central American country. Hardly dominose falling as a result of Vietnam.

Posted by Klein's Tiny Left Nut | August 23, 2007 6:10 PM

Let's look at what John Kenneth Galbraith, the bestselling economist of all time, was saying in 1979-1984. From Richard Parker's website:

"Extending the argument of The New Industrial State, Galbraith insisted that the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly alike, converging into somewhat different versions of the planned society. This was no small misjudgment. Galbraith's conceit about the depth of his insights led him 1980 to describe the gray-on-gray world of East Berlin as strikingly similar to the neon-lit streets of West Berlin.

"Five years later, writing for The New Yorker about another visit to the Eastern bloc, he argued, "The Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years. ... One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets. ... Partly the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 6:32 PM

Well Steve I haven't read the Galbraith book and can't purport to know how well these quotes capture what he was trying to say. However, as someone who was a lving, breathing, left wing college student in the late 70s early 80s I can assure you that there were not a lot of people in my circle who were attracted to either the Soviet Union or China. There were a few folks I guess who still had some delusions about Cuban style revolutionaries, but most people on the left that I knew were drawn to Scandanavian style democratic socialism (and still are). We were drawn to a "third way" that wasn't the equivalent of being a Rockefeller Republican.

What most of us rejected was the Manichean Reaganite, neo-con, Jeanne Kirkpatrick world view that embraced people like Savimbi (who you rather nicely dismantled), the Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean generals, and of course those great defenders of the West in Pretoria.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 8:08 PM

I was in high school from '78 to '81 and college and law school from '81 to '87, and like ktln, I don't remember any leftist warm fuzzies for the Soviets, nor do I remember anyone really believing that they were serious threat. For one thing, everyone knew by then that the Chinese were our allies, a fact so secret it was an important plot point in that socialist propaganda masterpiece Red Dawn.

In fact, I vividly recall that Solidarity started in Poland in the fall of 1980 and that Jarozelski declared martial law, which kept the Soviet tanks on the their side of the border, which probably wouldn't have happened even five years earlier. I grew up in Texas and my parents owned farmland, so I really, really clearly remember selling wheat to the Russias. A classmate of mine from high school's Dad worked as a Russian translator and went to Moscow on a couple of trade missions. Mr. Guidry used to take $20 cases of Wrigleys and a couple extra pair of Levis to leave with his hosts, and told us about how they used the gum and jeans to buy extra food.

This is not to say we weren't frightened of the prospect of war, only that it was apparent to most of the population that the Soviets weren't our equals at anything but making missiles. I, personally, was frightened that the geriatrics in charge of the USSR would do something stupid and we would stupidly respond, but I didn't and I don't recall anyone else really thinking things were equal.

Oh, and can anyone else here identify Konstantin Chernenko? I've won a couple free drinks in the last few years knowing who he was.

Posted by Karen | August 23, 2007 9:11 PM

Let's see what the respectable left was saying throughout the 1980's about the Soviet Union's ability to compete with the United States socially and economically (via Dinesh D'Souza):

"In l982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability.”

This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who observed that “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in l984: “That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene.

One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops. Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the l985 edition of his widely-used textbook. “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth. The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.”

Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of Communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the United States. “It is clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism and capitalism are all in trouble.”

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as l989, wrote, “Can economic command significantly accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

Kudos to those on this board who rejected the Soviet model throughout the seventies and eighties, but let's not pretend that this was the prevailing view among members of respectable left during that time.

Posted by torourke | August 23, 2007 9:36 PM

Torourke,

It was the right wing that was convinced of the might and power of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s. Reagan and his allies consistently laid down the line that the Soviets were on the verge of achieving nuclear superiority and were looking to win a first strike nuclear exchange with the US.

The notion that people on the left, whether Galbraith, Schlesinger, or Thurow were in thrall to and admiring of the Soviet Union is red-baiting nonsense. Schlesinger, by the way, was a long time enemy of the Soviets who helped push post World War II communist sympathizers out of respectable left wing circles in America. Were you even alive durng this era? Because you don't seem to have any earthly idea how actual people on the left thought or behaved.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 9:48 PM

As for whether or not the war in Vietnam killed more people than the post-war chaos, while I doubt this statement is true for Vietnam - Jeff Singer

Somewhere between two and four million Vietnamese were killed between the arrival of US troops in 1965 and the Communist victory in 1975. US bombing alone may well have killed a million: more ordnance was dropped on Vietnam by the US than was dropped in WWII in all theaters of war by all participants combined.

