8/23/2023 *list 3 examples of the cold war Why was the afghan war called the Vietnam of the Soviet UnionRead NowThis, in turn, became a project to overcome the so-called Vietnam Syndrome-that is, the widespread aversion to foreign interventions bequeathed by the US defeat in Vietnam. For many American policymakers, the objective became to give the Soviets “their Vietnam War,” to quote the US National Security Advisor at the time. Political, military, and cultural elites looked to the Vietnam War in order to draw lessons for the unfolding Soviet war in Afghanistan. ![]() Throughout the 1980s, the idea of a potential “Soviet Vietnam” became enmeshed in both US and Soviet political discourses. Specifically, the project looks at how the Vietnam War becomes a preferred metaphor for the later Soviet war in Afghanistan on both sides of the Iron Curtain. My current book project, “Entangled Defeats: The Soviet-Afghan War and the Shadow of Vietnam,” examines the use and abuse of historical analogies during the 1980s and beyond. Q: What project are you working on at the Center? The Wilson Center was a natural setting to begin my new book project that deals more directly with the late Cold War issues. This decision, in turn, first brought me to the Wilson Center (Kennan Institute) ten years ago as part of a Ph.D. This is a long-winded way of explaining that I ultimately dropped my college specialization in ancient history and chose to pursue Russian and Soviet history in graduate school because it profoundly challenged my long-held Cold War perceptions. It wasn’t until very late in high school and especially college, when I first studied these issues in any depth, that I came to understand that the Soviet Union, like the United States, was the product of complex social, political, economic, and geopolitical forces that its political system, peculiar ideology, and antagonistic relationship with Western governments could be understood and explained as a response to very specific historical circumstances that there was a fundamental disconnect, for example, between the aims of revolutionary socialists of the early twentieth century and the authoritarian system that emerged in Russia in the wake of 1917. Indeed, even today, many of my students espouse some version of this mentality, which also continues to inform an important strand of US political thought. Long after the USSR collapsed, elements of this mentality stayed with me. In the distorted view of my youth, the Soviet Union was above all things concerned with destroying the American way of life, and “socialism,” in all its manifestations, constituted an intrinsic evil. But as a child growing up in a mountain town very similar to the one depicted in the film, Red Dawn felt entirely realistic. It’s cartoonishly violent and my students usually respond with laughter at the absurdity of it all. Of course, none of the students or teachers is armed. The soldiers attack in the middle of a school day for some reason and proceed to fire rocket launchers and AK-47s indiscriminately into the school. I sometimes show my students an opening clip from Red Dawn in which Soviet paratroopers launch an all-out assault on a high school in a small Colorado town. But Hollywood films like Red Dawn and the Rambo series probably did as much as anything to shape my childhood worldview. My earliest childhood memories were set against the backdrop of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, news coverage of the Chernobyl disaster, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like many kids of the 1980s, my fascination with communism, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and so on, derived from paranoia and fear, as well as a belief in the infallibility of America’s role in the world. Q: Describe your background and what brought you to the Wilson Center. Careers, Fellowships, and Internships Open/Close.Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition.Science and Technology Innovation Program.Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative.The Middle East and North Africa Workforce Development Initiative.Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.North Korea International Documentation Project.Environmental Change and Security Program. ![]()
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