<h2>The False Understanding of the Soviet Collapse</h2><p>The role of economic development theory and geopolitical theory in implementing effective foreign policy cannot be understated. The US foreign policy planners apparently made a huge bet that the Russian economy would collapse with a modicum of pressure, reminiscent of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.</p><p>Purportedly, the US policy planner “Grand Strategists” wanted to keep the regime change-destabilization strategies in Eurasia a secret, so they never consulted a wide spectrum of comparative ideological systems theorists to thoroughly understand why the old Soviet System collapsed in the first place.</p><p>Without understanding why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992 they could not replicate it by sanctioning the Russian economy as seen in 2021. The Russian Federation had been reorganizing its society to leave the psychological bankruptcy caused by Atheistic Marxism behind as they returned to the combination of Orthodox Christianity and market economies that better complement human nature.</p><h2>The “innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle”</h2><p>The reason why the Soviet Union collapsed was that nonmarket communism does not have an “innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle” that is typically initiated in the “tactical-to-practical” sequence in historical market economies.</p><p>The United States and Great Britain invested massive amounts of money in computers and electronics to advance several strategic areas, specifically: (1) code-breaking and signals intelligence from Bletchley Park; (2) communications switches to improve domestic infrastructure; (3) the Aerospace Industry where aeronautics models are based on relating the two unseen forces of gravity and atmospheric density to the measurable effects of lift, thrust, weight and drag; (4) and to assist the Manhattan Project for nuclear energy where extensive calculations have to be done quickly and accurately to overcome human error in lengthy calculations.</p><p>Prototypes of complex electronics, aircraft, and rockets were developed and field-tested for military purposes where the testers would discard the worst designs and purchase the best-performing products.</p><p>Once the first phase of the consumer preference feedback loop occurred, the next phase was large corporations releasing civilian versions of this product to boost productivity and social status, which then led to a third phase in which the wealthy elite that run the corporations invest the tens of millions of dollars required to increase the economies of scale and lower unit costs making the cutting-edge technology a consumer commodity.</p><p>The initial feedback loop might have taken 15 years at the end of World War Two, but by the 1980s this cycle had dropped to about six years and might be as little as three years today. Just think about how massive field radios were in the Second World War, and how bulky and expensive mobile phones were in the 1980s. The cheapest mobile phones today are a fraction of the size and relative cost of the cell phones of the 1980s, with significantly advanced features. The technology never would have evolved so quickly if not for the initial military expenditures.</p><h2>Bureaucratic Systems</h2><p>The bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union were far too cumbersome and overly politicized to reverse-engineer Western products fast enough to keep pace with the West. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling generations behind the West’s cutting-edge military applications and never had a mechanism to convert its own military products into consumer products required to boost living standards. The market system does this automatically—bureaucratically controlled political economies do not.</p><p>Gorbachev knew that the Soviet Union had to return to a market economy in order to stop the bureaucratic interference in the innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle if the Soviet Union was to remain both a superpower and a civilization in distinction to the dystopian North Korean model.</p><p>The Soviet Union did not survive the transition back to a market economy and the Russian Federation emerged in 1992 in its place. By that time all of the major game-changing Kondratiev-type inventions in electronics, ceramics, and metallurgy had rendered these mature industries. Russia could merely trade from its immense oil and natural gas reserves to purchase the products on the global market on one hand while making joint ventures to manufacture key products to catch up industrially.</p><p>From observing the foreign policy decisions of the US government over the past two decades, it appears that the policy planner did not fully understand why the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1992, and therefore did not understand that the Russian Federation had made the necessary corrections to prevent a recurrence.</p><h2>The Inflationary and Bankruptcy Dilemma</h2><p>Now the neoconservative war hawks are in a widening dilemma—their plan was to collapse the Russian economy and Balkanize the Russian Federation to debilitate Iran simultaneously. The goal then was, and still is, to gain access to Caspian Sea oil and natural gas reserves to ultimately deliver the product to Europe by pipeline.</p><p>The separation of Europe from cheap Russian gas was to maintain both Europe and Japan as key allies, and feeding Europe much more expensive energy via LNG was to be a temporary sea power coping strategy to thwart Russia’s Heartland, or land power, advantage.</p><p>But Russia did not collapse, and its economy seems to grow stronger as it ceases capital outflows to Western partners and instead repatriates the profits. In terms of the previous paper, they can invest more to advance its own economy and those in its periphery.</p><p>Additionally, the alliance of Russia, Iran, and China to keep the US and NATO out of Central Asia is strengthening.</p><p>The US is now at nearly $34 trillion in debt and adding almost $1.7 annually, indicating that the $40 trillion dollar mark is approximately 3.5 years away, at which point interest on the debt will eclipse Defense Department and Intelligence Community budgets. Covering both budgets at the current GDP is untenable if the welfare programs with enormous amounts of unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities are to be paid to retirees.</p><p>The neoconservative war hawks will not want to reduce military and intelligence community budgets because the US will lose its sole superpower status. Meanwhile, the neoliberals and the Left will not want to reduce social services on their long march towards socialist democracy.</p><p>The neoconservatives have a three-year time limit to furnish the debt at current spending rates, all while rising energy costs drive inflation for consumers, leading to widespread protests across the EU—most recently among farming sectors across the German world—and causing businesses to close or relocate to access affordable energy, leading to job losses which will further debilitate the working and middle classes.</p><p>The Green Party and Social Democrat coalition in Germany is losing voter support while the Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD) is gaining ground. If the AfD takes power in Germany in the next election cycle, then they are more than likely to repair the Nord Stream pipelines, form a Euro-Ruble exchange, and exit the petrodollar. That would effectively shatter the US-NATO alliance with Germany and the rest of the German world, including Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria, who historically have been neutral.</p><p>Following the natural gas “domino theory” in the opening articles, Japan would likely complete the Hokkaido-Sakhalin tunnel project and ultimately fuel Germano-Russo-Japanese energy integration.</p><p>Adding insult to injury, President Biden’s approval ratings are in the 30% range and Donald Trump is currently ahead in swing state polls. A Trump victory on an energy independence, peace, and prosperity platform would mean that the neoconservatives, neoliberals and the Left will all have their budgets reduced and their sacred cow of social welfare dismantled.</p><p>This ruling coalition will go to great lengths to prevent a Trump election victory and the AfD gaining power in Germany, which makes the invasion of Iran to access Caspian Sea oil and natural gas the last remaining play. Thus, it is no mystery why the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel drastically accelerated this possibility.</p>

