What was the use of the US fighting the Cold War with the USSR now that America seems fine with embracing Putin?

dear lord

Maybe you don’t understand the Cold War or the fear of the nukes flying. Part of the Cold War was played out on the economic front to break the back of the USSR. From that aspect, it worked and the USSR collapsed. But that doesn’t mean that we could never make peace with Russia (or any of the Soviet Bloc countries). If you believe we should always hate those we have had strife with in the past, then we ought to still hate Russia and England and Germany and France and Viet Nam and N. Korea and Mexico and Iran and Iraq..at a minimum. And we should never, ever again talk with the leaders of any of those countries.

Very much the argument one would expect from Putin himself. In case no one has noticed, the cold war was also extremely convenient for facilitating the entrenchment of our military industrial complex. Indeed, since the close of the second world war, our country has managed to secure a condition best described as a state of permanent war. This situation is passed off to the gullible as “a state of readiness”, but the consequences regarding the actual deterioration in the viability of the country are profound and without precedent. The U.S. did indeed force the cold war on Stalin, and as was obvious, the Soviet Union, then as now, was in no position to afford both guns and butter. We apparently could. I say apparently, because we pulled it off through the convenience of deficit spending, the credit card we possessed and nobody else. But what is the difference between the Russia of the cold war, and the Russia of the present day? Why is our fool of a President so eager to cozy up to today’s “evil empire”? Simply put, present day Russia amounts to the holdings and property of a criminal enterprise, as does North Korea whose boss trades “love letters” with his North American counterpart. Prior to his election, and throughout his campaign for the Presidency, there were according to the mueller report upwards of 130 meetings and contacts between high level Trump operatives and Russian gangsters comprising the Putin “family”. There is little question that our would be thug would love nothing better than to be in the embrace of the crowd world wide which so exemplifies mastery of the trade to which he has aspired his entire life.

If you were to get the one-party system to want, @mazingerz88 and the leaders you want, you’d see the problem with life in the U.S.S.R.

But there would be no other country or superpower to save your bacon, as happened with the victims of the U.S.S.R.

Putin heads Russia. The Cold War was against the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), which included Russia.
The USSR basically did what Hitler wanted to do, but Stalin did it with the help of the Allies, unbeknownst to them. And NATO wanted to limit Communist/Socialist spread across the globe. So, hence, the Cold War.
The world doesn’t deal with the USSR anymore.

“What was the use of the US fighting the Cold War with the USSR now that America seems fine with embracing Putin?”
– WTF do you mean? This sounds like you think the Cold War was an unfinished job that still applies to Russia now that the USSR hasn’t existed for decades, and that there’s some underlying truth that we have some ongoing task to accomplish by being hostile to Russia to honor the effort put into the Cold War? Really, what is your thinking about this?

“Don’t see Americans marching and protesting at the WH re the issue.”
– WTF do you mean? Why and who TF do you imagine doing this? What would the message of such a protest be?

“And all the things Trump is doing supposedly against Putin seems superficial and just a ploy to make it look like he’s doing something.”
– Well sort of but I think you give Trump too much credit to call it a “ploy”. But yeah it’s BS of some or many flavors.

“Putin would have made serious threats and follow through if he is genuinely pissed imo.”
– Well that too is just one type of story. What the truths of the situations in the world are are very complex and not candidly reported. I’d say it’s a mistake to relate to international affairs as if it were some game where the presidents are actually the players and we can see the actual game situation by watching the news.

“America did support dictators before so in the case of Putin, are the issues similar?”
– Well… the USA still supports dictators for political reasons and the reasons are ultimately usually about colonialism, economics and diplomacy, so in that very broad sense, yes.

^^Why the fuck do you even have to say WTF?

^ It seemed like the most appropriate way to indicate the degree to which those questions seem outrageously crazy to me. If I just said “What” instead of “WTF”, it would be miscommunication by failure to acknowledge the degree of insanity.

^^Why is it insanity to ask implying that some Americans should still see Russia especially Putin as an enemy today?

^ The question might be the most wtf question I’ve seen on fluther in years.

@mazingerz88 They seem crazy to me because of the many ways they don’t fit what I think I understand about the situation. For example:

* the Cold War ended when the USSR disbanded. Russia is not the USSR, nor communist, nor presumed the enemy of NATO in a likely future hot war.

* remembering the tension and fear of world-threatening nuclear war that the Cold War involved, it seems crazy to desire a return to anything like that mindset.

* even during the Cold War, the focus of sane people, it seemed to me, was on avoiding conflict, not perpetuating it.

* the idea of a popular march to protest insufficiently hostile relations with Russia seems… well, if you don’t see why that seems crazy, I’m not sure what to say.

* Putin may be a nasty piece of work, and under him (and whatever other less public power groups) Russia may be up to various awful aggressive actions that may often conflict with the USA, including messing with our elections and taking advantage of our corrupt President, and they may have a nuclear arsenal, but Russia is not necessarily a sworn enemy of the USA. The situation is much more complex than “USA vs. Russia”, and we don’t have much view on what might really be going on, and yes it seems like Trump has corrupt reasons to align with Russia (those have been protested) and is generally diplomatically incompetent and has been taken advantage of by Putin/Russia (which has also been pointed out and objected to), but you seem to be requesting a public march based on a desire for more authentic hostility towards Russia, which just seems to me very hard to imagine what kind of thinking would arrive at that conclusion.

^^Thanks.

It is so obvious. The Soviets were a bunch of godless commies out to convert the world. Present day Russians are nice right wing autocrats, not unlike Trump, who would be only too glad to see Russia retake parts of Eastern Europe.

In fairness to Putin, he in all likelihood has the valid defense in presiding over a gangland empire. What were the alternatives? SOMEBODY had to run the place, and the effective efficiencies of strong armed rule cannot be denied. Order MUST have primacy.

“America did support dictators before…”
And still:

US Provides Military Aid To More Than 70 Percent Of World’s Dictatorships

“About three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships currently receive military assistance from the United States. This is a strange record for a nation that consistently justifies its sweeping foreign interventions as aimed at “promoting democracy” and “thwarting evil dictatorships.”