Approximately three hundred thousand South Vietnamese were put in reeducation camps after the Communist victory. Of those, perhaps a few tens of thousands died in the camps. There were no Cambodia-style mass killings in Vietnam, though former internees in the reeducation camps describe them as awful places where some guards did routinely shoot prisoners. One rather obvious way to spot-check the lack of mass killings after the war: go to Southern Vietnam today and talk to any male between the ages of 50 and 65, and chances are good he served in the South Vietnamese Army. In Cambodia, you will be unlikely to find anyone who fought for Lon Nol: they are dead.

Some one to two million Vietnamese fled the country in boats in the late '70s and early '80s. The main reason was severe poverty: the Vietnamese Communist economy was a wreck, destroying the South's agriculture, and malnourishment was widespread. (This also makes it complicated to assess how many people the Communists "killed"; most of those who died in the camps died of hunger, but hunger was widespread outside the camps as well.)

The Vietnamese Communist command economy lasted 11 years after the victory. (In fact, de-collectivization of agriculture in the South had already started by 1983, just 8 years after Saigon fell.) In 1986, a new generation of Vietnamese leaders took over and, influenced by Chinese and Soviet reforms and by the commonsense resistance to collectivization of the Vietnamese people, began a drastic about-face towards a market economy. By 1994, Vietnam was one of the world's leading rice and coffee exporters. Today, Vietnam is essentially capitalist and has the fastest growing economy in Asia after China and India. In anonymous polls, its people consistently give their government some of the highest approval ratings of any country in the world.

We fought the Vietnam War for nothing.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 23, 2007 10:00 PM

Mr. Klein is arguing against a straw man of his own creation. I'm not saying that the respectable left was pro-Soviet in the 1970s. What I am saying is that the current liberal notion that the American victory in the Cold War was inevitable due to the vastly greater productive capacity of capitalism over communism is not something that many liberals subscribed to in the 1970s. Indeed, the Atlantic Monthly published as late as around 1988 a hugely popular article among liberals by Professor Paul Kennedy about the rise and fall of great nations in which the great nation headed for a fall was not the Soviet Union but America due to our economy being severely overburdened by "imperial overstretch."

Posted by Steve Sailer. | August 23, 2007 10:01 PM

the millions lost in America's Latin American neo-conservative laboratory in the 80's,

To what are you referring, and in which country?

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 10:03 PM

I like how this thread went through 35 comments claiming that the domino effect wasn't really a domino effect, so the hawks were wrong, without referring to the fact that one of the things that stopped the domino effect was the hawkish buildup orchestrated by Reagan and Thatcher. Likewise with the economic story.

Posted by Mike S. | August 23, 2007 10:05 PM

Steve,

I was responding to another comment that seemed to suggest a great deal of admiration for the Soviets by liberal luminaries Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Thurow. I don't think this was true or fair.

Again, I think there were plenty of people who viewed the Soviet Union as a formidable and implacable foe and a huge chunk of them were on the right. As for Paul Kennedy, I remember him as a darling of the neo-cons, much more so than a guy with a liberal following.

I don't think many people of any ideological stripe were predicting the collapse of the Soviet system in 1988, myself included. But that was largely because our whole political culture was built around combating them. Which is not to say that this was irrational. The Soviets had gotten off the mat in 1942 and kicked hell out of Germany in desperate circumstances. Anyone who lived through that time (not me) had to regard them as a resourceful enemy -- with the later adition of a whole crapload of ICBMs and tanks.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 10:13 PM

One might also point out that hypothetical public policies advanced in liberal publications (several of which were incorporated into the 1984 Democratic platform) during the period running from about 1981 to 1988 included "domestic content" legislation, "industrial policy" and wage regulations according to the principles of "comparable worth". The first would have required rococo regulations imposed on manufacturers as to the identity of their suppliers. The second would have transferred a good deal of the discretion over investment from the capital markets to tripartite boards implmenting state economic planning (Michael Kinsley described it thus: "in the version favored by Mondale and the unions, it would amount to turning America's basic industries into centrally run cartels.."). The third would have replaced labor markets and collective bargaining with a centrally-determined set of wage scales across the whole economy, in order that secretaries might earn more and housepainters less. Respect for factor markets (or minimal comprehension of how they worked) was rather qualified among the Democratic Party's elite at that time.

