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Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter said, in a TV interview, that the assault “made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”

Carter’s critics chortled at his belatedly acknowledged naïveté, but at least he admitted that he’d been wrong and took corrective actions —ending economic assistance to the USSR, suspending nuclear arms control talks, withdrawing his ambassador, pulling out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, stiffening defenses in southern Asia, and arming anti-Soviet insurgents (a move that had

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