Talk:Neorealist

From dKosopedia

It is hard to believe that many people who have seriously advocated letting Germany and the USSR fight a winner-take-all battle in which a pan-Euroasian block would have emerged either under German or USSR leadership. There were some people in the U.S. between WW I and WW II who were in favor of siding with the Germans, and some people who were in favor of international communism. But to be among members of either group, one would have to have a view that was inconsistent with the values of the great majority of Americans. Once war was joined, those who had favored Hitler as a potential ally for the U.S. must have had second thoughts. People who had favored communism because of its stated policy of political idealism would also have seen how lacking in idealism the true article was.

So isn't it hard to say how many people failed to take a de facto "Neorealist" position once war with the USSR was joined?

There is another analysis of the activities of the US vis-a-vis the Nazis and the communists--that the US had a failure of nerve after the Nazi regime began to crumble, and ought to have been ready to go to war with the USSR to prevent the take-over of the countries that eventually fell behind the Iron Curtain. The Truman administration appears to have judged that our democracy would not hold still for another all-out war so soon after the surrender of Germany and Japan. So another strategy was chosen, and ridiculed by some, the policy of containment.

It may pay to be suspicious of political groups that name themselves "neo" anything. Are "neo-conservatives" really conservative in any sense other than their shared tendency to be authoritarianism as rulers and to accept the authoritarianism of their superiors in government? And are "neo-realists" really realistic? Or are they one of those groups that disagrees to any attempt to pass legislation that acts for the benefit of the entire community with arguments that begin: "Now let's be realistic about this idea..."

How do these so-called Neorealists fare when their plans are given the test of experience? First, do they in effect abandon all civilized values and opt for the proposition that everything comes down to the matter of who has the power to compel the actions of others, that society exists only to control people, etc.? Or, if they preserve the values that the founding fathers articulated so well, are they in fact "realistic," (i.e., objective, empirical, hard-nosed) when they come to plan the compromises with ideals that they hope will eventually serve those very ideals?

Flip that last question around: Are these people like the people who planned our grand strategy in WW II and its aftermath? Or are they more like a kind of conservationist who would quickly slip from the position that saving all trees in a forest would not be right because some trees need to be eliminated since their disease would otherwise spread to other trees, to the position that we might as well just clear-cut the forest and perhaps replant it at some later time? The idea that it is permissible to compromise something in the short run to preserve the nation in the long run ought to run together with the goal and the planning to reverse the compromises at the first opportunity. p0m 02:06, 28 July 2008 (EDT)