I kept wondering when contemporary rightwingers would recognize that they’re not, at the end of the day, the heirs to the mainstream anti-communist tradition at all. Rather, they’re the heirs to the “rollback” fantasists whose counsels Dwight Eisenhower wisely rejected and pushed to the margins of the American political debate. Orrin Judd t the rescue:
Unfortunately for the hundreds of millions of victims of Communism, our willingness to follow the Kennan model meant that the Cold War lasted for decades, during which we stood by as tens of millions were murdered and the rest lived in near slavery. To the extent that Kennan was responsible for our not settling Soviet hash in the late 40s, he (and we) enabled the repression and mass murder of a significant portion of the human population for a disturbingly extended period of time. The cost of his accuracy was catastrophic to them and morally disabling to us. Four decades of compromising with evil led directly to the spiritual malaise that even Jimmy Carter could diagnose and lament — though, having bought into the Kennanesque status quo, he was incapable of snapping us out of it.
Ah, yes, settling Soviet hash through a massive war during which, one assumes, no bloodshed or suffering or any other unpleasantness would have taken place. Too bad we listened to weak-kneed Harry Truman. Peter Robinson proves that not all conservatives have lost their marbles on this one.