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 10:19 PM

As for Paul Kennedy, I remember him as a darling of the neo-cons, much more so than a guy with a liberal following.

I think your memory is doing you dirt. Dr. Kennedy was implicitly a critic of an aggressive foreign policy of the sort favored by the Committee for the Free World. He was published in The Atlantic Monthly. I do not think his work appeared in Commentary.

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 10:23 PM

Steve and Mike,
"What I am saying is that the current liberal notion that the American victory in the Cold War was inevitable due to the vastly greater productive capacity of capitalism over communism is not something that many liberals subscribed to in the 1970s."

I like to point out that this view was not held by the American right either. It was only after the soviet union fell that Frum, Kristol et all elaborated the 'inevitability' thesis. Don't confuse the I love the free market speeches of the 50s and 60s with the it was inevitable op/eds of the early 1990s. The right didn't believe it was inevitable, that's why they shut up about large defense budgets and the taxes needed to fund them during the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Posted by Northern Observer | August 23, 2007 10:28 PM

Somewhere between two and four million Vietnamese were killed between the arrival of US troops in 1965 and the Communist victory in 1975. US bombing alone may well have killed a million: more ordnance was dropped on Vietnam by the US than was dropped in WWII in all theaters of war by all participants combined.

Just out of curiousity, just how was this estimate constructed? (It is quite a bit higher than others I have seen).

It should be noted that warfare was the policy of the Vietnamese Communists. They launched one in 1946, another in 1959, and another in 1974.

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 10:29 PM

Karen: I studied Russian Studies in college in the Gorbachev era, and now live in Vietnam. I basically agree with you completely but I think your use of "warm fuzzies for the Soviets" shows how confused this debate has become.

Regarding attitudes on the left towards the Soviet bloc in the '80s, there was a wide disparity.

a. There was a tiny, tiny group of people who thought that Communism was a good system, or no worse than liberal capitalist democracy. In the US this was a minuscule cultist fringe. In Europe, this attitude was more widespread in the anti-nuclear peace movement. But as Eastern Europe began to open up to travel in the mid- to late '80s, many, many European socialists became very disillusioned with any "warm fuzzies" they may have harbored towards Communism.

b. Most American leftists, I think, thought that Soviet Stalinism had been a totalitarian nightmare regime comparable to Nazism, but that Marxism was a powerful critique of the ills of capitalism, though not yet a blueprint for an alternative. They were into Sweden, and perhaps kibbutzes. They also felt that the USSR, while basically a bad regime, had now settled into a state of relative quiescence, and was not much of a threat to Western Europe or the US.

c. US leftists were, to a wo/man, pro-Solidarity, pro-Prague Spring, pro-Charter 77, pro-Havel, and pro-Gorbachev. They were anti-Brezhnev, anti-Honecker, and anti-Andropov (and anti-Chernenko!). They cheered when the Wall fell. But when it came to prescriptions for what should happen in the USSR, there was hesitancy and debate. Many felt that Jeff Sachs-style "shock therapy" was a bad idea, and hesitated about the dismemberment of the USSR; they mistrusted the idea that the free market would solve all ills. They were proved right. (Though Jeff Sachs has an interesting explanation of how "shock therapy" has been misunderstood, and of why a shift to private ownership worked in China in '80 but failed in Russia in '85.)

d. With regard to third-world Communism, most leftists felt that US efforts to fight socialist movements were doing a lot more harm than would be done by just leaving things alone. They were horrified by the brutality of authoritarian US allies and "freedom fighters" in Iran, El Salvador, Guatemala and Angola. Many also felt that the Communist movements in Vietnam, Cuba and El Salvador were morally "better" than the Soviets: less prone to brutal repression, more pro-peasant, more focused on barefoot doctors, etc. (Affection for Maoism however mostly disappeared with the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot.)

