(I have written this, rather than a much longer essay. I hope it will be of some value.)
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One of the questions that has haunted me since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war is “How is it to be ended?” And the best answer I see is “With Russia pushed back to its border, and that border guarded,” which is not a happy answer. Russia is still a nuclear power, and in extremity may turn to weapons of mass destruction.
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The Russian populace is thoroughly propagandized, and the overwhelming majority believes in this war. Russia needs a second glasnost, opening, so that its people see the truth. For Russia, if it comes out of the fugue it is in, it has to go on to something else. What it had is over. Communism failed. Oligarchy failed. So, then, what?
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The peace of Europe is not adequate, as the post-World War I peace was not adequate. The German nationalists were allowed to regroup
and to evade the reparations by inflating the Deutsch Mark (and destroying most people’s savings, creating a disaffected population which could easily be propagandized by the Nazis.)(That was muddled economic history, I've struck it out.) What would a positive world peace that included Russia look like?
2 comments:
If Russia is simply pushed back to the border, even with still reparations and continued sanctions, the country will be back in 10 years and we will have to do this all over again. Russia has too many allies willing to buy her resources and funnel black market technology to her in return. Russia must be destroyed as Germany was and even dismantled if possible.
It was not the German Nationalists who destroyed the German economy but New York banks which refused to provide the necessary loans to salvage the currency. As soon as Hitler came to power the loans were forthcoming immediately. The banks thought that Hitler was a safer bet to pay the reparations. Sure fooled them.
Russia is a nuclear power, and there's no way to invade Russia without starting a nuclear war. It would have best had matters not come to this pass, and the USA played a role in getting Russia to this state, but here we are. Which puts us right back to containment. :-(
My German economic history was wrong; the hyperinflation was in the early 1920s. The economic collapse of 1929 was a separate thing. Facing that collapse, and determined to depend on gold as a currency, the German government went with austerity rather than stimulus, always the wrong move in a recession. US banks stopped lending because the US banking system, dependent on gold, was under a financial denial of service attack - rich people were literally removing their gold from the banks and, often, the country and the banks, literally, were out of money. This was the case until 1933, when out of desperation, FDR took the USA off the gold standard.
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