Ronald Reagan discovers that the Russians actually did think the US was capable of waging nuclear war on them:
“Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did … During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike … Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us.”
Quote found at the Wikipedia page about Able Archer, the 1983 NATO exercise about nuclear war that was so realistic it almost fooled the Russians into believing the exercise was real and into launching a first strike.It nicely sums up the American cluelessness about how other countries and people see them, to understand that not everybody agrees that they are the good guys. It’s a classic fallacy of empire of course, this lack of empathy, previously seen in Britain as well as Rome. It exists because as an empire, you do not have to take into account the wishes, desires and fears of lesser countries, it’s they who have to take into account yours. It’s a disease that leads to quite a lot of nasty surprises and which can only be cured by no longer being an empire. The British may pride themselves these days on how much better they understand whichever people they’re the junior partner in the American subjugation thereof they are, but they were just as clueless when Rule Brittannia was still true.