Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
300
means, would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United
States” (my emphasis). Leffler observes that “American assessments of
the Soviet threat were less a consequence of expanding Soviet military
capabilities and of Soviet diplomatic demands than a result of growing
apprehension about the vulnerability of American strategic and economic
interests in a world of unprecedented turmoil and upheaval.” A prime
concern was indigenous unrest, on the assumption that US national
security required “access to the resources of Eurasia outside the Soviet
sphere.”
Leffler notes that the dynamics of the Cold War become more clear
“when one grasps the breadth of the American conception of national
security,” which “included a strategic sphere of influence within the
Western Hemisphere, domination of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, an
extensive system of outlying bases to enlarge the strategic frontier and
project American power, an even more extensive system of transit rights
to facilitate the conversion of commercial air bases to military use,
access to the resources and markets of most of Eurasia, denial of those
resources to a prospective enemy, and the maintenance of nuclear
superiority.” In particular, the US commitment to the rebuilding of
Russia’s traditional enemies Japan and Germany within the US system,
and the maintenance of air power, atomic weapons and bases on the
periphery of the Soviet Union, virtually guaranteed continued tension.
The concerns throughout fell within the reigning geopolitical
conceptions already discussed, with aggression on the part of a severely
weakened Soviet Union faced with overwhelming US power a remote
contingency.
In the most detailed current study of the postwar Soviet army,
Michael Evangelista cites an intelligence estimate of 1945 that
concluded that Soviet weakness made it unlikely that they would risk a
major war for at least 15 years, and notes that similar assessments were