Bush set out the American demands. He pushed Gorbachev to halt assistance to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This was top of the US list of priorities. The Soviet team was surprised. Gorbachev wanted to draw a „strategic and philosophical“ line under the Cold War.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 96.

Here Zubok is writing about Bush and Gorbachev meeting near Malta in December 1989. Topping the US list of priorities is Soviet support for Cuba and Nicaragua. I remember those years of incessant drumbeats insisting Americans fear impoverished Central Americans.

I find this headline very funny.

In trying to regain his balance amid a host of problems, Gorbachev was thinking out loud in the presence of Chernyaev, as if arguing with some conservatives: „Stabilization will be the end of perestroika. Stability is stagnation. Revolution equals instability!“

Chernyaev believed his boss was now out of touch.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 82.

This last line strikes me as incredibly funny. Zubok is writing about August 1989, so this is tragic, of course, but the utter failure of many Soviets – and many Americans for that matter – to at all understand what was going on in the USSR during these years led to some people taking very laboriously thought out and well written up positions which in retrospect appear quite ludicrous.

Maduro has apparently upped his game while in custody, so he is now a dictator rather than merely a strongman. In a way, I guess, you could compare the president of a South American country with an Iraqi ISIL leader.