Maybe JFK would have got us there with his dreams of Camelot, it was a time of Disney and of hope. The dollar was used pretty much all over the world, Perhaps it could have been like Pax Romana, a lot of people loved America, because of the movies and Disneyland, I recall the supreme leader of N Korea really wanted to visit Disneyland. The opportunities for peace and friendship were there in abundance
One useful thinking aid is to assume we got to where we want to be and then think back to how we got there. Or to how we didn't get there.
There may have been some resonance between what Jackie said and what the JFK administration and the era was actually like. JFK changed the developing arms race between the US and USSR, morphing it into a space race - a big improvement - especially if you care about the progress of the human race. A total 180 from the nihilist actions of president JB.
The space race was a proxy contest to bring new ICBM's into development in the name of something other than next-gen nukes.
A lot of technology can be used in war, but better to focus on a friendly rivalry than on killing each other as has often been the case.
I'm trying in this thread to look at where we want to go, and to imagine, since that's the start of a improving our lives, at what we really want. We've had a lot of good things in the past, that have worked out well. And that might provide some ideas for what we want to preserve or do more of in the future.
When I opened this thread it was mostly to help myself find a ray of hope amid the gloom. Now that ray has become a burst of sunshine, WW3 has been averted - Joe Biden didn't get the war on two fronts he wanted. The war in Ukraine was problematic but although Russia would not tolerate NATO weapons in Ukraine just 5 minutes by flight from Moscow, Russia would not produce WW3 to avoid WW3. The situation in the Middle East is far more complex and dangerous, but it looks like saner minds than ours are prevailing.
All was not totally wonderful. The Cold War was going on between the United States (and Western European allies) and the Soviet Union (and Communist bloc). It was a short interval between the Korean War and Vietnam War, which were sort of both part of the larger ongoing "Cold War" conflict. The U.S. has launched a halfhearted intervention into Cuba the first year of JFK's presidency. (Which was probably related to JFK's assassination a few years later) Don't forget the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Things could have gone bad. There were tensions. But in terms of the U.S. economy and standard of living, the U.S. was probably at its height of prosperity at this time. For the first time, poverty seemed like it was becoming a thing of the past. Abundant good-paying jobs for American workers, and much of the rest of the world (even people in Soviet bloc countries) wanted to be like the U.S. or move to the U.S.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was an example of the silver rule: do not do to others what you would not want done to you. In 1961 the US placed nuclear armed missiles in Turkey within range of Moscow. The following year the USSR placed nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, to help the US understand what it felt like.
And now we are back at it again, placing NATO weapons right next to Russia, and the Biden supporters are blind to seeing that Russia might find that threatening.
The route to peace isn't always an easy one. We bombed Vietnam for years and then finally it became peaceful after we stopped.
It's no coincidence that this happy era was in the early 1960s, before JFK was assassinated, because after that things went progressively wrong. JFK had planned to pull the advisors out of Vietnam as soon as the election was over because he couldn't risk being called 'weak' or a 'communist' before an election. Instead the US changed from wanting to help the world to bombing it.
Most people didn't notice the transition: As they said in Vietnam: "to save the village we had to destroy it''. Or more recently, in mid 2021 when we sent over to the capital of Ukraine, huge 155mm fragmentation shells in large quantities, and some more howitzers, these supplemented the paltry amount they had already which they were firing at Donetsk and other 'breakaway' civilian areas. There were no Russian forces to shell at the time. This additional artillery reached the front and was put into action around Feb 16 2022 and led to Russia moving forces in, having told everyone this was going to happen, on Feb 24th. The US public was kept from knowing what was going on by referring to the munitions as 'aid' or 'help'. Just as the money we spend to attack other countries we call 'defense'.