This last is really the legacy of Vietnam, on the left: the sense that the US generally doesn't know what it's doing when it intervenes militarily in third-world countries, that the US government can't be trusted to act intelligently to promote democracy and stability or to prevent US soldiers from killing innocent people, as soldiers in extreme circumstances will, and that the US, because of its arrogance and ignorance, often aids and abets evil in other countries. In other words, Graham Greene was right. Iraq has proven him right yet again.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 23, 2007 10:37 PM

Art D.

So are you suggesting that those who supported industrial policy or protecting domestic manufacturing in the 1980s(the latter policy I also recall being rather big amongst the McKinley set by the way) were on the slippery slope to the five year plan, the NEP and rounding up the Kulaks.

Maybe you're right about my memory, but as a lefty, I was reading works by people like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, not Paul Kennedy. The fact that he was published by the Atlantic would not seem to be the sina qua non of left wing credentials (witness the blog lineup).

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 10:40 PM

No, my point is that mainstream liberal and Democratic Party opinion in the 1970s and well into the 1980s (with Paul Kennedy's bestseller being highly representative) was totally different from the current view popular among liberals that America didn't have to actually wage a Cold War that sometimes turned into hot wars because capitalism was so much stronger than communism that we would have won anyway.

Kennedy's 1988 book "The rise and fall of great nations" was about how America had exhausted its economy waging the Cold War and we were headed for decline. It was very popular among liberals.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 10:53 PM

However, as someone who was a lving, breathing, left wing college student in the late 70s early 80s I can assure you that there were not a lot of people in my circle who were attracted to either the Soviet Union or China. There were a few folks I guess who still had some delusions about Cuban style revolutionaries, but most people on the left that I knew were drawn to Scandanavian style democratic socialism (and still are).

My experience of that sort of milieu at that time may have been unrepresentative, but I think what we would term the "left-of-center" (such as it was) was more variegated then than now. You had a.) the campus Democratic Party, b.) causes with an affinity thereto (SANE/Freeze, &c. and later the South Africa obsessives), c.) the local Trotskyist club, and d.) a student association whose orientation and sensibility resembled that of the editorial staff of The Nation. I suspect if you had corralled the folk in categories b & c and carefully questioned them, you would have found that an affection for foreign reds (Fidel, the Sandinista directorate, the FMLN in El Salvador, &c) was common if not modal, and that such affection was a signature of those in category d. To say that the members thereof were not seeking to advance the cause of a command economy in America is likely quite true, in some measure because cogitating on the subject of actual or hypothetical public policies is atypical in that sort of milieu, and perhaps beside the point of their endeavours.

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 10:53 PM

In general, liberals in the 1970s really didn't want to think about the Soviet Union.

Think about all the anti-communist works in English by major literary figures of the 1960s-1980s. Let's see ... there are a bunch of plays by Tom Stoppard (who believed he was Slavic by birth and was devoted to liberty for Eastern Europeans) like Travesties, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle, and Cahoot's MacBeth. And then there was ... well, not much, not much at all. During the last three decades of the existence of the Soviet Union, the cultural elite of English-speaking world paid as little attention to it as they could.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 11:00 PM

So are you suggesting...

Not my suggestion at all. It is my suggestion that a regard for the utility of markets was qualified and disputed in and among the Democratic Party elites and journalists of a certain sort.

Now, I may have misapprehended everyone concerned, but if I what I read in the papers was correct and correctly digested by me, modal opinion among the newly constititued establishements in Eastern Europe ca. 1992, as among the domestic commentariat here, as among the economics professors I had a decade earlier, had it that the lodestar (not necessarily achievable) of political economy was free market capitalism with social-democratic qualifications. You could call this a "mixed economy", and it certainly had its advocates within the Democratic Party ca. 1984: Michael Kinsley, Charles Schulze, and Jimmy Carter to name three. However, what was being discussed at that time and promoted by impeccably establishmentarian figures (Felix Rohaytn, Walter Mondale) was a mercantilist political economy with social-democratic qualifications.

I doubt Irving Howe or Michael Walzer ever took much exception to what Dr. Kennedy had to say. We could look it up though.

Posted by Art Deco | August 23, 2007 11:14 PM

Wow, some old fahsioned red baiting.

Art, how many members were there among the Sparts/Trotskyists. They were viewed by virtually everyone I knew on the left as a tiny collection of loonies. There was some sympathy for the Sandinistas and FMLN in my circles -- but then again, the righties were in bed with D'Aubuisson and Somoza's progeny - I don't think being in league with a bunch of nun rapers is exactly a point of pride.

