The Soviet threat was vastly overstated.
The theory had been that if we abandoned Indochina to the Soviet Union, they would be appeased. Instead the reverse happened. The dominoes were falling. The Soviet Union boldly and rapidly spread Soviet domination further and wider. This is what had people alarmed.
With containment discredited and unsuccessful, the only effectual strategy to deal with the Soviet threat was that which Reagan proposed: Rollback. As long as containment had seemed to work, it had been electoral suicide to advocate rollback.
Containment failed in Indochina. As predicted, failure of containment set of a wave of falling dominoes.
Momentum has significance. The appearance was that the Soviet Union could win at any one place it chose. So every nation sucked up to the Soviet Union for fear that they might be the next one place. They all kissed ass in the hope that they would be the last to be devoured.
Suddenly rollback became popular among the voters.
The left claimed the Soviet Union was strong and winning, and that to confront it would be suicide. Reagan claimed that the Soviet Union was weak and winning, and that confronting it would be easy. As events proved, confronting it was easy.
The Soviet threat was the core of Reagan's campaign and program, and the center of his policy once
elected.
Rollback is what shattered the illusion of Soviet might, broke the will of the Soviet Union, and caused people to cease to fear it. And when they ceased to fear it, that was the primary cause of the collapse.
The disaster in Vietnam had led to a world wide crisis of expanding Soviet power. The bloodbaths had happened as predicted, the dominoes were falling as predicted, Soviet troops were now stationed on the mainland of Latin America.
Reagan proposed a solution to that crisis: Rollback, instead of containment.
The people voted for it, Reagan implemented it, it worked.
Democrats were in denial about Reagan's campaign program, because they in denial about Soviet world domination, and the consequences of the failure of containment.
Reagan was campaigning on the basis of what was actually happening in the world.
Carter and the democrats were campaigning as if things had actually turned out the way the opponents of the war in Vietnam had erroneously predicted they would turn out. They were campaigning in the world that they wanted to imagine that they lived in.
I still today hear people in this newsgroup making scornful remarks about bloodbaths and dominoes, as if the bloodbaths had not happened, and the dominoes had not fallen.
By the standards that everyone had accepted and taken for granted in the period 1950-1970, what happened during 1976-1979 was a catastrophe, a cataclysm.
For twenty five years, for a generation, the US government had regarded any substantial Soviet advance as intolerable, as cause for spending vast amounts of blood and treasure to prevent.
In the four years 1976 to 1979 there were numerous major Soviet advances, any one of which would have been held to have been a major defeat, a crisis worthy of vast amounts of blood and treasure, during the period 1950 to 1970.
The seventies, were the high point of Soviet dominance, when it seemed that the Soviet Union was indeed riding the forces of history to a predestined triumph, and all the governments of the world were kissing up to them.
By about 1968 it became obvious to the most intelligent and best informed that the Soviet Union was going to win in Vietnam, and that following its victory many dominoes would fall. In Australia, many thought this process would run right up to the shores of Australia, probably taking Indonesia, though probably not New Guinea.
By around 1970 it also became obvious that the attempt to transform humanity by non violent means -- voluntary communal living, participatory democracy, and consciousness transforming drugs, was a dismal failure -- that each one of these projects was an utter failure and complete disaster. At the same time the world triumph of the Soviet Union appeared imminent.
This change in the hope for transforming man caused a change in the nature of the western left. During the seventies treason, always a strong point of the movement, became the defining and critical element. A grim and rigid ideological conformity became required. Orthodoxy and utter humorlessness came to be required. The internal organization of the left manifested a loss of faith in voluntary means for transforming mankind for the better, and the acceptance of harshly authoritarian program whereby the best people, ourselves, would make everyone else as virtuous as we were, by violent means.
In 1975 the dominoes began to fall, more slowly and less of them than many had feared or hoped, but still a tremendously impressive process, not at all disappointing. What we had long imagined was finally becoming real. And as it became real, it became necessary to discard certain hypocrisies and double think -- for example it became obvious that the process was one of external conquest, not internal revolution, The NLF were insignificant in the takeover of South Vietnam, and when their usefulness as a propaganda tool for maintaining the pretense of revolution ended, they too were ended, were executed or imprisoned in camps from which few ever returned. With perfect unanimity, the entire left, from moderate to radical, from supposedly non socialist to flaming socialist, defended the abrupt disappearance of a group they had a short time before loudly identified with and enthusiastically praised, and with glib confidence explained that external conquest really was internal revolution, for external conquest was what the people really willed. With perfect unanimity we loudly focused on the quite genuine good intentions of those engaged in mass murder, and the benevolent purposes that regrettably required the wise and good to terrorize the entire population -- an argument that rapidly became distinctly unconvincing, particularly as some of those terrorized were distant relatives of mine. The confident unanimity rapidly began to break down, particularly after George McGovern broke ranks, but while it held, it had a tone of extravagant certainty, the tone of confidentlyspeaking what everyone knows.
Because the process was of conquest and terror, not revolt, the dominoes fell more slowly than expected. The process started to run slow, because each terror absorbed and held down a lot of troops and consumed lots of resources that the Soviet Union could ill afford.
By1980, five years after the fall of Vietnam, it became apparent that the Soviet Union had bitten off more than it could chew -- that world Soviet domination, though still perhaps inevitable, would take considerably longer than
expected.
By about 1985 those who were paying attention began to see that it was the Soviet Union, not the west, that was going to fall, and with that change in the perception came a change in the intellectual climate among the small but rapidly increasing number of people that were aware of what was happening, what was going to happen.