And I don't see Western states acting in their best interest anyway. I actually see something between slow surrender to the worst of their competition and some weird kind of "let no one win", trying to empower the worst savages while simply not working with those of competitors who shouldn't necessarily be their adversaries. You can also take a look at the people which reach the top in European and US political classes, these are of, eh, declining quality.

Also for my second point - an event in the future still can't be the cause for an event in the past, justification or not.

Other than that - large parts of NATO \ West "civilization offering", so to say, were about freedom and human rights.

And large parts of the Soviet alternative were about humanism and equality and unification.

And if it's casual for you that people were not supposed to believe in any of that in either case, then I don't get it why people here are so eager to point out Soviet hypocrisies as if they were any different.

It'd be probably also awesome for realpolitik fans to not forget how real world works in terms of errors. Right now an error in your security systems means some protest, some Assange or Snowden, some scandal. Getting into realpolitik too much would shift those errors to justified terrorist acts. Well, I suppose that may be one reason why some countries are so eager to get rid of nuclear energy despite all the green agenda in PR. Single point of failure and all that.