IN THE EARLY 1980s, I served on Pres. Ronald Reagan's National Security Council. Prior to my time at the White House, I was a vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank, in charge of its USSR and Eastern Europe division. It was my job to assess the creditworthiness of the countries in that part of the world, and I had come to realize that the Soviet Union had relatively modest hard currency income-and that what little it had came largely from the West.In 1982, the Soviets had an empire stretching from Havana to Hanoi, but their hard currency revenue totaled only about $32,000,000,-000-roughly one-third the annual revenue of General Motors at the time. They were spending about $16,000,000,000 more annually than they were making, with the funding gap-the USSR's life support-being financed by Western governments and banks.
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