The role of economic development theory and geopolitical theory in implementing effective foreign policy cannot be understated. The US foreign policy planner

Desperate Bets in US Foreign Policy

The False Understanding of the Soviet Collapse

The role of economic development theory and geopolitical theory in implementing effective foreign policy cannot be understated. The US foreign policy planners apparently made a huge bet that the Russian economy would collapse with a modicum of pressure, reminiscent of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.

Purportedly, the US policy planner “Grand Strategists” wanted to keep the regime change-destabilization strategies in Eurasia a secret, so they never consulted a wide spectrum of comparative ideological systems theorists to thoroughly understand why the old Soviet System collapsed in the first place.

Without understanding why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992 they could not replicate it by sanctioning the Russian economy as seen in 2021. The Russian Federation had been reorganizing its society to leave the psychological bankruptcy caused by Atheistic Marxism behind as they returned to the combination of Orthodox Christianity and market economies that better complement human nature.

The “innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle”

The reason why the Soviet Union collapsed was that nonmarket communism does not have an “innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle” that is typically initiated in the “tactical-to-practical” sequence in historical market economies.

The United States and Great Britain invested massive amounts of money in computers and electronics to advance several strategic areas, specifically: (1) code-breaking and signals intelligence from Bletchley Park; (2) communications switches to improve domestic infrastructure; (3) the Aerospace Industry where aeronautics models are based on relating the two unseen forces of gravity and atmospheric density to the measurable effects of lift, thrust, weight and drag; (4) and to assist the Manhattan Project for nuclear energy where extensive calculations have to be done quickly and accurately to overcome human error in lengthy calculations.

Prototypes of complex electronics, aircraft, and rockets were developed and field-tested for military purposes where the testers would discard the worst designs and purchase the best-performing products.

Once the first phase of the consumer preference feedback loop occurred, the next phase was large corporations releasing civilian versions of this product to boost productivity and social status, which then led to a third phase in which the wealthy elite that run the corporations invest the tens of millions of dollars required to increase the economies of scale and lower unit costs making the cutting-edge technology a consumer commodity.

The initial feedback loop might have taken 15 years at the end of World War Two, but by the 1980s this cycle had dropped to about six years and might be as little as three years today. Just think about how massive field radios were in the Second World War, and how bulky and expensive mobile phones were in the 1980s. The cheapest mobile phones today are a fraction of the size and relative cost of the cell phones of the 1980s, with significantly advanced features. The technology never would have evolved so quickly if not for the initial military expenditures.

The bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union were far too cumbersome and overly politicized to reverse-engineer Western products fast enough to keep pace with the West. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was falling generations behind the West’s cutting-edge military applications and never had a mechanism to convert its own military products into consumer products required to boost living standards. The market system does this automatically—bureaucratically controlled political economies do not.

Gorbachev knew that the Soviet Union had to return to a market economy in order to stop the bureaucratic interference in the innovation-consumer preference-economic production cycle if the Soviet Union was to remain both a superpower and a civilization in distinction to the dystopian North Korean model.

The Soviet Union did not survive the transition back to a market economy and the Russian Federation emerged in 1992 in its place. By that time all of the major game-changing Kondratiev-type inventions in electronics, ceramics, and metallurgy had rendered these mature industries. Russia could merely trade from its immense oil and natural gas reserves to purchase the products on the global market on one hand while making joint ventures to manufacture key products to catch up industrially.

From observing the foreign policy decisions of the US government over the past two decades, it appears that the policy planner did not fully understand why the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1992, and therefore did not understand that the Russian Federation had made the necessary corrections to prevent a recurrence.

Now the neoconservative war hawks are in a widening dilemma—their plan was to collapse the Russian economy and Balkanize the Russian Federation to debilitate Iran simultaneously. The goal then was, and still is, to gain access to Caspian Sea oil and natural gas reserves to ultimately deliver the product to Europe by pipeline.

The separation of Europe from cheap Russian gas was to maintain both Europe and Japan as key allies, and feeding Europe much more expensive energy via LNG was to be a temporary sea power coping strategy to thwart Russia’s Heartland, or land power, advantage.

But Russia did not collapse, and its economy seems to grow stronger as it ceases capital outflows to Western partners and instead repatriates the profits. In terms of the previous paper, they can invest more to advance its own economy and those in its periphery.

Additionally, the alliance of Russia, Iran, and China to keep the US and NATO out of Central Asia is strengthening.

The US is now at nearly $34 trillion in debt and adding almost $1.7 annually, indicating that the $40 trillion dollar mark is approximately 3.5 years away, at which point interest on the debt will eclipse Defense Department and Intelligence Community budgets. Covering both budgets at the current GDP is untenable if the welfare programs with enormous amounts of unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities are to be paid to retirees.

The neoconservative war hawks will not want to reduce military and intelligence community budgets because the US will lose its sole superpower status. Meanwhile, the neoliberals and the Left will not want to reduce social services on their long march towards socialist democracy.

The neoconservatives have a three-year time limit to furnish the debt at current spending rates, all while rising energy costs drive inflation for consumers, leading to widespread protests across the EU—most recently among farming sectors across the German world—and causing businesses to close or relocate to access affordable energy, leading to job losses which will further debilitate the working and middle classes.

The Green Party and Social Democrat coalition in Germany is losing voter support while the Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD) is gaining ground. If the AfD takes power in Germany in the next election cycle, then they are more than likely to repair the Nord Stream pipelines, form a Euro-Ruble exchange, and exit the petrodollar. That would effectively shatter the US-NATO alliance with Germany and the rest of the German world, including Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria, who historically have been neutral.

Following the natural gas “domino theory” in the opening articles, Japan would likely complete the Hokkaido-Sakhalin tunnel project and ultimately fuel Germano-Russo-Japanese energy integration.

Adding insult to injury, President Biden’s approval ratings are in the 30% range and Donald Trump is currently ahead in swing state polls. A Trump victory on an energy independence, peace, and prosperity platform would mean that the neoconservatives, neoliberals and the Left will all have their budgets reduced and their sacred cow of social welfare dismantled.

This ruling coalition will go to great lengths to prevent a Trump election victory and the AfD gaining power in Germany, which makes the invasion of Iran to access Caspian Sea oil and natural gas the last remaining play. Thus, it is no mystery why the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel drastically accelerated this possibility.

Harold Mendoza 6xaf Y a E1 Lm Unsplash 

As the Founder of the G3Strat Group, he combines business acumen with military precision to guide companies in risk resilience. With over a decade of experience, he has held multiple roles in security, intelligence, and training. His expertise includes risk assessment, national security, operational planning, and intelligence analysis.

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George McMillan

Founder and Head of Research

<h2>The False Understanding of the Soviet Collapse</h2><p>The role of economic development theory and geopolitical theory in implementing effective foreign policy cannot be understated. The US foreign policy planners apparently made a huge bet that the Russian economy would collapse with a modicum of pressure, reminiscent of the collapse of the old Soviet Union.

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