How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

Once the Pershings were installed, NATO was poised to win without a fight. But the story of a near-nuclear confrontation conceals a deeper truth. Some of the Russian leadership preferred a preemptive war against the West as an alternative to inevitable defeat. Fortunately, Andropov overruled them. Rather than fight to extinction, the Soviet Union chose to go quietly. To win the Cold War, the Reagan administration took a risk that seemed frightful in November 1983. But the likelihood that an aging and exhausted Russian leadership would sacrifice the Russian homeland in a nuclear exchange was small. Stalin had long since extirpated the apocalyptic messianism that had motivated the grandfathers of the Soviet leadership, the terrorists of 1900 to 1917. The Politburo of 1983 were not revolutionary fanatics but bureaucratic survivors of the Stalinist terror. Reagan’s people were counting on it. CIA Director Bill Casey quipped at the time, “These guys must be exhausted over there. These damn Politburo meetings go on for hours—by the time the guy gets back to his dacha he just wants to have a drink. All they want to do is enjoy being at the top, and we’re not letting them do it.”7 The United States won the Cold War by presenting the Russians with convincing superiority in weapons (American dominance of the skies), the threat of even greater superiority (Strategic Defense Initiative), forward defense (installation of the Pershing medium-range missiles), and aggressive response to R...

Russian insurgencies.