appeasement did not end until the Nazis invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941. A further Soviet betrayal was the Soviet-Japan Neutrality Pact of April 1941 whose impact was to put the Soviet Union on the side of the Axis powers, and to facilitate Imperial Japan’s December 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s four years of all-out warfare throughout the Pacific and East Asia.

11. Second World War Soviet Warfare and U.S./Allied Assistance and Global Combat. The Soviet Union did not begin to resist Japan until the last days of the war in August 1945 after U.S. combat, homeland bombing, and the use of the atomic bomb had assured Japan’s unconditional surrender. With regard to the Soviet people’s late but heroic resistance to Hitler’s 1941 invasion, Soviet Russia’s “Great Patriotic War” against Germany from then until May 1945 came late and cannot justify the claim to have caused Germany’s surrender or won the Second World War, nor excuse the Soviet regime’s constant earlier, concurrent, and later totalitarian terror. Immediately after the German invasion, the U.S. extended to the Soviet Union the critical and massive U.S. “Lend Lease” military assistance programs it had provided for many months to Great Britain. And with formal U.S. entry into the war after Japan’s Pearl Harbor Attack in December 1941 extensive American (and Western Allied) sea, air, and land combat against the Axis forces (and heavy bombings of their homelands) assured victory in major global theaters of the Second World War from which Soviet forces were absent (e.g., Western and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, Southeast Asia), or were reached by Soviet forces only late in the war (Germany, in early 1945, China and Japan’s outer islands, in August 1945). Without such U.S. warfare there can be no doubt that Germany and Japan would have won the war and the Soviet Union would not have survived.

12. Post Second World War Soviet Betrayals of Peace and Democracy. The Second World War ended with the unconditional surrender of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan. The Western Allies demobilized, began to decolonize (e.g., Philippines, India) and took major initiatives for peaceful democratic and economic development (e.g. the Marshall Plan), arms control (e.g., the Baruch Plan), and international cooperation (e.g., the United Nations). The Soviet Union, in contrast, broke its pledges made at Yalta, Potsdam, and the U.N. by denying human rights, Sovietizing its Eastern European captive nations, constructing an Iron Curtain, undertaking a unilateral arms buildup, and extending support for revolutionary pro-Communist warfare and subversion in China, Korea and across the globe. U.S. and Western strategies were developed to try to stem what at times appeared like a Communist tide.

13. Faltering U.S. Cold War Strategies. U.S. understanding, strategies, and statecraft in dealing with the Soviet Cold War (and Soviet support of regional hot wars) before Reagan’s presidency had occasional limited short-lived successes in slowing or rolling back cases of local Soviet subversion. But they did not effectively deter, moderate, or roll back overall Soviet ideological, military, and imperial momentum. Roosevelt’s diplomatic “normalization” hopes were met by new Soviet subversion and betrayals. Harry Truman’s NSC–68 “containment” strategy of 1950 soon lost its “roll back” element and the U.S. came to accept stalemates or defeats in major regional wars in Korea and Vietnam. But officially the strategy remained predominant through Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Like the “containment” strategy, both the U.S. “Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)” strategy established under President John Kennedy and carried out through the Carter’s presidency, and Nixon and Carter’s “détente” strategy, faltered in the wake of increased Soviet arms buildups, treaty violations, subversion and outright aggression. Meanwhile, the U.S. sought to counter such Soviet threats by forming major regional alliances and through swings in strategic emphases from nuclear deterrence, to regional warfare and large troop presence, to counterinsurgency war, intense negotiations and disengagement. Readers gain insight into how periods of U.S. moral and strategic clarity and effectively focused strength slowed Soviet imperial momentum, while periods of U.S. confusion, weakness, and disengagement provoked more Soviet aggression and new Cold War crises.

14. Reagan’s Critiques of Traditional U.S. Cold War Strategies. Reagan’s critiques and alternatives to the three interconnected U.S. Cold War strategies above, built on non- and bi-partisan 1970s critiques by President Ford’s “Team-B” and private organizational catalysts like the Committee on the Present Danger. In assessing the predominant U.S. Cold War strategies, Reagan particularly criticized large unilateral cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence capabilities, reliance on a MAD balance of nuclear terror, constant U.S. diplomatic self-censorship about Soviet right abuses, treaty violations, and sub- 

[Book pg. x]