It's memory-holed now, but reading archival, media or literary sources from the 1970s it is striking how US, EEC and Japanese societies sapped by stagflation, oil crisis, decaying cities and terrorism were not at all confident that they were outpacing the Brezhnev-era USSR.

To Western leaders and voters facing crises such as New York's near bankruptcy, the UK's strike-prone Winter of Discontent or terrorist chaos of the deutscher Herbst, the US, Japan and EEC's strengths in relation to Brezhnev's USSR were less obvious in 1978 than they were in 1988.

I think there was a lot of money to be made and power to be grown by playing up the Soviet threat.

In hindsight it's shocking to me how overvalued the West the Eastern Bloc in terms of economic potential