I recall it differently. Very few were pointing to the a collapse. just about every democrat and some Republicans were calling Reagan a fool for Star Wars and his idea of piece through strength. I remember democrats arguing the soviet union was only getting stronger. many seem to say it was a superior system.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20...ut-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/
Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin’s control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system’s problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union’s collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism — call it anti-anti-communism — that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime’s stability and legitimacy.Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected."
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laugh if you want, but during the cold war we spent a ton on the military. Money that could have gone to children for their lunch at school. But not one of those children ever died in a war with USSR.
on the other hand, anyone with half a brain could have looked at the USSR economic system and said, "That aint gonna work." let's spend our money on children and let them go broke spending on their military.
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