>
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, SA wrote:
>
>> I think that's exactly what's *not* true. There was no collapse on
>> the horizon in the USSR. It was a case of stagnation and slow
>> decline. If deep economic problems automatically produce radical
>> reform to revitalize the system, where's North Korea's Gorbachev?
>> Their problems are a hundred times worse than the USSR's.
>
> Korea is being propped up by divided outsiders.
North Koreans are literally starving and yet that's only prompted mild and glacial reform.
> But the SU and China were not. Stagnation would have led to palpable
> crisis within decades.
Maybe - within decades. But once you accept that it would have taken some unspecified number of decades without Gorbachev before serious change would have been forced, lots of other possibilities become feasible. For example, maybe after some number of years Moscow would have looked at the success of the Chinese road and decided to imitate it. Then, who knows, maybe the system could have survived as a Chinese-style capitalist/communist hybrid, or something. And then that means there would never have been a unipolar single-superpower world. The point is: history would have been a lot different without Gorbachev. On a much grander scale than without an Iraq War.
SA