How the Russians Won the Cold War

Posted on August 14, 2003 in Citizenship Pointers

Yule Heibel discovered this report written by a Russian news bureau chief who also did his job under Communism. Among the similarities with the old ways of Brezshnev, Andrei Sitov noted:

• The US acts as if it believes it knows what’s best not only for the Americans but for the rest of the world and shows a willingness to force this belief down other people’s throats. For a while – until the terrorist attacks – its “elite” even toyed with the ridiculous notion of an “end of history”. This is an idea common to all totalitarian regimes (some scholars say it is rooted in the Armageddon prophecy in the Bible). At least Fukuyama’s version did not envision a blood bath.
  
  
  
• The US shows a dislike for international agreements across the board – from arms control to the International Criminal Court and from Kyoto protocols to tobacco trade [and moratoriums on landmines and napalm]. The Soviet Union also seemed to comply only with those international obligations that it liked. To be fair, as Secretary Powell pointed out to me, Americans don’t break agreements – they either don’t sign them or withdraw from them.
  
  
  
• The US now liberates other nations without being asked. The Pentagon advisor Mr. Perle told me that “there are more important things than national sovereignty”. Of course the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had a “doctrine of limited sovereignty” named after him. Mr. Perle also said the US always leaves the lands it occupies. I shared that opinion with a Mexican colleague; he begged to differ.

Perhaps the most telling comparison is Mr. Sitov’s take on the outcome of the Cold War:

I believe the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it was not telling the truth about itself either to its own population or to the world. The Russians do not like to think of themselves as losers in the Cold War (after all they peacefully rejected communism and won their freedom). But generally speaking, from a moral standpoint, losing may actually be preferable to winning. If you lose, you have to ask yourself why it happened and face your own shortcomings, weaknesses and lies. Meanwhile the illusions, propaganda and lies of the winning side are usually justified and reinforced.

Supposedly we lost in Vietnam. But what lessons did we learn? We’re repeating it in Iraq and we’re repeating the mistake of the Soviets in Afghanistan. Perhaps we should begin by rethinking the lessons we learned from Vietnam and seeing ourselves as winners: that it is a bad idea to go against the popular will of a people, no matter how much we distrust the form of government they have chosen for themselves. We won Vietnam by realizing the truth that intervention only breeds death. Our victory is marked by the survival of generations of young men — including myself — who never spent a sleepless night wondering if their number would come up.