During the decades-long Cold War the belief in America was that the Soviet Union had an ideology of world domination. Every nationalist movement, such as Vietnam’s effort to throw off French colonialism, was misinterpreted as another domino falling to Soviet world conquest. This mistaken American belief persisted despite Stalin’s purge of the Trotsky elements that preached world revolution. Stalin declared: “socialism in one country.”
As the Soviets did not have the aim that the US attributed to them, the two governments could cooperate in reducing the dangerous tensions that nuclear weapons presented.
The rise of the American neoconservatives and their doctrine of US world hegemony has given the United States the expansionist ideology formerly attributed to the Soviets. Only this time the expansionist ideology is real. Yet, Russia’s foreign minister, Lavrov, said yesterday that “we [the US and Russia] have no ideological differences which make the Cold War inevitable.”
The inability of the Russian government to understand that the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony is the driving force of US foreign policy leaves Lavrov puzzled at the high level of hostility toward Russia. As Lavrov believes that there are no ideological differences between the two countries, he doesn’t understand the hostility. However, he does understand that this hostility toward Russia is a negation of Cold War rules that both countries avoid surprising the other with what could be perceived as a dangerous threat.
There is no sign that the US government understands the danger in Russia’s perception of threat or that Washington cares.
Copyright © 2016 Paul Craig Roberts
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
You know I get the point you make but I wonder what other possibilities there might be in terms of interpreting what is going on. What about manufacturing conflict between big powers in order to create the perceived need for one world government. Maybe China and Russia are willing to go along with that. It is possible they don’t have any choice and it is possible they are colluding with it. You say the neo-cons have their hegemonic agenda but the process of global development makes the USA increasingly less able to control emerging countries which grow stronger and more independent. Perhaps their attempts to assert control are a response to losing control. Stalin wanted to end the permanent revolution of Trotsky because true democratic socialism with workers control of society, as advocated by Trotskyists, would have ended Stalin’s bureaucratic system which he thought vital to the survival of communism. That is the part of the fight between Stalin and Trotsky which is always deliberately ignored. People who say the neo-cons are Trotskyists really need to do some more reading.