wat0n wrote:If the West is truly in decline, why would Russia or China regard anything that barred them from getting what they want from the West as "fair" or "legal"?
Indeed - why should they, when they've been on the short end of that stick for a few generations and have seen how arbitrary notions of justice actually are?
The West and the Soviets had a unique oppurtunity to build an equitable world order that the Third World would want to participate in (and be well-served by participating in), but Truman set the US on the path toward a Cold War and fear-governed foreign policy. Western oligarchs, through their arrogance and inability to trust what it perceived as an enemy, wasted the oppurtunity.
And yes, I do blame Truman - FDR's administration had gone to great lengths to repair the relationship with the Soviet Union during the World War, a legacy that Truman deliberately threw away due to personal anti-communist tendancies and his choice in cabinet. Given Western rhetoric, and Western interference in the Russian Civil War, it is reasonable that the first step to building trust should have (and for a time did) come from Western concessions. They failed to build a world where the strong can't take what they want and are reaping what they sow.