Obama to normalize relations with Cuba

[gf0012-aust]

(P.S. I'd have to do the research but for that matter I'd wouldn't be surprised if Great Britain didn't have 'War Plans' drafted in the event of conflict with the U.S. prior to WW11.)

Circa washington treaty there was a significant cohort of US snr military who did see Gt Britain as a military and thus strategic threat. Some of those snr US military carried that prejudice right up to and well into WW2

eg USN war games treated the RN as read team

[Monash]

We had war plans against EVERYBODY!!! And we don't throw stuff out.

United States color-coded war plans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As the article points out they are excellent staff planning tools.

Does anyone know which variant of 'War Plan Red' was meant cover the invasion of Australia?

I submit that given our (then) current state of military preparedness we would have retaliated with an asymmetric militarily campaign involving huge volumes of beer, sausages and beach parties cleverly designed to wear the occupying forces military preparedness down to the point where your Government decided they had no choice but to send them home for detox. :)

Come to think of it, this might still be our plan!

[DOR]

Nixon was a Republican.... In fact Obama is the first Dem president to seekout major foreign policy changes. Normally its the GOP- Ike, Nixon, Reagan

Nixon was a REPUBLICAN?!? Not by today's standards! Seriously, did you not understand the context? I'll spell it out: the post-Cold War GOP (the historical context is very important) has not sought to overturn Kennedy's Presidental decree for ideological reasons.

[Monash]

Ideology weighs heavily on most of the policy decisions being made by the Republicans of late, which is not necessarily a bad thing so long as it is balanced by a healthy dose of pragmatism. Sadly I'm afraid it is the latter which appears in short supply of late in some sections of the GOP.

[Albany Rifles]

Z,

Yeah, cause Truman, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton did nothing in international relations.....

United Nations
Marshall Plan
Foreign Assistance Act
Ich bin ein Berliner
Camp David
Dayton Accords

[zraver]

Z,

Yeah, cause Truman, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton did nothing in international relations.....

United Nations
Marshall Plan
Foreign Assistance Act
Ich bin ein Berliner
Camp David
Dayton Accords

None of those are ground breaking and 180 from conventional wisdom in the way that Nixon in Bejing or Reagan in Reykjavik were.

[Officer of Engineers]

None of those are ground breaking and 180 from conventional wisdom in the way that Nixon in Bejing or Reagan in Reykjavik were.

Jason, you shitting me? Carter, PRC in 79. Within 30 days of Deng's visit, the 1st Sino-VN War.

[zraver]

Jason, you shitting me? Carter, PRC in 79. Within 30 days of Deng's visit, the 1st Sino-VN War.

Sir the state visit by Deng was not very ground breaking, it was building on Kissinger's work about flipping China...

[Officer of Engineers]

Sir the state visit by Deng was not very ground breaking, it was building on Kissinger's work about flipping China...

Jason,

Are you shitting me? Do you understand the implications of the 1979 Sino-VN War? And the result of Deng's visit?

Deng played us ... to our benefit. Within 2 weeks of Deng visiting the US, he destroyed the Soviet's southern flank to China ... with our blessings!

[Julie]

Embargo and sanctions only hurt the citizens...the Government still does what it wants to as continuing to embrace communism. Opening relations with Cuba I think is a good thing. I just hope Obama doesn't add iran and/or N korea to the list.

[Monash]

More likely, articles of surrender... At least until the various naval treaties were signed. The US controlled UK access to credit, raw materials and food. A pissed off US without the naval treaties beats the UK in very short order.

The reason the UK wanted the London and Washington Naval treaties was to head off a brand new battleship arms race they could not win. They were exhausted by WWI and could not match US financial or production resources. By the time the Versailles treaty was signed the US had 22 Dreadnoughts. 14 of them were super-dreanoughts, and had 10 more super dreadnoughts and 6 super battle cruisers were under construction. The Royal navy had 32 dreadnoughts but only 11 were true super dreadnoughts, 11 were intermediate and none of them had transoceanic range. They had no new battleships under construction. They had 12 battlecruisers, only 1 of them a super battle cruiser and no new ones on the slips. By 1924 it would have been USN- 31/21 dreadnoughts and 6 super battle cruisers vs RN- 32/11/11 dreadnoughts and 11/1 battle cruisers.

