The Soviet Military Threat

The Soviet Union’s military was primarily structured for self-defense rather than hemispheric invasion. Joseph Stalin’s policy was communism in one country rather than the Trotskyite policy of global conquest. Mongols, Napoleon and Hitler had invaded Russia and the Soviet Union- not vice versa.

The Red Army rolled up the eastern front of the Nazi army and occupied the countries they had been in. There wasn’t a good reason to swiftly give them up and allow an unstable west without a pre-determined political future structurally to have an opportunity to attack again starting from the 10 yard line. After a half century when the Reagan administration and President Gorbachev working together through historical providence found a rapport, they gave them up. The Soviet Union faded away and the new Russian federation emerged through the Yeltsin administration.

With the death of the dictator Joseph Stalin and his one-country policy there was a renewal of Soviet expansionism and the Cold War became heated. Soviet and Western proxies fought battles around the global from Nicaragua to Vietnam and in Africa. The 1950′s until 1989 had nuclear proliferation, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla wars globally. It was a difficult era. The Soviet Union also had the problem of a rising China with leaders antipathetic in some respects to Soviet Far East interests. The Amur River saw Sino-Soviet militaries occasionally considering war.

The essentially Soviet threat to the United States besides nuclear conflict was two-fold. Communist expansionism from Latin America and fifth column socialist-communist citizen elements occasionally associated with the Democrat Party. Each of those invasion threats was contained.