I am sorry Steve that lefties did not produce adequate works of anti-Soviet propaganda during the period in question. I think our collectve plate was ather full with our own immeidate issues in this country. You guys on the right were free to try. I guess you don't do the literary thing.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 11:18 PM

It should be noted that warfare was the policy of the Vietnamese Communists. They launched one in 1946, another in 1959, and another in 1974.

The "war" the Vietnamese Communists "launched" in 1946 (actually 1945) was the national war of independence from France. As an American I think those wars are pretty justified. As Ho Chi Minh put it in his Declaration of Independence, borrowing from some Jefferson fellow: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

In 1959, Vietnamese Communists belonging to Ho's movement, the Viet Minh, constituted about one-third of South Vietnam. They never accepted the legitimacy of the Diem government, which had been created by the US and France as a non-communist backstop against Ho, and had no real popular base -- it was composed of the inherited colonial structure. Diem then proceeded to alienate the country's entire non-Catholic population, and also tried to wipe out the Viet Minh. It's hardly surprising that the Viet Minh fought, given their strength and Diem's weakness, nor is it surprising that Hanoi still viewed Diem as a foreign puppet and backed the effort to reunify the country. The war from the late '50s until 1963 was mainly fought by local South Vietnamese Viet Cong; it wasn't until massive US intervention on behalf of the Saigon government that North Vietnam began sending regular troops into the South in large numbers.

In 20 years of rule, the South Vietnamese government never succeeded in establishing its legitimacy among more than a small urban segment of the population. Only a small minority of South Vietnamese were willing to fight for their government. The overwhelming majority of North Vietnamese were eager to fight for theirs. That's why North Vietnamese carried artillery shells on bicycles for months at a time down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, while South Vietnamese dropped their rifles and ran in the face of Northern advances. It was the policy of Vietnamese Communists to make war to reunify the country. That goal had legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Northern population and much of the south, and that is why they ultimately won.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 23, 2007 11:19 PM

Art,

I think most of us on the liberal or left side of the equation understand the usefulness of markets, but we do not engage in idolatry with respect to them, and we have enough knowledge of history to understand how often markets can and have failed people over the years. As a result in ost New Deal America we have had none of the crippling financial panics that rippled through the country with such frequency in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Steve,

I would like to see some acknowledgment some time that the entire structure for fighting Soviet communism was the product of liberal Democrats like Truman -- NATO, Containment, the Berlin airlift, the intervention in Korea -- all the product of a president and his allies who supported socialized medicine, the power of unions, and redistributionist tax policies, among other things. In other words, Truman was not a Republican, a conservative or anything like it.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 11:30 PM

brooksfoe has done a much better job than I did of capturing the 70s and 80s zeitgeist of the left. Just read what s/he wrote.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 11:34 PM

However, what was being discussed at that time and promoted by impeccably establishmentarian figures (Felix Rohaytn, Walter Mondale) was a mercantilist political economy with social-democratic qualifications. - Art D

Mercantilism is hardly the exclusive territory of the left, as Pat Buchanan would be happy to tell you. I don't see how your argument that the '80s Democratic establishment tended towards mercantilism with social-democratic qualifications rather than laissez-faireism with social-democratic qualifications fits into a discussion of the left's attitude towards the USSR. It seems more suited to an argument about the left's attitude towards Japan.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 23, 2007 11:36 PM

Steve Sailer, you are quite right, it would be silly to call the American victory in the cold war inevitable...except through the lens of history and then only as a judgement. Luckily that's exactly what I'm saying. The lense of history allows us to see the inevitability of capitalism's victory over communism. Even China who endured no bankrupting arms race is slowly turning capitalist. Talk about inevitable.

At the time of Vietnam, however, it seems to me the people most worried about a victory of worldwide communism were those among us constantly scanning the horizons for the next approaching horde. I grant you there was no way to know then with any assurance they were wrong or not. Certainly it seemed it could be so. Now we can safely say they were very wrong, and the policies they advocated were far too extreme. It's a bet but I think a good bet to say we could have come to a similar now with far less death and destruction, simply by allowing people to hang themselves by their own rope, and minding our own business more closely.

