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It was madness, yet for Sweden and Norway to prepare that way was a local optimum and a rational choice. (Not the only choice, but not a crazy choice.) Nobody

It was madness, yet for Sweden and Norway to prepare that way was a local optimum and a rational choice. (Not the only choice, but not a crazy choice.) Nobody wanted to start a great war, but at least during a couple of incidents things came to close to start by accident. And once started, war takes on a life of its own.

vidarh 7y ago
It was a rational choice based on a totally flawed understanding of the other side, is the point. When you believe the other side is out to destroy you, then yes, that is how you respond. But that belief was driven on both sides by an underlying belief on both sides that they were the good guys and the other side were cartoonish villains. Neither side questioned the belief that the other side were war mongerers with a crazy willingness to sacrifice to expand, and both sides saw proxy wars as evidence of that while they saw their own involvement as protecting themselves by building alliances and creating buffers. We see this up to and including Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", only to then get reality thrown in the face by the Soviet response to Able Archer 83 in particular (and I generally have little respect for Reagan, but he does deserve credit for actually coming to that understanding and acting on it in what was one of the biggest foreign policy about faces in modern history). It was understandable, though, in that both sides had seen the nazis, and both sides saw the nazis as a model for the other side - the Soviets seeing the nazis as not fundamentally different from capitalist imperialists, and the West seeing the Soviets as not fundamentally different from nazi authoritarianism. But it was nevertheless in retrospect terrifyingly flawed. It stands as one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups in human history that the world for half a century was shaped by the two biggest blocks fundamentally misjudging the intentions and motivations of the other side, despite the vast amount of "intelligence" both sides believed they had about each other. It makes me terrified to think about, because of the implications it has for what stupid mistakes we're probably still perpetuating when we try to infer the motivations of the major powers.
- jacobush 7y ago
  I agree, but also want to add more of the outsider perspective. Norway was part of NATO. Sweden was not. Even if Sweden would have had insight into that both NATO and Soviet had mistaken beliefs about each other, it would still had made sense for Sweden to prepare for total war. If these two sides fought, Sweden better have been prepared. And there is some indication that Sweden actually had a slightly more nuanced perspective. Olof Palme wanted a nuclear free zone in the Baltic Sea. This was seen in NATO as a conceit to the Soviets, and maybe the other way around in Soviet command.

vidarh 7y ago

It was a rational choice based on a totally flawed understanding of the other side, is the point. When you believe the other side is out to destroy you, then yes, that is how you respond. But that belief was driven on both sides by an underlying belief on both sides that they were the good guys and the other side were cartoonish villains. Neither side questioned the belief that the other side were war mongerers with a crazy willingness to sacrifice to expand, and both sides saw proxy wars as evidence of that while they saw their own involvement as protecting themselves by building alliances and creating buffers. We see this up to and including Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", only to then get reality thrown in the face by the Soviet response to Able Archer 83 in particular (and I generally have little respect for Reagan, but he does deserve credit for actually coming to that understanding and acting on it in what was one of the biggest foreign policy about faces in modern history). It was understandable, though, in that both sides had seen the nazis, and both sides saw the nazis as a model for the other side - the Soviets seeing the nazis as not fundamentally different from capitalist imperialists, and the West seeing the Soviets as not fundamentally different from nazi authoritarianism. But it was nevertheless in retrospect terrifyingly flawed. It stands as one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups in human history that the world for half a century was shaped by the two biggest blocks fundamentally misjudging the intentions and motivations of the other side, despite the vast amount of "intelligence" both sides believed they had about each other. It makes me terrified to think about, because of the implications it has for what stupid mistakes we're probably still perpetuating when we try to infer the motivations of the major powers.

jacobush 7y ago
I agree, but also want to add more of the outsider perspective. Norway was part of NATO. Sweden was not. Even if Sweden would have had insight into that both NATO and Soviet had mistaken beliefs about each other, it would still had made sense for Sweden to prepare for total war. If these two sides fought, Sweden better have been prepared. And there is some indication that Sweden actually had a slightly more nuanced perspective. Olof Palme wanted a nuclear free zone in the Baltic Sea. This was seen in NATO as a conceit to the Soviets, and maybe the other way around in Soviet command.