The threat level of the USSR has nothing to do with why it collapsed.
And this is why I'm calling you naive.
But since you asked, I believe they posed at least as big a threat in 1981 because their military power was intact. They could project power anywhere they wanted and their nuclear stockpile was very much operable. Perhaps you have a different definition of threat though.
Yeah, my definition isn't based on Hollywood movies.
In 1981 the physical size of the Soviet army was massive, but they couldn't focus their strength anywhere. Afghanistan is a testament to this, where the Soviet military attempted for nearly a decade before calling it quits and abandoning much of their equipment where it lay as they left. Had they moved more units from other regions they would have quickly seen the regions from where troops were moved facing unrest, because by 1981 the Soviet Union wasn't even capable of feeding its own people due to funneling all of its money into military in trying to keep up with the United States (who was actually sending tons of grain to the USSR since the 1970's). The Soviet military posed only one tactical threat to the US, and that was the presence of nuclear warheads-- the long-established doctrine of MAD (mutually-assured destruction) and the Warsaw Pact held that threat pretty much in line. From a tactical perspective the USSR could pose no imminent threat to the continental United States by 1981, though not for lack of trying to develop sufficient military engineering-- they certainly made some interesting air superiority fighters.
Interesting is how you seem to assume this had nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, when in fact this had
everything to do with the collapse. The fact that the USSR after 1969 began pumping nearly all of its resources into the military, even to the detriment of the population, left most of the country bankrupt and requiring military backing to keep the peace by the end of the 1970's. Tricky Dick saw the opportunity to undermine the Soviets further by visiting China, which was a diplomatic kick in the nuts to the USSR and forced them to move toward détente with the US. This led ultimately to SALT I and II being signed, further reducing the military threat from the Soviets in the 1970's, while the improved Soviet relations gave the US the opportunity to start shipping food aid over there-- which the Soviets then used to focus even more of their own resources on their military instead of bolstering their populace. By the time the 1980's started the USSR was getting itself embroiled in conflict with Afghanistan, it couldn't turn down the food the US was sending despite the "evil empire" BS Reagan was throwing, and it couldn't afford to move enough of its massive military infrastructure around to finish off the Afghan conflict because member states to the USSR were dealing with antsy populations as well.
So back to the military and what it has to do with all of this. The reason the Soviet government was having so much trouble managing all of these things is because their methodology in most of their military funding and infrastructure was "big, massively big" in every way. The problem is that big is expensive, and when funds were needed they were taken out of the very things that kept government running or people fed or hospitals operational and so on and so forth. This is actually why I find the dismissals of the example that is China to be disingenuous at best, since the Soviet Union drifted just as much away from "true communist" ideals as China did, they simply did so in a much more fascist-totalitarian manner (as opposed to the capitalist-authoritarian China). I won't say that Nixon was the first to notice this, but he was definitely one of the first ones to
take advantage of it, and both his and Ford's administrations effectively cut the balls off the main dangers the Soviet Union posed for the United States, while the Afghan War and Glasnost pretty much finished things off. But it was the attempt by the USSR to maintain the facade that they were still the same imminent threat to their enemies long after they'd grown too large to be able to back it up that led to the decline of the Soviet Union, and despite the naive rhetoric that so many people seem to accept without question that decline began shortly after the US beat the Soviets to the moon in a manned ship. Sure, they were massive and had access to all sorts of resources, but all of those resources went into maintaining the facade that the USSR was the biggest, baddest military that could overwhelm its enemies, and by the 1970's that just wasn't so in any real sense, even less so by the 1980's. They couldn't buy their way out of that mess, and Reagan's deficit spending kept them prodded into continuing to spend as well to try to keep up airs, and the clay feet of their deficit spending finally caught up with them.
Overall, the contributing factors to the fall of the Soviet Union should serve as a lesson to the United States or any other world power that exists: careful with deficit spending, which isn't bad to do but there are limits to efficacy; be very aware that having to fight on multiple fronts is going to wear down quickly, so end confrontations fast or risk losing them; in the end, be able to back up your bluster or learn to go the diplomatic route to save face, otherwise you write checks your ass can't cash. None of those things are flaws exclusive to communism, they're exclusive to empires and huge world powers. While the US isn't an empire, they are a world power and many of those cautions apply to the US just as well as they did the USSR, even if the situations aren't identical (and that
would be due to the different political and economic make-ups).
I apologize for the tl;dr length of this explanation, but that's about as brief as I can make it and still make sure to cover enough that (provided you read it all and don't just cherrypick) you should have a clear idea of what I'm saying. Keep in mind that this is the
short version, because the long version is too long to fit in a post. Suffice to say, though, both versions have nothing to do with "communism always fails because some communist countries have failed and they've failed because they were communist, thus communism always fails" mainly because that kind of reasoning is worse than incorrect, it's willfully ignorant of history.
