ABSTRACT

This chapter examines what Americans want to achieve with regard to the former Soviet Union and how much they want to intervene and on what side, and for what reasons. Mackinder offered an assessment much less reassuring for Britons or for Americans, that whoever controlled the center of Eurasia could exploit this to control the rest of this greatest of continents, and from this would be able to dominate the world. As most Americans however, welcomed this turmoil, they in effect forgot the nuclear threat, or simply could not do anything about it. Therefore it might be much easier for Americans to relax into a noninvolved isolation, as power in Eurasia was more and more balanced against itself. The dramatic collapse of Marxist regimes in all the countries we are considering here might suggest that little or no attention should be given to what had been taught in the universities of these countries under communist rule, an interpretation of US