> It is not clear that the wars you cited, especially Vietnam, were necessary to fight and defeat communism
But that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming that they were a big part of America's toolkit in the cold war. To say that we won the battle through liberal democratic means is absolutely false. We toppled democratically elected left leaning governments time and again. Democracy was neither our means nor our end.
US did X is different from saying US defeated communism by doing X. I am not disputing the former and indeed there were terrible actions including bombing of civilians, and the removal of elected governments.
But that is not to say that X was the cause of victory. For too many cases, it actually lead to a backlash with regimes which were not friendly to US interests coming to power(Iran, Vietnam,..). Also, the USSR did similar acts (Hungary, Afghanistan) but could not win.
That the US prevailed owes a lot to its economic dynamism relative to USSR. (As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn't necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric.)
> As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn't necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric
That isn't true, taxes has remained constant since ww2. The tax distribution might have changed, but the total amount collected hasn't changed much. Can see the curve looks about the same as always. The marginal tax rate barely matters for total taxes collected since there are so few rich people.
This is an interesting point. But the spikes in revenue when tax policy changes indicates sensitivity. Further, that there are other countries with wildly different tax revenues as of GDP implies that there is lot of scope for change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
But in the US itself, if it is true that high tax regimes(for both income and corporate tax) did not prevent dynamism in the economy (because of what Hauser observed or otherwise), that would be an interesting to note. One analysis I read, in Jacobin - a pro-socialist magazine, was that the critical difference was that in the US, companies were allowed to fail, whereas in the USSR failures continued due to political reasons and absorbed a lot of resources.
But that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming that they were a big part of America's toolkit in the cold war. To say that we won the battle through liberal democratic means is absolutely false. We toppled democratically elected left leaning governments time and again. Democracy was neither our means nor our end.