Many suffered under communism, including Russians. But was the suffering greater than the suffering of Japanese civilians twice nuked by the “Indispensable people,” or the suffering by German civilians whose cities were firebombed, like Tokyo, by the “exceptional people”?
You can see what drives him here. Which isn't to say a guy like this can't be right on a particular issue, just that it's usually in a clock is right twice a day kind of way.
I saw that and don’t agree with him. But this is interesting:
When the Soviet Union collapsed I was invited to come to the CIA and explain to them why they had gotten it so wrong. The difference with the CIA dated back to the Reagan years. After Reagan got the economy on its feet again with his supply-side policy, he then focused on ending the Cold War. He wanted to end it, not win it....
Once they saw that, they would believe that the pressures that he kept threatening to put on them of a new arms race, of SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) — you may remember Star Wars — none of this actually happened. It was all Reagan propaganda to make the communists in the Soviet Union agree to negotiate to end the war, rather than to be drawn into an arms race that their economy, at the time, was no longer able to sustain.
So that was Reagan’s approach. The CIA kept telling Reagan, ‘Oh, no, don’t threaten the Soviets with an arms race. They will win!’
So Reagan was really up against the entire establishment on that...And the committee that he appointed me to, we concluded that the CIA was wrong. People took my position in the committee. And this would be an effective threat on the part of Reagan to put pressure on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to negotiate the end of the war, and it worked! And that’s what happened. So that’s that story.”