Russia won the Cold War

I know Americans like to think they won the Cold War -- particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Balkanization of the Soviet Union.

But it's quite evident now that Russia won the long game.

After all, they've installed a puppet regime in Washington D.C.

Congratulations to our new Soviet overlords! Well played, Russia. Well played.

Agreed, Yanks in general have a problem with the long game.

We've taken steps to rectify this by hiring a con-artist as chief executive. I think our game will improve.

The OP is stupid beyond belief?

I doubt if you ask anyone from Putin to a person on the street in Moscow whether they "won" the Cold War that they would agree with you.

And calling the Trump administration a "puppet regime" is ridiculous beyond belief.

We'll see.

I'm buying more guns, and some body armor.

The Cold War never ended. It was just half-time. (this but with a Soviet flag)

Yeah, but we already knew that.

@Federal Farmer, @Dayton3 and @Captain X rated my post dumb.

That's pretty much rock solid scientific confirmation that I'm right.

I guess you forgot that Cold War history is my specialty and I've made presentations about it to historical societies and other organizations.

I guess you forgot that history is still being made.

Generally speaking, twenty years gone by is when you truly start assessing and interpreting history. I'd say we're at the point where can start that. we are in a post-cold war era where history is still being written. So I'd say we can probably assess the period between 1989-9/11 We are now in a post 9/111 era, we still got a few years before we can asses our current era.

Ok. I'll look you up in 20 years for your assessment of the 2016 election.

You don't have too much longer to asses the Bush-Obama era Trump's first term coming at the end of that. if he cuts taxed for example, it would take probably a couple of years to determine if they were successful or not, but long term things like a potential war or dismantling Obamacare or certain departments have long term effects. Take reconstruction, in the short term it slowly rebuilt the country, but we're still feeling long term repercussions. Many historians have said Lincoln's death was the worst thing that could have happened to the South after the war.

Technically, the way historians professional and amateur say it is that "news is being made" because "news is the first draft of history".

What you fail to remember is that while what happens today is "news" doesn't mean that it will one day be considered "history".

All history was once news but not all news becomes history.

Exactly, there's a professional process historians go through. Anything less that twenty years old can't be assess properly without bias and historical documents such as letters, diaries, etc are too in the moment to be interpreted.

Which ones?

Don't be purposely obtuse @shootER, you know what he's talking about.

I'm genuinely curious about which august organizations have benefited from him vast knowledge.

Oh, I thought you were implying there was another Cold War, my bad.

The Arkansas Historical Commission for one.

http://aacht.net/ for another.

AACHT!

I must admit WAB might be right - here's the proof:

Not too sure how seriously to take this thread.

For all I know, Donald won the election fair and square. (Doesn't seem at all like him, but you can't rule it out.)

Or it was stolen for him by red-blooded Americans like other elections in the past?

Or it was hacked --- by the Russians or by some pimply-faced Trumpista computer-nerd hacker sitting on the couch with his laptop (cellphone?)?
If so, Americans are collectively to blame for starting to fool around with voting gizmos in the first place. From the very first "voting machine", it was headed for a hacked election all along.

I believe the historical records show the US to be largely to blame for starting the Cold War. (No -- sorry -- this does not mean that the USSR was a great place or that Uncle Joe Stalin was a nice guy.) It's just a matter of who was aggressive toward whom in the initial post-war years.

Once it got going, each side developed its own military/industrial complex. Both thrive -- especially the US one -- to this day.

If you want to keep something like that moving, you need to constantly have a bogeyman to rant about. This the Americans have had ceasely, Cold War or not. Yeah, today it's Putin, but think about them all: Saddam, Kaddafi, Noriega, Castro .... ad nauseam. It's all set out in 1984 --- you need this figure to keep people scared shitless and military spending high.

The US military/industrial complex isn't going to go away. Possibly Donald will join up with Putin and the Chinese will be the new bogeyman. I dunno.

As always, we simply don't know what happened in the election. Pathetic, eh? People are still saying things like "Hillary has a lead in the popular vote of X as things stand." Translation: Over five weeks after the "election", nobody's sure about the result. Results --- I read this just the other day --- are "still trickling in".

