Should-Read: Pseudoreasmus: The Cold War Triumph of Liberal Capitalism—in Hindsight

Should-Read: Not just in hindsight! The point of my citing to George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram”—published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—was to stress that what you, Pseudoerasmus, whoever you are, call the retrospective assessment was Kennan’s prospective hope as well.

Kennan wanted containment, not rollback. Kennan wanted to move the conflict to the political economic-ideological level: which system better delivered on Enlightenment values of prosperity, security, freedom? He was confident that, if moving the conflict to that level could be accomplished, the U.S., the western alliance, liberal democratic capitalism would win if it deserved to win. And he was confident it deserved to win.

Curiously, N.S. Khrushchev—at least in his saner moments—wanted the same thing: he, too, sought to move the conflict to the political economic-ideological level: which system better delivered on Enlightenment values of prosperity, security, freedom? He was confident that, if moving the conflict to that level could be accomplished, Soviet communism would win if it deserved to win. And he was confident it deserved to win. “We will have to be the ones making your funeral arrangements…”

Khrushchev was wrong. But he was a believer…

Pseudoreasmus: The Cold War Triumph of Liberal Capitalism—in Hindsight https://medium.com/@pseudoerasmus/if-we-ask-the-retrospective-question-why-did-western-liberal-capitalism-actually-triumph-then-e025706801e0: “The tête-à-tête Soviet-American global struggle over the Third World…

…the support of comprador dictators, the interference in elections, the military coups that installed friendly tyrants, the interminable proxy civil wars in, etc.—these were sideshows. The Ogaden War; FRELIMO; Cuban troops in Angola; Vietnam; the 1964 coup in Brazil; the Algerian revolution; Yemen!!!, Nicaragua, Afghanistan!, Malaya!!!, Polisario!!!, the Indo-Pakistan wars, Allende, even the Greek civil war, the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of PKI by Suharto, etc.—all grand irrelevances…. If the Cold War in the Third World did matter in some way, it was by inducing the Soviet Union to allocate more of its resources to silly adventurism…. The true “Fukuyama vulgarism”… is not the triumphalism of liberal capitalism, which seems bloody obvious. It’s the utopian expectation that the Rest of the World would and could adopt the model.