Pakistan, Feb. 11 -- From President Harry Truman to President Trump's second administration, the White House too often exaggerated or ignored the real degrees of danger posed by perceived major threats of the time.

The former Soviet Union was a textbook case. After World War II, in which the Soviet Union had been critical to destroying Hitler and the Nazi war machine, benign views of it persisted until the Iron Curtain descended from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

Lyndon Johnson was determined to fight communism on the Mekong and not the Mississippi. He fed into the myth of a monolithic Communist threat, when in fact China and Russia were at each other's throats. The Reagan administration mounted a military buildup against the Soviet evil ...