While Reagan's military buildup is credited with ending the Cold War, post-war data revealed the USSR was spending 40-70% of its GNP on defense—not the 20% the CIA estimated. This miscalculated overspending made economic collapse inevitable.
The 1969 Sino-Soviet border war led China to view the USSR as its primary adversary. By aligning with the U.S., China forced the Soviets to heavily militarize a second massive border, fatally overextending an economy already competing with NATO in Europe.
President Bush intentionally refrained from celebrating America's Cold War victory to avoid humiliating Gorbachev and empowering Russian hardliners. This strategic humility bought newly freed Eastern European nations two decades to integrate with the West, securing peace at the direct cost of Bush's domestic popularity and re-election.
The West reluctantly included human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords, believing them unenforceable. However, dissidents across the Eastern Bloc weaponized these clauses to hold communist regimes accountable, undermining their legitimacy from within and contributing to their collapse.
The U.S. Navy's ability to track Soviet submarines while keeping its own hidden threatened the USSR's second-strike capability, the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence. This technological and financial asymmetry pushed the Soviets toward de-escalation and ultimately, ending the war.
The West's Cold War fear was that countries would fall to communism one by one. Ironically, the domino effect occurred in reverse. Once democratic reforms began in Poland, the movement spread rapidly, causing the entire Soviet empire in Eastern Europe to crumble.
In the Soviet system, factory managers consistently lied about inventories and needs to meet quotas. These falsehoods were aggregated up the command chain, resulting in fundamentally flawed national data. The government was therefore blind to the true value of capital, labor, or consumer demand, leading to catastrophic misallocations.
Gorbachev believed his reforms would lead Eastern European nations to adopt "socialism with a human face" and view him as a liberator. He completely failed to grasp the depth of animosity after decades of occupation, ensuring these countries would reject Russia at the first opportunity.
To facilitate German unification, Chancellor Kohl paid East Germany and Hungary hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks. In exchange, they eased travel restrictions, allowing East Germans to leave. This brain drain and display of preference for the West created a crisis that made the fall of the Berlin Wall inevitable.
Aware that Britain and France opposed a powerful, unified Germany, President Bush and Chancellor Kohl used a tag-team diplomatic strategy. Bush's role was to delay international meetings, preventing allies from interfering while Kohl rapidly advanced the political and financial merger of the two Germanys.
The US stopped its ground offensive in Iraq after 100 hours, short of toppling Saddam Hussein. This was because the Soviet Union drew a red line: no regime change. Preserving Gorbachev's cooperation to finalize the end of the Cold War was the primary strategic goal, superseding objectives in Iraq.
To maintain imperial control, the Soviet Union intentionally spread the manufacturing of complex goods, like airplanes, across different republics. This policy backfired catastrophically upon dissolution, as each new nation inherited fractions of a supply chain, rendering them unable to produce finished goods and crippling their economies.