MICHAEL WALSH: How We Got Here.

The seeds of the conflict in the Ukraine, now the subject of both a shooting war and a ferocious propaganda barrage on both sides—and by “both sides” I mean Russia vs. the West, using Ukraine as its proxy—were sown more than 30 years ago, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union on Boxing Day in 1991. At what seemed almost a single stroke, the goal of American foreign policy for the previous four decades had been achieved. The mother church of Marxism-Leninism had fallen, the Evil Empire destroyed, and the brave new world of “the end of history and the last man” was dawning.

Although Ronald “we win, they lose” Reagan was out of office, this was the Gipper’s triumph. Playing poker against the Soviets’ aging and disillusioned chess masters, Reagan bet the house on the Strategic Defense Initiative—widely opposed and even mocked by the pro-Russian Leftist press, led by the New York Times (who else?), as “Star Wars”—and essentially bankrupted the Kremlin. Unfamiliar with the concept of a bluff, Mikhail Gorbachev turned over his king and walked away from the board.

I vividly recall standing outside in the freezing cold of a mid-February day in Dresden, on the 40th anniversary of the firebombing of the city by British and American bombers in 1945. Standing in front of the newly restored Semper Opera House, Erich Honecker, the East German party boss, gave a stemwinder of a speech, inveighing against the very “Star Wars” (that was the term he used: Sternkriege) the Times was mocking stateside. “I think Star Wars is bullshit,” whispered a German-speaking American colleague of mine, “but it sure has these guys scared.” Within six years, both the German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were gone.

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