But let's say -- for the sake of argument -- that Trump won. That's definitely good news for Putin. Whose economy has been busted owing to low oil prices.
And Donald has named as his secretary of state a guy who doesn't know dick-all about foreign affairs but who knows the oil business inside out.
Oh .... and in 2012 Tillerson won Russia's highest honour for non-citizens.

Shore do sound promising, yep.

"Give peace with Russia a chance" sounds nice, until we consider what non-intervention actually means: letting Putin steamroll over liberal democracies in Eastern Europe.

Whereas "make war with Russia" sounds ummm.. kinda groovy (or does it?) until we consider what it would involve.

I'm afraid a cordon sanitaire of Finlandized states is the only sane option.

But then --- speaking of "sane" --- Don the Russophile will soon ascend to the Oval Office, making the question somewhat moot.
Though I have every confidence in Donald: I trust him implicitly to toss us all into the soup one way or another.

How?

The U.S. cut its military after WW2 to the bone, brought almost all of its troops back to the U.S. and we didn't spend all our time setting up puppet regimes near the Soviet borders.

Yeah, it was totally the US that blockaded Berlin, built walls across eastern Europe, murdered and "disappeared" people by the tens of thousands to make sure our puppet rulers kept their boots on necks, refused to let countries liberated from the Nazis determine their own futures . . . oh no, wait, that was the Soviets who did all that. My bad.

You call full speed ahead with a nuke-devlopment programme cutting to the bone? That's an odd use of language.

In accordance with the Yalta agreement, the USSR set up friendly regimes in its zone of influence and the West in its. To this latter end the National Liberation Front, which was ruling Greece, was toppled and replaced with the monarchy and a rightwing dictatorship. Truman asked congress for 400 million dollars (a hell of a lot of money at the time) for US operations in Greece and Turkey alone. Of course, as Senator Arthur Vandenberg said to Truman, he'd have to "scare the hell out of the country" to win congressional approval. So he did.

This was 1946. By 1947, US personnel were arriving in Greece in large numbers. The new authorities used torture, mass arrest and imprisonment without charges or trial (plus imprisonment of the wives and children of "subversives") in what amounted to concentration camps, mass executions ordered by military courts martial and, naturally, press censorship. Over a hundred thousand people were killed. Eight hundred thousand were forced to flee their homes.

The Greek civil war came from a home-grown insurgency, home-grown under the Nazis. Of course the Americans treated it like a Russian plot. The interesting thing about all this in Greece is that Stalin didn't life a finger to help the insurgents. Churchill (no friend of the USSR -- on the contrary) said "Stalin never broke his word (at Yalta) to me. We agreed on the Balkans. I said he could have Bulgarian and Romania and he said we could have Greece."

Indeed, it was the Greek civil war that led to the break between Stalin and Tito. Stalin ordered Tito to stop supporting the Greek rebels, Tito told Stalin to get fucked, and that was that --- Yugoslavia was hoofed out of Cominform.

You forget that at war's end, the Soviet Union was flat on its ass. As Jack Kennedy later said, "No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives.* Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland -- a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago."
* We now know this to be closer to 28 million.

The last thing the Soviets wanted was conflict with the US, which had a nuclear monopoly which it constantly brandished (and burnished). In fact, the Soviets kinda hoped they might get some Marshal Plan largesse. Fond hope.

Only when this began to sink in were non-communists forced out of the Bulgarian government, the Red Army helped overthreow the Czech government, etc.

You need to respect a timeline, Dayton. And a trifle more historical accuracy fercrissakes.

So simple in your mind.
Timeline, Lanzman, timeline. See above.
One thing follows another.

Otherwise all I gotta do is say Yeah, it was totally the Soviets who overthrew governments all over the world, tried to invade Cuba, bombed the shit out of Vietnam north and south, napalmed, blew to threads and "disappeared" perfectly innocent people by the hundreds of thousands in Indochina, to make sure their puppet rulers kept their boots on necks, refused to let countries choose their own futures . . . oh no, wait, that was the Americans who did all that. My bad.

See? Easy. You make things so easy on yoreself.