Their reasoning was based on the idea that a war with the Soviets was inevitable and that the US should attack before it lost the strategic advantage - given that there was no war are you actually arguing that they were correct?
What you are doing is resulting, connecting result with decision under probability. I am not sure what was probability of a war but I don’t think that because war didn’t happen that it was unprobable.
So you think an attack would have been the right thing to do?
Edit: To be fair, in the event of an Able Archer '83 war we might have all have have wished that such an attack had happened (not me though, I'd be dead). So its not impossible to construct a timeline where it was the right thing to do. I'm just curious whether if you had been a decision maker back then whether you would actually choose to do that.
Basically China is an ideological extension of the cold war. It's an oligarchal society where the people don't have a vote for their future. Versus us where there is balanced based off the vote. The two are incompatible and they will come to a head. If we pre-empted this the way Neumann, McArthur, etc wanted... we would avoid the conflict that is coming in 10-20 years.
