I note only that Peter qualified rather than refuted my points, and ignored my homage that located Reagan's conservatism in a much more difficult political and lonely climate of the 1970s and 1980s than is true today. I also note that sometimes the qualification is reduced to the absurd, such as the defense of, yes, the disastrous 1986 immigration law on the logic that the "feds" did not do what Reagan apparently wanted. But was not Reagan the chief of the feds "in subsequent years", say from 1986 through 1988? Thematic in Peter's lament is that those around Reagan did not carry through on what Reagan "really" intended (e.g., immigration, Lebanon, etc.). I liked Reagan a great deal and found him far better than most all who succeeded him, but an occasional lax executive style, at best, led to some "disastrous" decisions, and at worst a certain naivete.

Five Classic War memoirs

E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed is a beautifully written, and often misunderstood, ode to the Marines of the Pacific; the chapter on Okinawa is horrific.

Erwin Rommel's Infantry Attacks about his experiences in WWI is not just a reflection on tactics and leadership, but the spirit of combat that assume the impossible is never impossible, one that later was manifested in North Africa.

Ted Morgan's My Battle of Algiers: a Memoir, recently publishing, is a candid, brutally honest account of the savagery of the war, that goes a long way to explain how, against odds, the French won the war on the ground, and quite understandably lost it politically.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. Many have criticized some of the details (and facts) of Graves' classic account of WWI in the trenches, but it captures not just the horror but also the thinking that emerged that explains Europe in the postwar 1920s (hence the title).

Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman. Most prefer Grant's that are more concise and not cluttered with memos and orders, and personal slights and rivalries. But Sherman's is a philosophical analysis of war that separates the strutting and bombast of militarism from the hard science of logistics, strategy, and technology.  He was a prophet of modern war and his memoirs make that clear. His exchanges with John Bell Hood are Thucydides, brilliantly argued and models of English prose.

Five classical texts

Homer—I think the most literal and successful translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey remain those of Richmond Lattimore. No finer works in classical literature than the two Homeric epics. Achilles learns that the race goes not to the swift; Odysseus reminds us you can never keep a good man down—especially one that wants to get back to his family.

Thucydides—Robert Strassler's Landmark Thucydides (Crawley translation) is the most useful edition (confession I wrote the introduction, but the strength of the edition derives from the maps, footnotes, and headers and footers). The history is really a philosophical approach to war, peace—and timeless human nature.

Sophocles—Antigone and Oedipus Rex, of course, are essential to a classical reading list,but the under-appreciated Ajax andPhiloctetes (again, Lattimore's University of Chicago translations) are even more relevant to modern times (they read like Western epics, as in High Noon/the Searchers style).

Virgil Aeneid—Either the Fitzgerald or Fagles translation is fine—a great synthesis of ancient epic, national destiny, and the ambiguous position of the poet in the age of Augustus—and beautiful poetry whose lines permeate almost all of subsequent Western literature

Petronius, Satyricon—(Sullivan translation) a brilliant novel with a disturbing window into the decadence, sophistication, and  multicultural world of Nero's Rome. His Bay of Naples reminds me of the upper West Side.

I think the pattern will be regional adjustments, marked by local provocative acts akin to the fishing trawler incident between Japan and China, or increased overflights of the Aegean by a more muscular Turkey or pressure on the former Soviet Republics. Things like that. The general mood abroad is that the U.S. either does not have the financial wherewithal or military clout anymore to keep regional order, or perhaps might even sympathize with legitimate readjustments. Something like this happened in 1979 (Chinese invasion of Vietnam, Soviet inroads in Central America and Afghanistan, hostage taking in Teheran, fall of the Shah and fear of radical Islam, etc.), and it required a frantic and often sad effort by Carter ("Carter Doctrine," rescue attempt imploding in the desert, resignation of Vance, boycott of Olympics, etc.) to correct the impression abroad established from his sermonizing in 1977-8. Everything is in flux now, and it will take Hillary to discover that tensions predated and transcended Bush and then in turn tutor Obama on that fact of life that simply was not supposed to be true. Unfortunately we are still in a hope and change/I'm the laureate mood, in which Obama believes his singular charms and atypical heritage appeal direct to the masses of the world, and will flip them in the sense that they will have no desire to embarrass such a rarely sympathetic President.

