The democratic phobia and global conquest goals of the communist powers would eventually lead to the Cold War, the institutional reason for the inevitable confrontation between the Red Powers and the United States. However, why did the U.S.-Soviet Cold War take place after World War II and not before it? Why did the U.S.-China Cold War take place in 2020, not 2000? The reason is that military power is needed to launch the Cold War, and neither the military power of the Soviet Union before World War II nor the military power of the Chinese Communist Party during the Mao era was sufficient to fully confront the United States. In modern history, it was the United States that raised the two Red Tigers, the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party; in the end, the United States had to spend huge national resources to deal with the Cold War threat of the Red Tigers, which is a painful historical lesson that the United States has not yet reflected on.
First, without the assistance of the Western powers, the Red Powers could not constitute a threat
The two Red regimes of the last century in China and the Soviet Union were established in large, industrially backward countries. The Communist Party took the path of urban riots or civil war to seize power, which would only happen in backward countries, because in the industrially backward countries, the peasants were heavily weighted, and the Communist Party had the opportunity to mobilize poor peasants to join the Red Army, and with a source of soldiers, and then try to obtain weapons, it might seize power. In contrast, in the more industrialized countries, where the working class was heavily represented and the nationals were better educated and civically literate, it was not easy to be incited to armed revolution by the communists. Some of Marx’s followers advocate relying on the working class to overthrow the capitalist system, a desire that always fails because the working class does not like violent revolutions, and violent revolutions are not attractive in industrialized countries. This historical pattern shows that the communist regime was very weak from the beginning and that it did not originally have the strength to challenge the Western powers, especially the United States.
In a telegram to the State Department on June 30, 1944, U.S. Ambassador Harriman in Moscow referred to a conversation he had with Stalin: “Stalin praised U.S. assistance to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of all large Soviet industry was built with the help or technical assistance of the United States.” That other third of Soviet industrial technology was built with the help of Germany, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Czechoslovakia and Japan.
In 1973 Antony C. Sutton, a researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, published a book entitled National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (“National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union”). National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union. He analyzes how the Soviet military-industrial system was built up from the last century after the Bolsheviks took power, concluding that “all modern Soviet military and civilian systems came from the West,” especially from the United States.
Second, how did the penniless Soviet Union build up a modern military industry?
Early in the establishment of the Red regime in Russia, a senior planner, V. Oshinsky, published an article in Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in July 1927, saying, “If we use the big Russian peasant cars against American and European cars in the future war, the result will mean, to put it mildly, heavy losses for us, losses that are the inevitable result of a technologically weak the inevitable result of a technologically weak position. This was in no way an industrialized defense.” At that time Russia did not even know how to build cars and imported all of them.
The Soviet Union’s military vehicle and tank manufacturing technology was largely aided by the United States in the 1930s. The U.S. Ford Motor Company designed a large Gorky automobile manufacturing plant for the Soviet Union in 1930 with an annual capacity of 140,000 vehicles, provided a full set of equipment and drawings, and then installed and put it into operation under the guidance of American engineers. The Soviet Union first used Western-aided plants to produce military vehicles, then copied Western equipment and opened new plants, which is how almost 95 percent of Soviet military vehicles were built. The Soviet Union assisted China in establishing automobile factories in the 1950s, using technology that had previously been provided to the Soviet Union by the U.S. The design of the Jiefang 4-ton truck and the Yuejin 2-and-a-half-ton truck still copied the 1930 U.S. drawings.
From 1929 to 1933, the United States and Germany also helped the Soviet Union build several large tracked tractor manufacturing plants, including the Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kharkov, and Chelyabinsk plants. When the Soviets introduced these technical equipment, they said they were going to build agricultural tractors, but in fact these plants were producing tanks when they went into operation. in late 1932 Ingram Calhoun, an engineer for the American Oil Machinery Company in Milwaukee, reported to the U.S. government that the Kharkov plant had begun producing 8 to 10 tanks a day, and that tank production was taking priority over tractor production,” …… they can hide from tourists, but they can’t fool foreign engineers.” However, the U.S. government did not mind.