Posted by bakum | August 23, 2007 11:36 PM

"I would like to see some acknowledgment some time that the entire structure for fighting Soviet communism was the product of liberal Democrats like Truman -- NATO, Containment, the Berlin airlift, the intervention in Korea -- all the product of a president and his allies who supported socialized medicine, the power of unions, and redistributionist tax policies, among other things. In other words, Truman was not a Republican, a conservative or anything like it."

Acknowledged.

Similarly, the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland helped wage the Cold War in the 1980s, smuggling aid to Solidarity among much else.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 23, 2007 11:38 PM

Steve,

Thanks -- the Truman thing drives me nuts. I also wish the Americans for Democratic Action group, which included the likes of Schlesinger and labor leader Walter Reuther, a huge lefty, were incredibly influential in the fight against communism.

brooksfoe -- really nice writing and analysis. A tip of the hat before retiring to bed.

Posted by klein's tiny left nut | August 23, 2007 11:46 PM

klein's tiny left nut writes: "I am sorry Steve that lefties did not produce adequate works of anti-Soviet propaganda during the period in question. I think our collectve plate was ather full with our own immeidate issues in this country. You guys on the right were free to try. I guess you don't do the literary thing."

To be fair, the right did produce "The Turner Diaries," Tim McVeigh's favorite book, during this period. It's not exactly high literature, though.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 24, 2007 12:39 AM

Steve Sailer writes: "Kennedy's 1988 book "The rise and fall of great nations" was about how America had exhausted its economy waging the Cold War and we were headed for decline. It was very popular among liberals."

Like almost everything Steve Sailer writes, this only tells a very small part of the story. Kennedy's book wasn't just popular "among liberals." It received plaudits across the spectrum. He also predicted the Soviet decline, he just didn't realize it would be so abrupt and so soon.

He correctly predicted China's rising fortunes, and his notion of America's decline has certainly not been shown to be wrong - in fact, since the decline was more of a "falling back to the pack," he was absolutely correct. Relative to China and the EU, the US has certainly lost a once huge edge.

And is there anyone out there who regards the Bush Error as a high point for America in any way?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 24, 2007 12:49 AM

Wow, some old fahsioned red baiting.

?

Art, how many members were there among the Sparts/Trotskyists. They were viewed by virtually everyone I knew on the left as a tiny collection of loonies.

The ones I was acquainted with were sane, and I think more to be taken seriously than those in the generic "progressive" student association (I sensed their idealism was less self-aggrandizing and their political intelligence more programmatic). I suspect the prism of the social theory they adhered to gave them an unwarrented sense of understanding of their world, but we all have that problem to one degree or another. I had a (non-political) admiration for one of their number, so I may have been biased.

There was some sympathy for the Sandinistas and FMLN in my circles -- but then again, the righties were in bed with D'Aubuisson and Somoza's progeny - I don't think being in league with a bunch of nun rapers is exactly a point of pride.

I am not sure to whom you are referring. I think Sen. Jesse Helms may have been a public advocate for ARENA in El Salvador prior to d'Aubuisson's death, but such influence as the U.S. Government brought to bear in El Salvador was on behalf of rival political organizations, and one of d'Aubuisson's many crimes was hatching a plot to assassinate Thomas Pickering, the U.S. Ambassador. I think if you examine the discourse within Republican politics and conservative journalism at that time, you will find arguments in favor of subsidies to the succession of Salvadoran governments premised on the notion that there were elements within those governments (e.g. Jose Napoleon Duarte and his camarilla) whose objectives were worthy or premised on the notion that alternative policies were worse. I think you would have to do some digging to find articles extolling d'Aubuissson, ORDEN, the Treasury Police, or the establishment within the Salvadorean military.

I do not recall that any of Anastasio Somoza's children or shirt-tail relations were figures withing FDN, much less any of the other contra groups. The military commander of the FDN (Enrique Bermudez) had been a colenel in the National Guard under Somoza, but had been dispatched to a diplomatic post in 1975 and not been implicated in all the blood that was spilled in Nicaragua during the last four years of Somoza's rule. I have seen conflicting accounts of the share of the officer corps in FDN who had been in the National Guard (Newsweek estimated the share to be about a third). I was not a close student of this sort of thing, but I cannot recall it being reported that those in the Miskito Indian outfit or Eden Pastora's outfit were tied to the ancien regime. The civilian principles (Adolfo Calero, Alfonso Robelo, and Arturo Cruz) had all been part of the opposition prior to July 1979.

