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Is it just me, or is there a rather obvious historical parallel between Gorbachev and the impending Kamala Presidency?
Not at all. Gorbachev was a failed reformer. He had ideas how to improve USSR, was realist that the situation is not good, was willing to break with the ideologic doctrine for the state to survive, but he ran out of runway.
Kamala is probably the other type - if we assume that the west's dominance is doomed due to reasons, she will be the one that with steady hand will ignore any and all warning and ram the titanic in the iceberg.
She is shitty material for US president, but damn she is just fine for a member of the European Commission.
I am not sure she can even comprehend the challenges US will be faced with - the biggest allies are sliding into irrelevance - Japan hasn't grown in 3 decades, Europe in 15 years, the other big players in the world are smiling to the US and chasing their own interests, you have the incoming national debt shitstorm, wildcards with AI, changing nature of warfare, cultural split, cost disease, total lack of people that have lived experience in a multipolar world to run the US foreign policy, probably even lack of people with any idea what US interests are.
Kissinger said that USSR in the 80s was faced with many problems - not a single one of which was unsolvable, but all together overwhelmed the state. The US is in much better shape economically, the challenges faced are somewhat vaguer and there is no consensus among the elite that the US is in trouble. Polls show that the population is worried, but the elite is not. In the USSR I think it was the opposite - the elite were worried because they could travel west and compare, the population was not, it was waiting for the collapse (not that it brought much good, but many a phd-s could be written why things went so wrong everywhere in the former soviet bloc in the 90s and early 00s, we got the italian organized crime, korean birth rates, indian brain drain and japanese gdp growth all at once )
Great post and it sparks in me a question.
How inevitable was the collapse of the Soviet Union? Let's say instead of Gorbachev you get a hardliner. What happens then?
I think we often look back at history with an idea that things had to happen just the way they did. But if Gorbachev wasn't chosen, I think it's possible the USSR exists today. The Venezuelan government still stands after all.
The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.
No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.
Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.
But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.
Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.
The independence movements of non-USSR Warsaw pact countries was written on the walls, no hardliner could have managed those. With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.
But they in fact weren't, except for the Baltic states.
Why do you think Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania weren’t bound to happen?
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