>>117296660Whether he does or not, he's right.
The USSR's economy was blatantly dysfunctional since the 1980s. The US administration was stuffed with people who genuinely believed that the Russians were going from strength to strength when they were actually at their weakest point.
Moves like the invasion of Afghanistan were taken as shows of strength when they were actually shows of tremendous weakness. We thought they were trying to expand their empire, in reality they were desperately afraid that bankrupt Islamists next door might be strong enough to destabilize their own Muslim regions. They built their own space shuttle because they couldn't understand the logic behind ours and were terrified that the best explanation was that it was some kind of bomber, so they wanted to have one to test. We thought they built it so that they could more effectively militarize space.
Ultimately some of the people most taken by surprise by the collapse of the USSR were those working in western intelligence agencies and governments because they were completely unwilling to see what a paper tiger it was in later years.
