23 March 2012, CoC, Committee on Conscience, hosts the Power of Witness event
How does author and former Washington Post foreign correspondent Michael Dobbs see the world today?
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Scott LaMar
23 March 2012, CoC, Committee on Conscience, hosts the Power of Witness event
Airdate: November 08, 2022
Best-selling author and journalist Michael Dobbs will be speaking at Messiah University this Thursday.
As a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs had a front row seat to the collapse of Communism, covering landmark events such as the breakup of the Soviet Union, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and the Tiananmen protests in China.
Dobbs has written six books on the Cold War and World War II, including the widely acclaimed One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, on the Cuban missile crisis. His latest book, King Richard, Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, was named New York Times critics’ “Top Book of 2021.”
Appearing on The Spark Monday, Dobbs compared Russian President Vladamir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,”We haven’t yet reached the stage of nuclear escalation around Ukraine that we reached in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. But on the other hand, this crisis has been going on for a lot longer, and there are many unpleasant surprises probably in store. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for 13 days, or at least the most critical phase of the Cuban missile crisis lasted for 13 days. And you had two relatively sensible politicians, JFK and Khrushchev, who as soon as they understood that they were getting close to the abyss, they took steps to defuse the crisis. We haven’t got to that stage of danger, that stage of risk yet. But I can’t see the kind of way out of the crisis of the Ukrainian crisis that resulted in the compromise solution back in 1962. So this war in Ukraine is likely to continue for many months, possibly years. And there are many things that could go wrong. Back in 1962, they were just three or four states with nuclear weapons. I mean, there are now more than a dozen countries with nuclear weapons. So as I say, I think the dangers are comparable, at least to the height of the Cold War.”
Unlike the Cold War, China is probably the United States’ most significant adversary and what’s different is that adversary has a strong economy — one that the U.S. relies on. How does Dobbs see those comparisons?,”(In) the Cold War, you had this communist ideology which included complete control over the economy. There was no kind of market economy. So the both the Russians and the Chinese have junked that idea of trying to control everything. They have market economies, those sort of kind of market economies. And as a result, they’re more flexible than the old communist system. So I would define the current struggle in the world, not between communism and capitalism as it existed during the Cold War, but between autocracy and democracy. And for the time being, at least, these autocratic systems, particularly in China, have not discredited themselves in the eyes of their own people because the Chinese autocracy brought great benefits and advances in living standards to ordinary Chinese. And for many years, Putin in Russia was seen as a return to some kind of economic and political stability in Russia after the chaos of the collapse of communism and the chaos of the Yeltsin years. So both Putin and the Chinese communist leaders had a considerable amount of domestic support, actually. I mean, I think that in the end, autocracy won’t work, but it’s still got a way to go before it completely discredits itself in the eyes of its own people, which in a nuclear world, the only way these systems are going to collapse is we can never defeat either China or the Soviet or Russia militarily.”
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