Sarah Paine

So I am gonna be quoting lots of Russians today.

because they have thought deeply about the fate of their country, how life as they knew it disappeared, the Soviet Union gone, the empire gone.

They thought a lot about it.

And here is a former Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Valentin Fallin, and here's his take.

Following the American strategy of our exhaustion in the arms race,

our crisis in public health and all the things that have to do with standard of living reached a new dimension of crisis.

And then if you add to the arms race of the United States, the arms race that was going on with China on that border, the arms race plunged the Soviet economy into a permanent crisis.

And here you have Georgy Arbatov, who was the Soviet Union's, late Soviet Union's finest expert on the United States, or at least his most famous one.

He's looking at

of the soviet war in afghanistan he said it is quite clear that the afghan war was most advantageous for the united states and we got our vietnam because the united states is busy funding the other side and it's costly and uh gorbachev is looking at this as he's telling the politburo a year after he came into power he said look the americans are better

betting precisely on the fact that the Soviet Union is scared of this SDI missile, the Strategic Defense Initiative's missile defense.

That's why they're putting pressure on us to exhaust us.

Correct.

So some would argue that the US victory in the arms race guaranteed victory in the Cold War.

It'd be go Ronnie.

That's one explanation.

But I'm gonna give you a tour of the counter arguments and some other explanations, starting with Presidents Ford, Carter, and the Helsinki Declaration.

So after World War II, the Soviets had wanted to convene a conference of European states to confirm its expanded World War II borders.

And for a long time, nobody was interested.

And then the Western Europeans are sick of all the drama.