In a somewhat different strain, William Shirer's Berlin Diary, in its early sections (e.g. 1934-9), reflects well the Nazi exuberance in a booming city, following Weimar, but with a foreboding that the dark side of Hitler's new Third Reich is inevitably about to corrupt and destroy German culture and much of Europe along with it. Of course, the topos begins with Homer's Iliad, especially the wonderful scenes in Book VI between the Trojan Hector and his wife and son, when he knows that the end is in store for  them all, and everyone around.

I think there are a number of cities in history which were precarious politically, while enjoying rich cultures amid an impending sense of doom that things would not last, or at least could change in a blink. Augustine's City of God is written amid the barbarian invasions of North Africa and the final Vandal siege and the end of a once prosperous and cultured Hippo Regius. Life in Constantinople between, say, 1420-53 took on a sense that the end was coming and a rich Byzantine culture flickering out with no way to marshall the forces of Christendom to fight off the Ottomans. Much of life in 19th and 20th century Trieste, like perhaps Vienna after the war, was predicated on the fact that the fate of the city was in someone else's hands and could change at any minute. 

1. I think they want what most young gang-bangers want who have taken over—free rein to do pretty much what they please (e.g., kill, maim, steal, not work, etc.) under the banner of being lawful, pure and Islamic. Remember Dirty Harry's reply, when pressed to explain his assertion why the psychopathic killer Scorpio would continue to murder when the experts were unsure of his motivation— "Cause he likes it." In short—Al Sahaab likes it.

2. I imagine that American support for a third front in Somalia to do a Mogadishu II is about 0%. For some reason, the American people have this strange perception that should they reenter that hellhole to "help" the people, then as soon as we had to use force to stop the killers from killing, the victims might be as eager to see us dragged through the streets as their suddenly kind and gentle former oppressors.

Oh, I think Soviet spies did a great deal of damage well beyond the nuclear thievery. One reason that the Soviet Union was able to arm, with up to date weapons, dozens of creepy regimes abroad from 1945 onward was to some extent due to its ability to steal U.S. military secrets, and often skip critical steps in development that allowed the Russian military to quite quickly expand and improve upon them.

Sometimes this had real life and death ramifications, like the Soviet supplied Egyptian SAM systems and anti-tank weapons that devastated the IDF in the Yom Kippur War's first 4-5 days, following a tradition that began at the end of WWII when an interned B-29 suddenly spawned the Tupolev Tu4 look-alike.

Much of Soviet submarine research was stolen.

The inability of the West to translate widespread Eastern European unhappiness over a half-century with Soviet hegemony to open revolt was in part due to both Russian infiltration of resistance movements, and lots of money supplied leftist groups in Europe who downplayed the Soviet threat. One could argue that the success of the Soviets in the 1930s to fool gullible Americans into offering them information translated by the 1950s into a general narrative that the Soviet Union was simply a form of socialism given to excess rather than a horribly murderous system—and such naivete often made it far easier for the Soviet Union to get away with its customary brutality. 

Some Soviet brinkmanship, from the Berlin airlift to the sanctioning of the Korean aggression, was due to intelligence gleaned from American sources about likely initial tepid American responses. In short, one of the reasons why a backward failed system like the Soviet Union for nearly a half century was able to match American weapons with near parity was due to sophisticated Soviet military and industrial espionage; and in many of our most severe political crises, like the fallout over the stationing of the Pershing missiles, Soviet spies funneled money and used blackmail to help foment popular anti-American resistance.

So yes, Soviet spying was probably worth the cost and investment.