From 1936 until 1940, the United States provided the Soviet Union with petrochemical cracking units for the manufacture of aviation gasoline, and also built all the refineries of the Second Baku Combine for the Soviet Union; it also built the most modern steel rolling plant for processing tank steel plates at that time, and also provided a complete set of equipment for a seamless steel pipe plant for military use; in the field of aviation industry, it built a large Soviet Union near Moscow aircraft manufacturing plant near Moscow. The above-mentioned technical and equipment assistance was provided by the U.S. companies Cosmos Petroleum Products, Bajer, Lammers, Petroleum Engineering, Arco Products, Mackey, Kellogg, and Volty.
To give another example, for guns and artillery shells to be fired far, it was necessary to have chemical plants capable of refining potassium carbonate, a technology that was not available in the Soviet Union until 1960. In 1963, years after the U.S.-Soviet Cold War began, U.S. Congressman Lipscomb opposed the export of potassium carbonate refining technology and equipment to the Soviet Union, but the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Export Inspection considered potassium carbonate fertilizer to be a “peace commodity. In the end, the Pittsburgh-based Joey Manufacturing Company was allowed to export $10 million worth of potassium carbonate refining equipment to the Soviet Union.
No defense against the Red Tigers’ technical support
The implementation of the Soviet Communist Party’s strategy of introducing Western technology can be divided into four stages: first, purchasing basic process technologies and equipment in various fields of heavy industry to lay the foundation for the development of the military industry; second, imitating them accordingly and expanding them into the Soviet military production system; third, using these process technologies to produce new types of weapons; and fourth, using these weapons against the United States and its allies or third countries. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, the CCP went through the same four stages when introducing American technology and equipment. The Communist Party first updated the outdated Western technologies imported from the Soviet Union; secondly, it used the new Western technologies to modify the military-industrial system to fill the gap; secondly, it relied on the modified military-industrial system to imitate the new weapons; and finally, it used these weapons to “show off its muscles” while exporting them to the U.S.’s rival countries.
President Roosevelt signed an agreement with the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and U.S. assistance continued unabated despite the fact that he found that the Soviets had repeatedly reneged on their promises to divert civilian technology to military development. tens of thousands of U.S. experts came to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and built up a huge potential for Soviet industrial production. . This technical assistance was only temporarily reduced in 1939 when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany collaborated in the invasion and partition of Poland; then, as Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union became an ally of the United States in World War II, U.S. aid to the Soviet Union resumed, providing not only large amounts of direct war materials but also large amounts of industrial equipment and technology. The agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time specified that one-third of U.S. aid could be used for postwar reconstruction; that is, two-thirds of the military supplies used directly to fight the war and one-third of the technical equipment to enhance the industrial system after the war.
After the end of World War II, there was no need to continue assisting the Soviet Union with war materiel, but in October 1945 the United States signed a little-known agreement with the Soviet Union called the “pipeline. Under this agreement, the United States sent the Soviet Union thousands of specialized machine tools and other equipment that could be used in the military industry and that were cutting-edge products of the United States from 1945 to 1946, much more advanced than the Soviets had in this area at the time. This support did not cease until the end of 1947, when the U.S.-Soviet Cold War took shape.
Since then, the Soviets have continued to acquire U.S. technology without restriction by the U.S. government, and R. Kilmachus wrote in Soviet Air Power (1962), “The Russians acquired selected advanced designs, equipment, and production processes by constantly watching the development of the aviation industry and by skillful use of trade with Western negligence. The emphasis was on the legal purchase of aircraft, engines, compressors, propellers, navigation instruments and airborne weapons, the acquisition of technical and performance data, knowledge of design, production and test situations and methods, and the procurement of machine tools, jigs, molds, semi-finished products and important raw materials. They purchased patents in order to produce certain modern military aircraft and engines themselves. At the same time, some Soviet scientists and engineers were trained at the best Western technical schools. Soviet maneuvers also included sending trade missions abroad, cramming inspectors and interns into foreign factories, and hiring foreign engineers, technicians, and consultants to serve in Soviet factories.”
In this way, with the U.S. government unguarded against the Soviet Union, American companies had no qualms about supplying the Soviet Union with all kinds of highly sophisticated technology. The same situation occurred between China and the United States after the 1980s. This is how the “Red Tiger” was fed by the United States.
The Law of International Students: Another Pipeline to U.S. Technology
The U.S. State Department maintained an exchange program for international students between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and between the U.S. and China since the 1980s. Such programs, while seemingly harmless, were in fact an important conduit for the Red Tigers to gain access to U.S. scientific and technological knowledge, bringing obvious military benefits to the Red regime.
