#89 The Fall of the Soviet Union
A key theme that will run through this blog and the following four, will be that behind all the tragedies is one key factor: the USA’s struggle to maintain world dominance has felt it worthwhile to achieve the story that I tell. Despite the continuous rhetoric of ‘freedom’, the majority of the people in the world after over 70 years of so-called independence remain in poverty and much else.
The Cold War, as we saw in some blogs back, was focused on undermining Soviet strength across the world as well as in the USSR itself. Despite everything that occurred after 1918, the invasion by the British and American forces, the end of the civil war, the famines in the 20s and 30s and the immense loss of men and material in the 2nd world war, the USSR had managed to industrialise her economy. She created a series of five-year plans, raised the standard of living of her people, and created a welfare state which included free education, health, and social welfare services. The cacophony of criticism that was part of the Cold War served to disguise the successful economic developments that she had achieved by the 1980s.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the western world was stunned. Their hyperbole of criticism and their lack of access to Soviet economic statistics left the Western countries unprepared for what to do next. The USA was prepared to celebrate; their Cold War had been successful, and they moved their best economists to Moscow to advise. From having no access and very limited knowledge, suddenly the situation was reversed. Their imperial ambitions soared.
The clearest official statement of US global ambitions was expressed in the Defense Planning Guidelines for 1994-1999, portions of which were leaked to the New York Times in 1992. These were overseen by Wolfowitz the undersecretary for defence:
"... The disappearance of the USSR from the world stage, it explicitly declared that the new goal of U.S. Geopolitical strategy would be indefinite prevention of the re-emergence of any rival power that could threaten American supremacy - that is the pursuit of a permanent unipolar world. "Russia" the document stated will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States. It thus continued to be the principal long-run target"
- Quoted from an article in Monthly Review, Introduction, July-August 2017
As Brzezinski argued in his The Grand Chessboard, the USA had suddenly been presented with global domination on all fronts and could now create new world order, backed by unipolar power and nuclear primacy. He argues that the US saw clearly that they could destroy 'rogue states,' and could decide the outcome of any dispute which they considered threatened their security or hindered their expansion, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The US ‘grand strategy’ for the post-Soviet era had, as its governing assumption, the re-emergence of a new capitalist Russia. With its NATO allies, the USA would expand closer to Russia in the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, thus suppressing any new movements and forces in key strategic areas.
Part of this grand strategy was the introduction of capitalism into Russia and the selling off of previous Soviet industrial assets to private individuals. Immediately after the collapse came a period of chaos, American economic advisors stepped in fast and advised the creation of market conditions across the Soviet Union. The result was rapidly apparent. Standards of living plummeted, prices escalated, and many lost their pension rights and social service benefits. The age of death in the cities decreased rapidly. Russia rapidly became a Third World-type state, offering access to Western capital ownership for minerals and a market for cheap western goods. The goal was the impoverishment of the entire region under US oversight, especially through the IMF and the World Bank.
The fall of the Soviet Union was the end of an era: certainly, the end of the Cold War. The USA saw not only that they had won that war, but also that they were the greatest nation on earth. In the early 1990s, the US had options; they could easily have decided that there was a chance to enrich not just themselves but also the old Soviet Union. They might have chosen to develop the existing industrial base in the old USSR by bringing in new capital and management techniques, and in so doing create a vast new market for their own producers.
Instead, the USA chose the old zero-sum-game option: ‘your loss is our gain’. In that sense, they behaved like the old European empire builders. The situation was very different, however; technology had moved inexorably forward, but the principles on which the US acted were the same as the old empire builders: impoverish and control the territory you have conquered. In making the decisions they made, an opportunity was lost for many millions of people. Large chunks of the old Soviet Union were dismembered. In Central Asia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe, small new nation-states were recreated, still leaving a massive core stretching from the borders of northwestern China, eastwards to Western Europe.
After the September 11th, 2001, attack in the United States, the US began to refocus her attention on the new battle of the War on Terror, and a strategy of permanent war throughout the so-called global periphery was pursued in her efforts to maintain total dominance. In so doing, she lost control of the new Russia under Putin and began a series of wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia, all of which continue to the present day. The rise of Islamic counterinsurgency then continued as fast as the US invasions developed.
Recommended Reading
Russia and the USA after 1989:
Zbigniew Brzezrinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books 1997.
Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, and George Kennan were three of the strategists in Washington, who had been born in Poland and Germany and could read Russian. Understanding Russia was not Washington's strength.
John Bellamy Foster, The New Geopolitics of Empire, Monthly Review January 2006.
John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism, Monthly Review Press 2006.
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War, Random House 1968.
Samuel Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilisations, New York Simon and Schuster 2011.
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.