the economic cold war

Dave Howery
Posted on Saturday, July 27, 2002 - 06:19 am:

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It's usually thought that the west won the cold war by outspending the Soviets; developing exotic military technology, higher levels of aid to important countries, and the very attractive consumerism life in America in general. Meanwhile, the Soviets were burdened with money draining lumps like Cuba and North Korea. What if this strategy had been realized and acted on earlier, say the 50's or so? In this ATL, the west adopts a strategy of letting the Soviets have all the miserable 3rd world useless countries they want (with the idea that such places will be a drain on their treasury), while the west fights like hell for all the places that have valuable resources (oil nations, south africa, etc.), strategic value (Iran, Thailand), or that we are just morally obligated to protect (Isreal). Would this have shortened or lengthened the cold war? made it less or more tense? I see no vietnam conflict, although a possible one in THailand. America would have run bigger deficits earlier. Plus, the Soviets tended to build big armies in those miserable dirt poor countries they did support (think cuba and nicaragua). thoughts?

1. save some places in africa like mali, every country has kind of an importance, and if it´s only that i´t borders on a more important one.
So you have to errase the domino theory
and the empire building concept that precedents it:

We want India, oK we have it. Now we need to control the sea lanes to India. So we take Aden, Kapstadt, St Helena, acquire basing rights here and there.)
And we have to stop the dynamics of these acquisitations Fine, we have thea sea port. Now we have to secure the hinterland. Where´s the next river? Taken.
Now, people settle along the river. They need protection. Next river.

Besides, Cuba and North Korea are the worst examples for money draining lumps before the communists took over: Cuba one of the relatively wealthiest and most developed countries in latin america, North Korea has much more natual ressources than South Korea and was the richer part in 1950.

The Communists transform everything into a economical ruined zone.

wow, an dead thread of mine gets resurrected from the old board.
Steffen> to be sure, every country has at least a negligable value, but we did without plenty of them during the Cold War, and could have let dozens of others fall to communism without hurting our situation any. And the fact that communism turned areas with high potential into economic wastelands was kind of my point. Although the west won the cold war, the US did so with a lot of paranoia and the domino theory. If they had realized earlier just how inefficient communism was, I wonder if they might have gleefully let the communists take control of some of the poorer nations of the world that had little economic or strategic value and let Russia support them; more Cubas and Nicaraguas to drain their treasury. It would have been cheaper for us in the long run, as we wouldn't be propping up so many of those places, and the USSR would have run into financial difficulties all that much earlier....

A little further development

Political scientist Steven Van Evera wrote a piece about how conceding the entire third world would be non-catastrophic for the US back in the 80s or 90s.

Would we be able to get out of both Korea and Vietnam in this scenario - in 1950, South Korea wasn't perceived as intrinsically important and it was an agricultural backwater.

If we're going to write-off the third world as useless, what's so economically special about Thailand. IT wasn't any more valuable than southern Indochina, its just that it turned out to have more internal cohesion than South Vietnam did. Defending the economically important parts of Southeast Asia basically means defending Indonesia and Malaysia. I guess the Philippines would be important on the "moral obligation" front, but economically, a Huk run archipelago would have been a great sinkhole for the Soviets. I wonder if Taiwan in the 1950s would have rated as an asset or a drawback.

A Soviet run Colombia could have been self-supporting on the basis of narcotics profits.

Perhaps we would also have saved money for the USA and given the USSR more of a bill by telling Sadat to get lost. Indeed, none of the front-line states facing Israel is an economic asset, so the bribes involved in a peace process were arguably a waste of money if we accept the concept of this thread. Somewhere I heard the Soviets joke that they were glad to have Sadat take Egypt out of their sphere so they could become a drain on the US instead of the USSR.

However, holding tight to economically valuable territories could have had its own risks -

1. Indonesia was turning anti-western in the 1950s and 1960s, and if the US was not prepared to wait for a favorable coup as in OTL, it could end up doing a messy military intervention.

2. Several oil states had home-grown revolutions that made them more friendly to the Soviet Union or at least less friendly to the US. Iraq in 1958, Libya in 1969 became more pro-Soviet. Iran became anti-US in 1979. Intervention in these areas could have been very high-risk - Khrushchev and Mao threatened against any armed western intervention when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Moscow was actually as loud about it as it had been about Suez two years earlier (and according to archival info, as a reaction to the US intervention in Lebanon, seen asa precursor to intervention in Iraq, Mao decided to drastically step up the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu). In Iran, a US armed intervention could have imposed either a serious counterinsurgency war on the US, and the that country bordered the USSR, giving Moscow far more options for using its own forces than in places like Cuba or Vietnam. While Iraq and Iran were farily close to Soviet territory, I suppose a USA that had kept its pwder dry and avoided Vietnam might have been able to forcefully overthrow Qadhafi in 69 or a few years later, without expecting Soviet retaliation. But, even there, as the Italians found historically, there could be nasty guerrilla warfare.

I recall someone upthread mentioning India and the need to defend it. Ironically,the perception f its importance to the world economy fell a heck of alot by the time of the Cold War. How'd that happen?

True, any kind of geopolitical conflict, even a 'cold' war, has it's risks. If the US had followed the policy I theorized, it likely wouldn't have been 100% perfect. There would have been successes, failures, miscalculations, etc., on both sides. The US would probably have lost Iran as an ally no matter what. I think the US would have hung on to the Phillipines as we had a very strategic naval and air base there. I think there still might have been an Israeli/Egypt peace, as Sadat wanted one. Some of your other ideas are interesting.
Would it have made that much difference to US history if all of Korea became a united Communist state? One thinks it would simply be that much more of a drain on the USSR and China. Of course, the US would probably beef up its presence in Japan in response, and there would be no S. Korean miracle economy to boom in the 80's....
I think the US would likely see the whole New World as strategically important and work to keep the Communists out, so we'd likely do the same things in El Salvador and Nicaragua....