Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. The healthy U.S. economy--the greatest in history--was just too enormous for the feeble, Marxist Soviet economy to compete with it. This in itself PROVED the benevolence of free market capitalism and the ultimate evil of Marxism.
After Reagan, Americans succumbed to decadence.
They refused to learn the lesson of the ultimate benevolence of free market capitalism.
Their self-indulgence let their entire society sink into the quagmire of decay.
Their economy began failing.
Their military declined along with it.
If the economy and the military of Russia, or China, or some other nation surpass those of the United States, it will come as no surprise to any honest person, and the dishonor will be that of the American people who allowed it to happen.
It is they whom future generations will rightly damn for their folly.
>After Reagan, Americans succumbed to decadence.<
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I still remember Bush #1 exclaim, right after his inauguration, that he wanted to establish a “kinder and gentler” society. I cringed when I heard that. It was sooooo PC.
Besides, it was a slap in the face of his predecessor.
Reagan fired quite a few shots, some real, some symbolic, some threatened, some not even literally his, in Africa, in Afghanistan, in Latin America, in invading Grenada, in Britain’s surprise defense of the Falklands, in having 550 thousand troops in Europe, in moving the short range missiles to Europe.
Some literally involved shots, and most didn’t, but it was clearly extremely aggressive, and displayed a willingness to fight.
It was the military toughness and the military build up that broke the back of Russia, they lost the window for attack in 1985 and knew that the window had been closed for the foreseeable future, and that led to internal instability, mixed with the fact that they didn’t have the economic power to counter Reagan’s global aggression and America’s new global forcefulness.
Reagan’s strength, went from appearing to look like a path to WWIII, to revealing the cracks in the USSR, and eventually it crumbled from attacks on multiple fronts, internal, economic, military, sociological, it just became too much to hold the empire together.