Re: the Cold War

On Nov 11, 2010, at 7:41 AM, Pat Mathews wrote:

> Of course, Russia and China didn't like each other any better than  
> we liked either one of them, or they, us. Still, Kipling's Great  
> Game went on along all three borders for quite some time.

Which took the US a long time to figure out, incidentally.  It also  
took us a long time to figure out that North Vietnam wasn't ever going  
to be a Chinese proxy the way North Korea had been, because China had  
been VIetnam's mortal enemy and part-time occupying power for the last  
thousand years or so, and that the "domino theory" justification for  
the Vietnam War was based almost entirely on completely invalid  
assumptions about how things worked in that part of the world, colored  
in large part by the very recent experience of the Korean War.