Chapter 80 collapse of the soviet union

Despite battering Japan's economic model in the 1990s and reshaping East Asia to suit its own interests, the dismantling of the Soviet Union remained a top policy priority for Washington. At the start of the 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington had no obvious rivals in the race for world supremacy.On that jubilant day, not many people expressed concern or raised alarms about the existence of a state of such great power in the world.After all, she is a democracy, and she is America.With no longer a military threat from the Soviet Union, NATO members, starting with the United States, can start diverting their $1 trillion a year military spending to civilian uses.

A new era of peaceful development, market reforms, and capitalist prosperity is the dream of millions of people in the former Warsaw Pact countries.But that dream was short-lived.The US establishment is preparing to consolidate US global hegemony as the sole superpower, always trying to lull the rest of the world into a false sense of satisfaction.In the 1990s, deception played a strategic role in Washington policy.The biggest deception was that Washington gave the impression that the United States was exploring new directions for policy after the Soviet threat had been lifted.This was quickly shown.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was a very important event in the history of the 20th century.But few realize that in the early 1990s, policymakers in the Bush administration were already grimly calculating the future of Russia and its satellites.By forcing "market reforms", Russia was brought into the economic orbit of the United States. In effect, Russia will be dollarized.As for how to make it feasible, it has undergone complex and meticulous preparations.But the end result was the establishment of the United States as the sole superpower and sole issuer of the world's reserve currency, with all the benefits left to Washington.The instrument of Washington's new Russia policy is the International Monetary Fund.

At the same time, Russia will be encircled by US and NATO military bases and NATO's eastward expansion.When NATO's eastward expansion is completed, any potential strategic alliance between Russia and continental European countries that may pose a threat to the US hegemony will be stopped.Washington's ruse is to completely dismantle Russia's power and make Moscow's nuclear-armed elite accept that reality. Washington's policy is classic geopolitics, not unlike that described by Sir Halford Mackinder almost a century ago.Mackinder had warned the British elite that a Eurasian alliance of mainly Germany, Russia, and Central Asian states would be geographically coherent, possess all necessary economic raw materials, and be sufficiently powerful to challenge any rival The population may make this alliance have the potential to become a world power.

At the end of World War I, Mackinder stated: "Whoever rules Eastern Europe controls the Heartland; whoever rules the Heartland controls the World-Island; whoever rules the World-Island controls the World In other words, if European states, mainly Germany and France, planned to dominate the Eurasian "heartland" centered on Russia, as Mackinder defined it, such an alliance would have the potential resources to dominate the entire world Advantages and geographical advantages. Washington establishment strategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski—a former White House national security adviser who held the top national security job in several administrations, worked alongside Kissinger, and under Bush’s Served as an advisor to the first presidency—publicly acknowledging the influence of Mackinder's geopolitical thinking on U.S. strategic policy.In his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski wrote: "There is an urgent need to ensure that there is no Eurasian challenger who can dominate Eurasia and challenge the United States." He added: "At the beginning of the century, the Mackinder's notion of Eurasia as a 'core region' sparked the discussion above."

This policy includes identifying any potential countries that could disrupt the balance of power, Brzezinski said: "The United States needs to formulate specific policies to compensate, choose or control the above situations." The industrial potential of Central Asia, Europe and Japan, the resources of China, India and Russia.He warned: "The control of Eurasia almost automatically made Africa secondary, and made the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geographically peripheral to Eurasia, the center of the world." How Washington acted on such an urgent need as the Cold War ended was initially unknown to other countries.Russian strategic thinkers at the former Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, were well aware.They carefully studied Mackinder and Anglo-Saxon geopolitical theory.But when the Soviet Union collapsed, their voices were drowned out.Prospects of a market economy and abundance of wealth have diverted the energies of the Russian elite. See Bill Braley's article "Eurasia: Misguided Russian Policy" in the Winter 1995/96 edition of Foreign Policy.The precipitous decline in living standards in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union was often discussed; the role of the IMF and the G7 in promoting Russia's deindustrialization policies was less discussed, for obvious reasons.Graeme Harder's article "The Robbery of Russia" published in "World Today" published in London in April 1998 gave a detailed description of the role of oligarchs.Issue 308 of "Russian Reform Observer", published on September 11, 1997, criticized the United States for its support of "corporatism" and "criminal" capitalism. The role of politics.See also Alastair McDonald's article. On August 2, 1998, Reuters published the article "The Russian Government Has Gained Time, But Too Many Problems".The author gives a larger discussion of the involvement of the world's largest banks in Russia during the 1998 crisis.The most intriguing issue has been the fact that few analyzes have addressed the apparent and close connection between Washington's financial authorities (including the Federal Reserve) and LTCM following the bankruptcy of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM).

From Washington's perspective, the strategy of transforming a Cold War adversary into an instrument of US hegemony was clear from the start—though not without risks, since the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal remained. The Russian bear may have been financially bankrupt in the 1990s, but it still retains some of its nuclear-armed teeth.The process of remodeling had to be done carefully.