Operation Unthinkable - Churchill's plans to invade the Soviet Union

So concerned was the Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that in the spring of that year he ordered his Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan, 'Operation Unthinkable' to attack the Soviet Empire. The top secret plan was so sensitive that only Churchill's immediate circle of military advisors were privy to the blueprint. The detailed proposal, which may seem fanciful today, sought to claw back East Germany and Poland, which had fallen under Soviet domination. Churchill felt particularly guilty over the fate of the Poles, who had fought valiantly for the Allies during the war but whose future was now dictated by Stalin.

If Churchill wanted to act, he knew that time was running out. The United States were about to move vast numbers of their troops and ordnance out to the Far East for the assault on mainland Japan, leaving Western Europe at the mercy of Stalin. Furthermore, demobilisation would start after VE Day and would rapidly reduce the size of the British Army and their capacity for offensive action.

In the 1990s in America the strategy got a face lift and became part of American think tanks to confront Russia. See amongst others, architect Paul Wolfowitz and neocons.

The Blob emerged from World War II, worry incessantly about the "collapse of the American security order"

Build a Better Blob | CATO Institute - May 29, 2020 |

"The Blob is not the problem," they conclude. "It is the solution."

They are wrong. For the most part, the Blob clings to a narrow set of views about the United States' global role and paints a far too rosy picture of the last few decades of American foreign policy. Its outlook, albeit widespread, should not be confused with expertise--but the idea of the Blob has become so slippery as to enable such p conflation. For those who truly want to reshape Washington's overweening and p militarized foreign policy, the best approach is not to engage in name‐ calling but to p work to replace the existing foreign policy consensus and its disciples with something better.

The Blob is by no means monolithic, and even policies with broad support at the time of their inception, such as the Iraq war and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, met with some criticism from inside Washington foreign policy circles.

To argue that the United States has a thriving "marketplace of foreign policy ideas," however, is a stretch. For many years, the expert consensus in Washington has been a brand of hawkish internationalism that holds that the United States, acting as the world's police officer, must seek to solve every global problem and that bad outcomes are the result of insufficient U.S. involvement or "leadership."

Debate occurs, but only within certain bounds: it is perfectly acceptable to argue that NATO expansion was a mistake but anathema to suggest that NATO itself may no longer serve American interests, given that Washington bears an unequal defense burden and could be forced into conflicts on behalf of the alliance's newer members.