Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights as fundamental to American foreign policy in his Notre Dame commencement address, emphasizing political freedoms denied throughout Eastern Europe, destroyed communist belief in communism itself according to longtime Soviet diplomat Anatoly Gromyko.

The 1969 Sino-Soviet border war over islands in the Amur River prompted the USSR to ask the US permission to use nuclear weapons, which the US refused; this reshuffled great power alignments so that China and Russia became each other's primary adversary, forcing the USSR into a bankrupting militarization of its Far Eastern frontier.

The post-WWII international institutions (UN, IMF, NATO, EU, WTO) were deliberately built by the Greatest Generation to prevent war and depression through institution-building on a global scale, creating the 'insurance system' for the maritime order until Putin's invasion of Ukraine began to overturn it.

The maritime order is positive-sum (both parties to trade win) while the continental order is negative-sum (winner's gain less than loser's loss because conquered territories are damaged), making the maritime order the only sustainable model for long-term human prosperity.

Gorbachev believed that without the Warsaw Pact there would be no NATO, and without Comecon there would be no EU, miscalculating that the Western alliance would disband if the Soviet threat vanished; he also believed the US would oppose German reunification as a continental power would, so he went on vacation during the reunification process.

Maritime and continental powers have fundamentally different primary defense requirements: maritime powers can defend primarily at sea and derive power from trade and naval supremacy, while continental powers must defend primarily by land and rely on territorial consolidation and large standing armies.

International trade lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty during the post-Cold War era, but this trend has ended as the period of inter-Cold War cooperation has given way to funding and counter-funding of insurgencies globally, which is wealth-reducing.

The second Cold War began between 2012 and 2014, marked by Vladimir Putin disposing of term limits in 2012, Xi Jinping coming to power, and Putin's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, after which both leaders emphasized their rejection of the rules-based international order.

Neither China nor Russia possesses the geopolitical prerequisites for successful maritime dominance that Mahan identified: both lack a moat (insulation from attack), have poor internal transportation grids, lack reliable sea access due to surrounding neighbors and narrow island-cluttered seas, and lack stable government institutions with regular transparent transfers of power.

In the modern era of precision nuclear weapons, maritime powers cannot rely on the British strategy of elephant hunting because neither side has an invulnerable home anymore; instead, the strategy must be to maintain economic growth, use sanctions rather than blockades to reduce enemy trade, and cautiously support peripheral allies without direct military engagement.

Presidents Nixon through Reagan produced cumulative presidential effects that defeated the Soviet Union by sequentially opening opportunities: Nixon played the China card, Ford continued it, Carter began the human rights campaign and military buildup, and Reagan accelerated militarization while operating from positions of military and ideological strength.

East German leader Erich Honecker had been forced out due to his disaster strategy of living off debt since 1971; on November 9, 1989, a border official inadvertently opened the Berlin Wall when press spokesman Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced immediate travel rules without confirming implementation details.

Continental empires operate through binary coercion—either neighboring peoples adopt the empire's culture and become 'honorary' members, or they face annihilation or enslavement—as evidenced by how Han Chinese laid waste to competing Zungar and Mongol empires and continue suppressing Uyghurs.

Britain's grand strategy for defeating Napoleon (and later applied in WWII) involved six integrated elements: keep home economy growing to fund military and allies; shut down enemy trade and force enemies to rely on dwindling resources; find continental allies directly threatened by the enemy; secure peripheral theaters favoring maritime access; force the enemy to fight on divided attention; and only commit ground forces after the enemy is badly weakened and with allied support.

The Industrial Revolution upended both maritime and continental empires by introducing compounding economic growth, shifting the source of power from land to money derived from trade, industry, and commerce, which catastrophically disrupted traditional societies whose security paradigms no longer functioned.

Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative has flawed mathematics because modern containerized shipping (with ultra-large tankers carrying 250,000 dead weight tons and container ships with 21,000 containers) is vastly more cost-effective than land-based rail (600 containers per train), and the Belt and Road's land routes would require continuous track gauge standardization and face wartime closure in narrow, island-cluttered seas surrounding China.

Maritime powers focus on negative objectives (preventing bad outcomes like invasion or trade destruction) rather than positive objectives (territorial conquest), making maritime success strategically invisible because 'on a good day Navy day absolutely nothing happens' while the Navy quietly prevents the destruction of the global trading system.

Ronald Reagan's military buildup, combined with estimates that the Soviet military consumed up to 70% of the Soviet economy (compared to only 55% for Nazi Germany), so suffocated Soviet economic quality of life that the USSR could not sustain the arms race.

Georgi Arbatov, Soviet expert on the United States, observed that Reagan's strategy of funding anti-communist insurgencies worldwide caused the Soviets their own 'Vietnam' problem in Afghanistan, with both sides funding insurgencies as a wealth-destroying strategy.

The Helsinki Accords of the 1970s included human rights clauses that Soviet leaders believed would not be enforced, but these clauses enabled human rights activists and dissidents throughout the Warsaw Pact to hold Soviet governments accountable, triggering a dissident movement that undermined communist legitimacy.