Commentary
Forty-five years ago, after two months of U.S. Army boot camp in beautiful, bucolic Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., in late April 1978 I arrived at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., to learn Russian. It was a time of increasing Cold War tensions. Communism was on the march.
South Vietnam fell to communist North Vietnam in 1975. That year, Castro’s troops installed a communist regime in Angola. In 1977, the communist Mengistu regime, backed by Moscow, took over Ethiopia, and soon perpetrated the worst famine since Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. In 1979, the communist Sandinista regime seized power in Nicaragua. And the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up a puppet regime….