They admitted defeat due to SDI etc and Solidarity helped too.

SDI had very little to do with it.

The defeat was economic, not military.

And now its successor state is on a warpath and has seemingly free reign.

It didn't fail. It just regrouped and waited for western hegemony to grow weaker and indecisive.

I'd say we're back to where we started with a much tougher set of adversaries.

> It didn't fail.

It did. What came later, in the years after Yeltsin, is completely different than the communist regime of the USSR.

> much tougher set of adversaries.

It may seem so because of the media, but Russia is much weaker than the USSR is and has almost none of the global influence that the latter had.

China is now by far the more powerful adversary to the US, which went unnoticed for years because US foreign policy was so fixated on Russia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Idiots.