The "war" the Vietnamese Communists "launched" in 1946 (actually 1945)

I think the actual combat began in December 1946.

was the national war of independence from France. As an American I think those wars are pretty justified.

Justified toward what end? Replacing French civil servants and soldiers with local Communists served the power drives of the local Communists. I am not sure what else it served.

As Ho Chi Minh put it in his Declaration of Independence, borrowing from some Jefferson fellow: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

I do not think these two men had similar objects.

In 1959, Vietnamese Communists belonging to Ho's movement, the Viet Minh, constituted about one-third of South Vietnam. They never accepted the legitimacy of the Diem government, which had been created by the US and France as a non-communist backstop against Ho, and had no real popular base , etc. etc

I think most of us on the liberal or left side of the equation understand the usefulness of markets, but we do not engage in idolatry with respect to them,

I was referring to political discussions taking place twenty-five years ago, not today. The perimeters of political discussion differ and what people assume - not what they necessarily understand - about their social world differs. The 'box' outside of which they are not thinking has different dimensions. As it was, it was a common opinion at that time that economic dynamism in this country could be enhanced by transferring authority over investment decisions to public agencies. "Pick winners" and so forth.

and we have enough knowledge of history

Having a knowledge of history is a characteristic of people who have studied it or lived it, not of a particular political faction.

to understand how often markets can and have failed people over the years. As a result in ost New Deal America we have had none of the crippling financial panics that rippled through the country with such frequency in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I think that has been attributable to improvements in the technics of monetary policy, the 1933 bank holiday, and deposit insurance. Federal banking regulation was not unknown prior to 1933 and it was swarms of officials from an extant federal agency (the office of the Comptroller of the Currency) that implemented the holiday and the examinations which attested to the soundness of the finances of the banks left standing by that time. The attempt to erect cartels across the whole landscape of economic life (via the National Industrial Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Act) or to institute federal social insurance may have been good or bad policy, but they were not an address to the problem of financial panic).

Posted by Art Deco | August 24, 2007 1:07 AM

Thanks klein.

I also wanted to say (to Art D, again) that with regard to the Paul Kennedy book, it's true that he was embraced more by liberals, not conservatives. But I think the response to that book was basically about the US vs. Japan or Europe, which was the great anxiety at the time among liberals. Liberals really weren't worried about the USSR in the '80s. They viewed it as economically anemic, and didn't believe in the possibility of war except by accident. What they were worried about was that spending more than was necessary on a military rivalry with the Soviets (based on a flawed neo-con belief in Soviet aggression and might) would leave us industrially hollowed-out and vulnerable to rising, workaholic Japan. (Europe, not so much. They just made us worried that we wouldn't enjoy life as much as they do.)

Liberals were worried, perhaps overly worried, about American weakness in the 80s. But not because it meant we might lose to the Russians. Because it meant we might lose to the Japanese.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 24, 2007 1:12 AM

"I am sorry Steve that lefties did not produce adequate works of anti-Soviet propaganda during the period in question. I think our collectve plate was ather full with our own immeidate issues in this country.

I think this presumes that those political factions were capable of observation of and concerned about the extant social conditions of the country in which they lived. Working politicians, I suspect, generally are, but journalists and pamphleteers are often not. Rummage through back issues of The Nation and I suspect you will discover that the editors gave little evidence of interest in Social Security or in the manner in which the lives of all classes of citizens are distorted or disfigured by urban crime; and a great deal of evidence of interest in the memory of Julius Rosenberg and the Hollywood Ten. So very 'immediate'.

Posted by Art Deco | August 24, 2007 1:21 AM

Replacing French civil servants and soldiers with local Communists served the power drives of the local Communists. I am not sure what else it served.

Oh, man. You're mostly a pretty smart guy, but this is ludicrous.

People don't like being ruled by foreigners. There's plenty of empirical basis for this dislike -- they tend to be subject to famines when foreigners rule, like the one that killed hundreds of thousands in the Red River delta in '44-45, whereas under local rule famines are almost unknown, regardless of economic system -- but beyond the empirical reasons, they simply do not grant their consent to be governed by foreigners. I believe the moral imp