Everyone is asking: how did we lose the Cold War we won? Wrong question.
The question: How could our supposed “leaders” not know? How could our “leaders” ignore the teachings of von Clausewitz & history?
The West is paying a terrible price for not learning our lessons from von Clausewitz:
‘Finally, even the total victory in a war should not always be regarded as
an absolute and final victory.
The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as
a transitory set-back;
and is waiting to find a future opportunity
in changed political / real-world circumstances
for getting pay-back (or compensation) for its losses.’*
It’s in the nature of any state that has lost – and certainly Russia – so it should have been expected and prepared for. But after the Cold War, our politicos, lacking all common sense, grabbed onto the “Peace Dividend” and ignored defense. Our politicos robbed defense to pay voters-reckless, but good for votes.
Suddenly we were all going to be singing from the same hymnal. Of course that’s not what happened. There was Russian sign after sign, bad behavior after bad behaviour, all downplayed. To make matters worse, when Russia acting badly could no longer be ignored, then the apologists came out of the woodwork saying: no, no, we, the West, were bad. The West humiliated Russia rubbing the loss of the Cold War in its nose & so is responsible for Russian bad behavior. Flat out wrong per von Clausewitz.
The post-Great War (WW1) has repeated itself, not as farce, but again as tragedy. The Allied Powers then also had a Peace Dividend and disarmed. And Germany armed for a future “opportunity”-and took it against Allies also afraid of Escalation.
So, not having learned from the past, we condemned ourselves to repeat it.
The time is now to re-arm; to minimize the danger we unnecessarily placed ourselves in; and once more to survive as free nations.
*(Endlich ist selbst die Totalentscheidung eines ganzen Krieges nicht immer für eine absolute anzusehen, sondern der erliegende Staat sieht darin oft nur ein vorübergehendes Übel, für welches in den politischen Verhältnissen späterer Zeiten noch eine Abhilfe gewonnen werden kann. On War, Bk 1, Ch 1, Sec. 9)
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