RN superiority was doomed without another expensive ship building race the UK could not afford. Not only numbers though, most US ships could sail in excess of 10,000 miles. Few British ships could. US ships could set out and shut down the global commerce the UK depended on and the RN could not stop them. The RN depended on coaling stations that would have been both incredibly exposed to USMC raids and unable to provide the fuel oil the best British ships needed.

The naval treaties saved the UK.

Z, will be off line for a while so I will go into more detail when I return (assuming I remember of course) however:

- Correct me if I'm wrong but immediately prior to the outbreak of WW!! GB still had the largest navy in the world (not large enough to cover all the commitments that would eventuate during that war by any means) but still the largest pre-war navy.
- Every Government of the day wanted the Washington Treaty (they all signed it) their Admirals not withstanding or course. The Great Depression had crippled the global economy and all nations were looking to reduce expenditure. So yes US Naval supremacy might have been 'doomed' if the US had continued it's build up but the short answer is it didn't - and for the same reasons as everyone else the kitty was running on empty. So while the the US might have been able to to continue with their program more than GB could it didn't mean they were willing to.
- GB was also in full transition to fuel oil by the end of WW1. (I think the Queen Elizabeth Class were the first all fuel oil capital ships in the fleet starting from 1913/14?) They continued this process through the interwar years -to the extent that by WW11 coaling stations were no longer a significant consideration by the the start of hostilities;
- by default GB had a chain of naval stations across the globe and an Empire to sustain those bases, making it very hard for the US to knock out its ability to resupply, repair and refit in preparation for naval offensives at the time and place of its choosing. Those stations located in the major ports of the dominion would in turn be defended by (in many cases large numbers) of Commonwealth troops
- the Entente Cordiale would ensure the British Isles resupply across the channel even if the US were to blockade the Atlantic and Mediterranean approaches to the GB Isles.
- lastly I am not suggesting the U.S would lose such a hypothetical conflict, nor am I suggesting it would win. Just that the scale and complexities of the problems faced by both sides, using only the forces historically available to them in the period concerned makes the outcome much less clear cut than you seem to predict.

And this doesn't even take into account the political and economic interests on both sides of the Atlantic working to avoid any conflicts between the two Great powers of the time. As an aside I believe Imperial Germany actually drafted a war Plan for an attack of the US Atlantic Coast early int he 20th century only to scrap the whole idea based on the likelihood that:
A) The US would eventually mobilize sufficient military reserves to drive off the limited number of German troops that could be landed; and
B) The fact that the British Navy would almost certainly intervene on the side of the US meaning the German navy would get reamed by the combined actions of both navies.

Cheers for now and have a great Xmas.

[GVChamp]

Jason,

Are you shitting me? Do you understand the implications of the 1979 Sino-VN War? And the result of Deng's visit?

Deng played us ... to our benefit. Within 2 weeks of Deng visiting the US, he destroyed the Soviet's southern flank to China ... with our blessings!

Not really the unique result of aggressive Presidential action, as far as I can tell.

Even the Camp David Accords aren't really the result of any particular genius on Carter's part: Carter wanted a huge multi-lateral agreement that would bring peace to the entire Middle East. Egypt and Israel resoundingly agreed that Carter was a moron and they would start negotiating peace between themselves.

Now that's not giving Carter enough credit: he's a great peacemaker! He had a relentless drive to do SOMETHING and achieve SOMETHING that bordered on obsessive.

But his actual idea of a huge peace conference was ridiculous.

[Albany Rifles]

Z,

Really!?!?

The Marshall Plan flew in the face of what the Unite States had done in every single war in our history. We reached out and helped our allies AND our adversaries after the war get back on their collective fleet. When had we ever done that? When had ANY nation state done that?

Truman also DEMANDED that Berlin be supported....in the face of the isolationists led by Taft...guaranteeing that city would stay in 4 power status...allowing Kennedy & Reagan to alter make their points there.

Huge game changer.

I also left out that Truman recognized the state of Israel...against the express wishes of most of our allies.

Truman used the United Nations time and again to the West's advantage...not just for our advantage. Again, a major first. And he used the UN to gather a coalition which faced down Communist expansion in Korea.

Without Kennedy standing at Brandenburg Gate and linking the US....AND NATO inexorably to the survival of Wdst Berlin as a West German city...Reagan never would have been able to admonish Gorbachev 25 years later.

So Camp David no big deal, huh?

