President Donald Trump kept up his habit of making false claims in the first abbreviated week of 2019, starting the new year by dispensing a dizzying supply of factually dubious and outright false statements.
Over the course of an hour-and-a-half-long press availability during his first Cabinet meeting of 2019, the president offered a puzzling justification for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, grossly inflated the cost of illegal immigration and the number of people in the country without proper documentation, claimed he “essentially” fired his former secretary of defense (who actually resigned over policy disagreements with the commander-in-chief), and falsely claimed the U.S. spends more in Afghanistan in one month than he is requesting for his desired border wall.
Trump's puzzling recollection of why the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
In making the case that an unlimited timeline on military presence in Afghanistan serves only to damage the U.S., President Trump began a riff on an argument he often used during the 2016 campaign: pointing to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump said.
While several historians reached by ABC News acknowledged that the Afghanistan war was costly for the U.S.S.R., there was considerable disagreement with the president’s contention that the invasion contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
“No one can even remotely argue that the war in Afghanistan had anything to do with the break-up of the Soviet Union,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor of International Politics at Cardiff University and Global Fellow at the Wilson Center. “The Soviet Union fell apart partly because of runaway forces of centrifugal nationalism, which the particular structure of the Soviet state ironically enabled, and partly because certain political actors in the largest republics -- especially Russia -- sought to gain power by weakening the center's authority.”
“It was only a small fraction of the Soviet overall defense expenditure,” Radchenko added.
Artemy Kalinovsky, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and research associate at the Cold War Studies Program at the London School of Economics and Politics, largely agreed with Radchenko.
“The war was not a significant drain on the Soviet Union either in hard military terms or in fiscal terms,” Kalinovsky told ABC. “Reporting on the war in the late 1980s did contribute to political polarization, led to a more critical attitude towards the military on the part of the public, and helped alienate some of the military elite from Mikhail Gorbachev. But the Afghanistan war was not a major factor in the nationalist mobilizations of that era.”
In his Cabinet meeting, Trump also made the argument that Russia invaded Afghanistan primarily because, “terrorists were going into Russia,” adding, “they were right to be there.”
The latter claim that the U.S.S.R. was “right” to invade Afghanistan flies in the face of decades of past U.S. policy, especially considering the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan at the time to aid the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets.
“That is obviously a big departure from the way U.S. policymakers - Democrats and Republicans - have ever talked about the Soviet intervention,” Kalinovsky said. “It is also not the way most Russians -- including many military leaders -- saw things, although recently there has been more of an effort to justify the initial intervention.”
The Soviet pretext at the time of the invasion was to offer support to the communist government in their fight against the anti-Communist mujaheddin.
But it was the president’s claim of ‘terrorists’ going into the U.S.S.R. to back up his belief that Soviet intervention was justified that truly perplexed historians.
“This claim is utterly preposterous,” Radchenko said. “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a complex affair, but the notion that some terrorists were infiltrating the U.S.S.R. from Afghanistan has no basis in reality.”
“When the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan they were not worried about terrorism or Islamism of any sort,” Kalinovsky added. “They were mostly worried that an unstable Afghanistan would be an opportunity for the United States to threaten the USSR on its southern border.”