Communism had no legs and was never going to engulf the world.
The only dominoes ever in play were a few strays in Southeast Asia and some flotsam in a few equally meaningless locales.
But the fantastically militant and global anti-communism of the "bear any burden, pay any price" types led Reagan and his advisors to seriously believe a Russian client state in Afghanistan was more dangerous than the Muslim crazies - Red Mosque types are an example (see Netflix, Among the Believers) - they funded and gave weapons to in order to drive out the reds.
Ronald Reagan personally and repeatedly called them "freedom fighters," though freedom was the furthest thing from their agenda.
He and his henchmen pretty much created the Taliban and handed over Afghanistan to them.
And that was actually worse for us, for Afghanistan, and for the world than a Soviet client state in that country would have been.
Particularly in view of the near approach of Communism's expiration date in Russia and Eastern Europe, an imminent collapse that, to the end, anti-communist intellectuals of the right were absolutely certain could never happen.
Right wing dictatorships, they insisted, had no staying power and would always fall to domestic forces creating liberal regimes within a few decades, at most.
But Communist regimes were different.
Communism is forever, they said.
Communism can only be overcome by attack from without.
As for the global ambitions and penchant for uninhibited violence of the Muslim fanatics they set loose on the world, not for a moment did they think of them as posing any serious threat to us, our allies, the world, or even the specifically Muslim world.
Ronald Reagan gave us 9/11 at the World Trade Center.
The Cold War, based as Jimmy Carter said on an "inordinate fear of Communism," gave us Jihad.
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