I am quite surprised at the negative sentiment you're getting for your post. It's well-reasoned.

>
Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell?

That's correct. The cold war wasn't the reason the USSR fell. Neither was 'Ronald Reagan', or Star Wars.

To elaborate on that point - it wasn't outspent by Star Wars - Soviet planners were not seriously proposing that the USSR maintain parity in that arena, just like they weren't proposing that the USSR maintain 11 carrier strike groups. MAD would still work, and with stockpiles of thousands of nuclear weapons, its territorial integrity was assured. "We outspent the reds" was more of a domestic justification for bloated DoD budgets, than it was an actual, credible, Soviet-empire-ending military threat.

The disaster in Afghanistan contributed to Brezhnev's circle losing power, but it was entirely self-inflicted. The USSR over-reached, only to discover, to great embarrassment that it was no longer actually capable of projecting military force outside its borders - half due to its domestic economic problems, and half due to Afghanistan being an empire-killing quagmire. It's not the first waning empire to come to this realization, nor will it be the last.

> I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies.

You're correctly observing that the purpose of foreign-affairs-posturing is media optics. I agree. The thing is that, to take Trump as an example - the observable impact of his domestic politics was... Not dramatically different from the status quo. He branded himself as a fireball reformist - and he did it by loudly complaining about Mexico, China, Iran, etc. Meanwhile, domestically - which is what really matters to his constituents - he has accomplished nothing. (To be precise, he accomplished less than nothing - COVID would have probably been handled better if he went on vacation for all of 2020.)

It's a stretch to say that Congress was working on domestic issues - Congress was spending their past year, keenly focused on doing... Nothing. That's the result of congressional deadlock. (To their credit, that's better than active sabotage.)

> The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.

I believe you are overstating the importance of economic dogma. The people of China, just like the people of the United States, or Myanmar, or Sweden, ultimately don't care about whether or not their economic policies are liberal, conservative, or martian. The political axis on which your economic policies fall on isn't interesting to anyone outside of a tribal political argument.

What they care about is results.

What they care about is answers to questions like:

"Do I have a job? Does my job let me make ends meet? Will my children be better off than I am? Do I feel secure in my economic future? Will I be better off five years from now, then I am now?"

Those questions are how you should be evaluating economic success, or failure - not where the policies fall on an economic compass. The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about the legal structure around a foreign-owned branch office in their country, or how some billionaire is treated. The average person cares about whether or not their government pension will be honored, and whether or not they'll be able to afford to buy an apartment, so that they can marry, etc, etc.

Of course, if you are consuming media that is written from the perspective of an un-average person - say, a foreign business owner, then of course it will make it sound like the most important question in the world is "But how neo-liberal are your economic policies with respect to foreign ownership?"

For the past twenty years, ever since the 'China will liberalize because foreign investment' meme was making the rounds in the newspapers (which sounded quite ridiculous to me at the time, but what did I know, I was 12...), all discussion of the subject was focused on the latter question, as opposed to the former. The only time the former was ever mentioned, was to argue a point about the latter.

To summarize - economic policies surrounding foreign ownership are not a bellwether for feedback loops of political sentiment in China. They are a bellwether for the sentiment of foreign business owners about China. There's an ocean of difference between the two.

> It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.

I am under the understanding that the elimination of leaded gasoline was the only meaningful factor for falling crime rates. Countries that did not undertake tough-on-crime legislature fared just as well as tough-on-crime did, without subjecting themselves to the social disaster that surrounded it.

So, the way I see it, it didn't 'have it's problems'. It was nothing but problems.

> Well yeah. No one wants a war.

I disagree. There are factions in the US that want a limited shooting war, because they think they can win it, without it going nuclear. There's the occasional post on HN calling for this sort of thing. I don't think one's likely to happen, but history tells us that its not outside the realm of possibility.