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book is an attempt to answer that question in the context of an American imperium. To start, consider just one proposition on which today’s imperialists—poisoned by false pride and self-glorifying assumptions—have fattened. I am referring to the dangerously misleading conclusion that the United States caused the Soviet Union’s collapse and therefore “won” the Cold War. The mind-set that produced this conclusion offers clues to how the United States, like ancient Rome, embarked on the path toward militarism and empire.
     
    Among American triumphalists, devoted fans of Ronald Reagan,and old star-wars enthusiasts, there is a myth that President Reagan’s sponsorship of what he called the strategic defense initiative (SDI)—a never-completed, never-deployable, largely space-based defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles—set off a competition with the USSR over defense spending that ultimately caused the latter’s downfall. The triumphalists allege that even though Reagan’s star-wars proposals never came within light-years of working, they forced the USSR into an arms race that broke its back economically. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, his support of anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan, and his illegal support of “counterrevolutionaries” (contras) against the elected government of Nicaragua—so this argument goes—created a climate in which SDI was decisive. Thus, despite an almost unbroken record of mistaken assessments and misplaced advice about the strength and problems of the USSR during its final decade, Robert Gates, George H. W. Bush’s CIA director, still concludes in his memoir, “In my view, it was the broad resurgence of the West—symbolized by SDI—that convinced even some of the conservative members of the Soviet leadership that major internal changes were needed in the USSR. That decision, once made, set the stage for the dramatic events inside the Soviet Union of the next several years.” 2
     
    Yet according to Anatoly Dobrynin, the long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, as early as February 1986 Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev had concluded that “the United States is counting on our readiness to build the same kind of costly system [as SDI], hoping meanwhile that they will win this race using their technological superiority. But our scientists tell me that if we want to destroy or neutralize the American SDI system, we only would have to spend 10 percent of what the Americans plan to spend.” 3 Among Gorbachev’s scientific advisers, none was more important than Andrei Sakharov, who participated in the creation of the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb and later became a brave critic of his country’s human rights record and the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
     
    On December 23, 1986, Gorbachev ordered Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, released from internal exile in the city of Gorky, where they had been sent by the Politburo for criticizing the Soviet invasion ofAfghanistan. The freeing of Sakharov was one of Gorbachev’s earliest and most important acts of glasnost, or “openness,” which ultimately led to the unraveling of the Soviet system, but he also wanted Sakharov’s advice on SDI. Given in secret meetings in Moscow in February 1987, Sakharov’s analysis was unequivocal: “An SDI system would never be militarily effective against a well-armed opponent; rather, it would be a kind of ‘Maginot line in space’—expensive and vulnerable to counter-measures. It would not serve as a population defense, or as a shield behind which a first strike could be launched, because it could be easily defeated. Possibly SDI proponents in the United States were counting on an accelerated arms race to ruin the Soviet economy, but if so they were mistaken, for the development of counter-measures would not be expensive.” 4
     
    Rather than hiking investments in new weaponry, the Soviets actually were in the process of cutting back. In the