No laughing matter!

Reagan,once a militant strike leader of the self-employed Actors Guild who led them out on strike in 1948 and a poor man's son,took a lackadaisical attitude to most things. His arms borrowing marked the apogee of American power before America's inevitable decline into massive indebtedness and gun crime.

His attitude to the Soviet Union?

Hostile!

It is not funny to lay siege to a country coming out of a long winter of repression and turning your back on a leader reaching out his hand in friendship.

America may have interests but the Russians had friends,real friends.

While,like it or not,not a single US soldier died on active service during his two tenures of office, Western rejection of a vibrant and necessary part of European political culture which Western Europe has more in common with than it had with the US,is still a running sore and a source of deep acrimony and bitter regret for me personally.

Russia is a country which has never taken anything that did not belong to it and Slav countries have more in common with one another than the West.