2. During the high Cold War (1945-1963), a Russia America alliance would have been unthinkable. That changed in 1960s when main threat to American hegemony emerged as anti-imperialist nationalism, not always communist, from Vietnam to Middle East to Latin America.
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3. Humiliated by Vietnamese resistance movement, under challenge from newly energized "Third World," buffeted by OPEC oil rise, some in USA started thinking: "hey, the Russians might not be so bad. At least they're white."
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4."Bismarck was supposed to have said that the most important fact of the twentieth century would be that Americans speak English; it is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white.” John Lukacs 1970
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5. Starting in 1973, the science fiction writers Jerry Pournelle & Larry Nivens, both with deep ties to military-industrial complex, wrote a series of novels imagining a USA/USSR partnership to rule the world.
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6. Gore Vidal, from his own eccentric position as an isolationist leftist, agreed. 1986 in The Nation: "For America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity."
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7. Vidal, 1986: "After all, the white race is the minority race and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers—or, worse, mere entertainment—for more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.”
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8. I haven't read post-Cold WAr Tom Clancy, but apparently he's part of this story as well. https://twitter.com/yeeyee187/status/1019005483678511104 …
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9. Pat Buchanan in 2013 asked if Putin were "one of us?" (Spoiler alert: yes!)pic.twitter.com/mMOFXvOiNP
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10. All of which is to say that one of the core ideas of Trump's foreign policy has been kicking around the ideological fringes since 1970s. Part of what Trump has done is take fringe idea & bring it to White House.
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11. I think discussion of USA/Russia alliance idea are too narrowly Trump focused. He might be attracted to idea for personal reasons (debts, blackmail) but there is a wider variety of USA far right that genuinely loves Russia.
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12. Some more thoughts on this (with links to the stuff I've quoted here):https://newrepublic.com/article/139817/donald-trump-wants-ignore-russia-worry-china …
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13. Addendum: because this pro-Russian stuff has a genuine base of support in GOP, smart play for Trump is not to back down but to hold firm, rally the Buchananites, Tucker Carlson people, etc. & scare the GOP establishment.
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14. There's some inkling out there that this time Trump has gone too far & congressional GOP will revolt. Maybe. But I think Trump could still rally his base on this and scare the GOP.https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1019009821926936576 …
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15. Speaking of Pat Buchanan:https://twitter.com/ChroniclesMag/status/1019016155913179136 …
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End of conversation
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