It ended 34 years of continuous combat between the primary adversaries in the Arab-Israeli wars. How many wars facing trans-Arab armies has Israel had to fight since? It changed the dynamic in the Middle East. It allowed the Saudis and the Emirates to use their national armies to fight fellow Arabs (see Iraq in 1991). It also allowed Jordan to normalize relations becaus eit showed all the Arab nations that while it may take awhile negotiations were doable with Israel.

Oh, he also committed US ground troops to keep the peace. Ever hear of the MFO? And they are still there.

Carter abandoned the "shuttle diplomacy" and committed his administration to multi-lateral negotiations which eventually bore fruit.

As for the Dayton Accords, again the US committed US ground troops into an entirely new area in Eastern Europe for the first time in the post-Cold War era. What resulted was the Balkans, an area which had real possibility of splintering off into a spread of fighting to rival what happened post 1914. The bottomline is that the killing stopped...which no one else was able to accomplish...Brits, French, NATO (with apologies to OOE), Russians. When the 1st Armored Division crossed the Sava River...huge game changer.

So, Z, I am sorry but I just don't buy your backhanded dismissal of these events.

Each was a game changer and saw the United States fundamentally take a different tack than it had in our history....with wide-ranging international implications.

[GVChamp]

None of those are major breaks from US history, the result of unique Presidential action, or even game-changers.

The Marshall Plan wasn't Truman's idea. Every major US official thought the plan to dismember Germany was pants-on-head retarded. It isn't even really new, just a continuation of American Idealism in place since Wilson's 14 points. It's not even the first time we tried to help out Germany, see the Young Plan and the Dawes Plan.

Recognizing Israel is not really that big of a deal, in terms of how the Cold War will eventually play out and end. All that changes is that the Jews are an oppressed minority like the Kurds or the Yazdi or the Coptics or the Palestinians. The US and the USSR are still going to pay people to shoot at each other. If anything, the lack of Israel existing makes it that much harder for the Soviets to penetrate the region, since the Suez Crisis was the initial catalyst for Soviet influence in that area.

The Camp David Accords are somewhat more relevant, because it's much later in the game, but Carter didn't cause that. He wanted a huge multi-lateral peace conference. The Egyptians and Israelis themselves wanted to make peace, Carter just facilitated. Granted, that's really, REALLY understating his role, because playing mediator in that conflict is NOT easy, but it wasn't his bright idea to suddenly make peace in the Middle East and he didn't suddenly come up with a dramatic new way to make it happen, all by his lonesome.
And Egypt-Israel peace is NOT a big ticket Cold War item. Does it move Egypt out of the Soviet camp? Yes....okay...so what happens if Egypt stays in the Soviet camp? Israel fights another war in the 1980s and smashes the Arabs again, the Saudis still dump a whole lot of oil on the market and the Soviets still get bankrupt. America still saves the day and the Cold War ends, it just ends with the Middle East in shittier shape than it otherwise would be.
But that's still a small ticket item. It's not Berlin, it's not Cuba, it's not Turkey, and it sure as hell isn't opening up China. The Soviets did not put 50 divisions to their south because they were concerned about the horrible threat from the few million Jews living a thousand miles away from them.

Dayton falls in the same camp: irrelevant, small change, incremental.

Honestly, I think Cuba falls in the same camp too, along with most of Obama's foreign policy: irrelevant, small change, incremental. Bush II had an absolutely transformative way of looking at the world and wanted to make it happen.

I think Zraver's right on this one, post-war Democrats tend to be less dynamic on the FP front than post-war Republicans. Wilson and FDR are totally different beasts, might as well compare Obama to Bismarck or Hercules.

[zraver]

Albany, as important as those events were (and I'm not dismissing their importance) they were not 180 changes in policy. As for helping our former enemies... US loan guarantees floated the Weimar Republic. The Marhsal Plan was historic, but not out of character.

Monash, I wasn't talking WWII but the fleets as they existed and were planned from 1918-25. So why the QE's had been oil fired, the majority of the fleet was coal or oil sprayed coal where the bulk of the US fleet was oil. Without access to coaling/ fuel oil stations the RN of 1918 time period is a regional power regardless of how many ships it has. The RN not only eviscerated its capitol ship building program in order to make escorts during the war, but post war it lacked the money to resume the construction. From 1916-1923 the RN built 15 capitol ships. The US built (or was building) 24. So if the Washington Treaty talks had broken down, the resulting naval arms race would ahve seriously favored the US over the UK in the Atlantic.