Between 1965 and 1967, 162 Americans studied in the Soviet Union and 178 Soviets studied in the United States, but the two countries had completely different majors. The U.S. State Department’s July-December 1964 exchange program report noted, “As in past years, most Soviet students studied physics and technical technology. American students largely took majors in humanities, sociology and linguistics.” Apparently, the Soviet Union sent foreign students to the United States to harvest the fruits of American craft technology for use in the military industry.
In reality, there could be no real exchange between the United States and the Red Regime. Both China and the Soviet Union wanted major U.S. departments and laboratories in high-tech fields to be open to their own graduate students and visiting scholars so that they could gain targeted access to U.S. scientific and technological knowledge to go back and use in growing their Cold War strength; but neither China nor the Soviet Union permitted U.S. engineers to visit and study at military-industrial research institutions in China and the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the Red regimes in China and the Soviet Union, American engineers were spies; while Chinese and Soviet technical spies came and went freely in American laboratories, the United States viewed this approach as normal academic exchanges.
The Chinese Communist Party has taken advantage of the academic openness of the United States and used various legal and illegal means to allow Chinese scholars to steal a large amount of U.S. scientific and technological knowledge and patents, experimental samples, etc., and even to tap talents from native-born Americans and ask them to “join the ranks” with guns. This kind of technology espionage began in the 1990s, and the “Thousand Talents Program” was gradually expanded during Obama’s presidency. Only after Trump took office did the U.S. realize how active Chinese technical espionage was in the U.S., and thus began to focus on the Thousand Talents Program. However, many U.S. universities still oppose the Trump administration’s measures to prevent red technology spies on the grounds of academic openness.
V. The U.S. made two mistakes by raising a tiger
The U.S. has twice raised tigers for trouble, twice fostering and growing totalitarian communist regimes, and finally forcing them into a state of Cold War twice. To make a mistake once can be considered as American stupidity and carelessness; to make the same major mistake a second time intact is worth thinking about.
The focus of today’s discussion on raising a strong red tiger, the Soviet Union, is not on the U.S. technology and weapons exports to the Soviet Union during World War II, but on the technical support provided to the Soviet Union before and after World War II. U.S. tiger-raising to the Soviet Union began shortly after the Bolsheviks established power; the U.S.-Soviet Cold War broke out after World War II, and the United States still continued to provide technical cooperation to the Soviet Union for a time. It can be said that the Soviet Union’s Cold War strength was fed by the United States. After the U.S. made the mistake of feeding the Soviet Union, Nixon slightly tightened some of the technological controls on the Soviet Union, and by the time Reagan was in office, the feeding of the Soviet Union to the tigers had basically ended. But when Nixon closed the door to feed the “Siberian tiger,” he embraced another “Northeast tiger. From the late 1970s onward, the United States opened its doors to the Chinese Communist Party and entered a second phase of feeding the tigers, until this year when Trump closed the door on feeding the Red Tiger.
The U.S. began feeding the Soviet Communist Party, the red tiger, in the 1920s and the beginning of the Cold War, which lasted 20 years; from the beginning of the Cold War to the closing of the door to feed the Soviet Communist Party the red tiger, which lasted another 20 years. Did the United States learn its lesson? It stopped feeding the Soviet Communist Party, the red tiger, but started feeding the Chinese Communist Party, the red tiger. The U.S. fed the Soviet Red Tiger for nearly 50 years, from the 1920s to the late 1960s, with both Republican and Democratic presidents making policy, and both parties involved in the decision to feed the Soviet Red Tiger; the U.S. fed the Chinese Red Tiger for nearly 40 years, from the 1980s to this year, with both Republican presidents Reagan and Bush, father and son, and Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama making policy. Presidents Clinton and Obama, still both parties were involved in the decision to feed the Soviet Communist tiger. And it was not a career politician or military general who ended up feeding the Red Tigers, but rather Reagan, an actor, and Trump, a businessman, respectively. Once the U.S. stopped feeding the tigers, the red tigers became less and less of a threat to the U.S.; it relied entirely on self-reliance to expand its military preparedness, which was inevitably overwhelming, and eventually became the natural loser in the Cold War.
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