Washington's failure to foresee the collapse of its superpower rival ranks high in the pantheon of predictive failures. The question of who got it right or wrong has been intertwined with the deeper issue of who "won" the Cold War. Like the disputes over who "lost" China and Iran, this debate has been fought out along ideological and partisan lines, with conservatives claiming credit for the Evil Empire's demise and liberals arguing that the causes were internal to the Soviet Union. The intelligence community has come in for harsh criticism for overestimating Soviet strength and overlooking the symptoms of crisis, the discipline of "Sovietology" has dissolved into acrimonious irrelevance. Drawing on declassified documents, interviews, and careful analysis of contemporary literature, this book offers the first systematic analysis of the predictive failure at the paradigmatic, foreign policy, and intelligence levels. Although it is focused on the Soviet case, it offer lessons that are both timely and necessary.