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China vastly overestimated the potency of the empire
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Calm down, obviously I meant the Soviet Union for the Cold War bit. I could draw Gorbachev's head splotch birthmark from memory. And the US chronically overestimated the Soviet Union's capacity to both wage war and leverage economic influence. It wasn't until Soviet MP Boris Yeltsin had a real time freakout in a Texas grocery store in 1989 that both sides had the veil lifted.
A large part of the overestimation is that the spies and analysts both took the most conservative stance possible, leaving little room for doing anything that wasn't just pumping up the military industrial complex.
Russia's "3-5 day takeover of Kiev" was 100% within the range of expected possibility at the time, and the quick exposure of Russia's relative paper tiger advance was the result of endemic corruption.
Small amount of context added.
Almost, the initial troops sent into the SMO were not enough to take over Kiev, hence why I wrote "force peace talks". Because that is literally what they did, at no point was there an attempt to storm Kiev.
And negotiations did happen and were on their way towards a positive conclusion for Russia if not for the intervention of the west via Boris Johnson. There were quite a few logistical fuckups which took time fixing, but they came to bear after plan A (quick show of force and then negotiate peace) failed, not before.