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Which of our preisdents was ever more buddy buddy with despots than Nixon? Brezhnev was his pal, the Chinese communists were legitimized by his visit, the whole idea behind detente was an easing of the hostilities and pressures from the west. Detente was a time out in the Cold War where we were no longer opposing communism, we were making joint space missions with them. Using "peace with honor" as his cover, Nixon disengaged from fighting communism in Vietnam.
Nixon hated the whole electoral process, that is why he got along so well with dictators.
Nixon began his political career as a right wing Red baiter because that is what was getting Republicans elected to office in the late '40's and early '50's. If embracing the commies had been what it took, then Nixon would have done that.
How would Nixon have handled Castro? He would have come up with some of his famously preposterous rhetoric to argue that Castro wasn't really a communist, that Cuba was actually "Red-Lite", his policy would have been some do nothing dynamic with a fancy name like "Regional containment" which iin reality would have amounted to "Ignore them with honor."
That you have bought into the whole Nixon as An Anti Commie Champion is precisely what Nixon would have wanted you to do. He got you believing he was engaged in a titanic struggle against socialism, while not having to actually do a thing.
Detente durring that time netted some token arms reduction treaties and trade agreements, but I would never say Nixon or any other president of that time had stopped opposing communism. The Russians cheated on those treaties and were never to be trusted, They were the strongest rival and had the military power, technology and will to possibly defeat the US in a conventional war.
Nixon had more success in negotiations because he convinced them that he was one of them, not a chump to be walked on, but a first rate chess player out to gain advantage in the game of world diplomacy. And yes, Nixon did connect well with dictators, knew how to break the ice and sometimes get a small concession out of them. Playing the buddy buddy thing with people your negotiating with is a positive thing, IMO. Good way to learn about them, and get them loosened up and perhaps catch them off guard and reveal something.
Who knows if the Russians would have still have tried to arm Cuba with nukes, had Nixon won in 1960, I kind of doubt it, because Kennedy was soft and let Kruschev dominate him in their first meeting, due to fatigue and back pain. As is was, before the missile crisis there was the bay of pigs invasion in which Kennedy had alot of pressure put upon him from military advisors, to do a full scale invasion and take out Castro. He barely resisted this advice but still supported the weak bay of pigs plan that failed, but it still looked to the rest of the world like we were behind an invasion of Cuba....what a waste.
You really think Nixon would have resisted military advice to invade Cuba with his United Fruit buddies losing out on all that money? I think your not in tune with Nixon, you say he resembled the dictator buddies he hung around with....what would Kruschev, Brezhnev or Ceausescu have done in this case ? What did Nixon do when LBJ military tactics were not working in Vietnam, did he call off the war and give up upon taking office ? No, he carpet bombed Cambodia because thats where the enemy was. Did he consider Hanoi to be off limits because big scary China might jump in. No, he bombed the hell out of Hanoi to get them to the negotiating table. He exercised every military option available to him short of nukes to try and win the Vietnam war.
With reguard to Mao, he did do one thing right. He finally broke the cycle of opium addiction in China that Great Britian had unleashed upon her in the 19th century. He lined up everyone of those generational opium pusher families and shot them. China was going nowhere without that problem being solved, and he solved it.
Actually, Israel has. The kibbutz is the purest form of communism and they thrive in Israel providing milk and food to the rest of the country.
Yeah but, we aren't really talking state systems, but communities within the state system. I am not sure this qualifies, otherwise someone can say their own family was a communist state when they were growing up (which is true when you think about it).
Kibbutz's have changed anyways, haven't they? Privatized, run like businesses, and some members having jobs outside the Kibbutz.
Vietnam has done OK, too, even in spite of a war with us.
Yeah but (there is the "but" again) Vietnam was travesty for the first 10 years or so after unification - they had two more wars - with Cambodia and China, lost a bunch of their population in the south that, again, took to crossing the ocean in bathtubs, economy staggered, triple digit inflation, virtual collapse of their state.
Then they reformed and moderated their economy in the late 80s. Took the china approach and combined elements of capitalism and private ownership. It's when they took steps away from their communist ideology then things improved. Today they are communist in basic principles only. But those first 10 years!!!
The pattern seems to be that when countries proclaim that they are now going to be communist, it screws them up for decades. Then they realize it won't work, and take some of the experiment's better lessons with them while adopting enough capitalism to have a functional economy. What remains to be seen is whether that individualized, hybridized sort of system can continue to thrive, because broadened trade and world contact tends to bring in external ideas which have serious potential to create conflict and agitation. We see China attempting to simply clamp down on it, but the Chinese are not fools, and cannot be so blind as to imagine they can keep out information forever--if they are even doing so successfully now, which is debatable.
,,,,Too bad that no one in the US government in the '60s foresaw that communism would disappear from Vietnam over 30 years into the future and would be dismantled by the Vietnamese themselves. Just think of how many lives would have been saved if someone could have foreseen the future...
The Vietnam war was not fought over communism, it was a battle for resources. Much the same as our current occupation in Iraq.
Cuba did better under communism, for most of the public, than it had during the previous century. That was so despite the departure of much of its mercantile class and economic warfare by the US that cut off many of its external markets.
China has done better than in the period before communism as well. The key in both cases is that they were badly messed up when communism came in.
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