Grasshopper27
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- Sep 11, 2002
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Originally posted by: MartyTheManiak
CW is not a really a valid example, since it wasn't an actual war. Think about it, was the treaty of Versailles better than the treaty at the end of WWII? Are germans and japanese and americans friends today because the US has the larger military, or is it because after the war the americans helped out ther Gs and Js and became friends?
The problem is, you want an actual war. In actual wars, the system of having the biggest stick failed. It is all the non-wars where it worked.
One possible example:
I do see Pakistan helping us out. They didn't want to at first after 9/11, but then they saw the size of the Taliban military, the size of our military, and made the wise choice.
In any case, the Cold War was won mostly because President Reagan had a brilliant plan for winning that war. He decided that instead of going to actual war, the United States would simply spend the Soviet Union into oblivion. Sure, the B-1B and B-2 bombers are stupidly expensive. Star Wars was never really real (but the Ruskies didn't know that), and all it it made the prospect of the USSR trying to keep up with our spending impossible. Without capital markets to borrow in, they could never hope to match our spending.
So we basicly won the Cold War by spending more money than we really had, and far more than the Russians could ever hope to spend.
Grasshopper