"Looking back, the key premise was the equation of Stalin and his successors to Hitler. This was first of all in their internal totalitarian controls and ruthless repression of dissent, where the analogy (especially under Stalin) was valid. I’ve never lost my well-founded abhorrence of the domestic tyranny of Stalinist-style regimes—whether in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba. More problematic, in retrospect—in fact, I would now say, flat wrong, recklessly so—was the presumption that such regimes, like Nazism, had an insatiable appetite for expansion, which they were determined to satisfy by military aggression where necessary and feasible. In particular, it was presumed that the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe—now armed with nuclear weapons as well as superior conventional forces—posed a direct military threat to Western Europe and America even greater than Hitler’s. Moreover, the equation of Communist regimes with Hitler ruled out any attempt at meaningful negotiations for the resolution of conflicts or arms control. Nothing other than full military preparedness for imminent warfare could influence or “contain” the Soviet threat to the “free world.”"