Word: overstretched
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harvard's Samuel Huntington confirms this Soviet intuition in the current Foreign Affairs. The real cause of the decline of nations, he argues, is not the now fashionable notion of "imperial overstretch" but the phenomenon of creeping inflexibility, what might be called industrial sclerosis -- precisely the loss of that ability to change and adapt...
...course the true basket case is the Soviet Union. (Its decline does not settle the argument between the overstretch and the sclerosis schools, since the Soviets are experts at both.) Gorbachev faces a society whose entire political and economic structure is ossified...
Kennedy proposed a theory of "imperial overstretch," that a nation gains "Great Power" status by using its economic strength to finance a military buildup and undertake a wide array of international obligations. As time goes on, however, such overseas commitments ultimately become a financial drain, eroding the Power's economic base by diverting resources badly needed for domestic investment...
Throughout the 1980s, American critics have attacked the Reagan Doctrine as too grandiose and expensive an undertaking for the U.S. They saw it as a form of imperial overstretch, to use the now famous phrase of Professor Paul Kennedy. This critique is unintelligible. The effects of the Reagan Doctrine have been precisely the reverse. It turned out to be an extremely cost- effective form of Western resistance to the Soviet expansion of the '70s. It made the new Soviet outposts expensive liabilities. The Reagan Doctrine demonstrated -- to the Politburo, ultimately -- that it was the Soviet empire that had overreached...