What are the Russian Oligarchs going to do?

[bruce MN]

To keep you commodity serfs in the game?

https://www.youngchinawatchers.com/voices-on-china-tom-orlik-chief-economist-at-bloomberg/

[sam1wiseone]

Maybe you could start a group, old China sycophants.

[BA Deere]

[sdholloway56]

Didn't get anywhere at all in provoking discussion about our successful and relatively bloodless victory in the Cold War.

But as the chief architect Kennan observed, the episodes of domestic hysteria were not helpful.

[sdholloway56]

Perhaps the greatest challenge was keeping the domestic hotheads in check for 30+ years while maintaining a pretty constant policy of containment and competition across the developing world.

Although the whole battle of who writes the history is paramount here. If you ask your avererage modern day righty he/she will almost certainly tell you it was all easy (well, I told 'em, ya just...) - Reagan/Thatcher then bing, bang boop- done.

One chapter that deserves its place but only a very small part of the larger story.

[sdholloway56]

The very much larger parts of the story were the alliances and US control of the world financial institutions that it set up after the war.

[sdholloway56]

I suppose "The Deep State*" was around since OSS times but the penultimate heyday was in the Reagan years, in which "the Clintons" were minor bit players- operating out of a banana republic state where they could cover and or provide some discrete services.

The final Grand Bluff was in fact a beautiful thing, although as I've said repeatedly, it is a fatal mistake to actually believe your own BS. I'm more than a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself, but mostly dating back to before the shocking degradation of the art form. There was almost certainly a lot of "you don't want to know" stuff leading up to the apparent sudden collapse of the SU and a whole lotta trouble that occurred on account of it all contemporaneously and subsequently.

Having covered the publicly shifting but forever static America First type trajectory and where it all has predictably popped up again, probably no trouble in reconciling "we were fighting the wrong enemy" to "russia, russia, russia", to "the dang deep state" etc.

*v. 2.0