You know how when you’re pushing against something heavy and unyielding—a heavy door, say, or maybe a car stuck in a ditch—and all of a sudden, the thing you were pushing against abruptly yields? What happens?
Why, you fall forward, of course.
Especially if you’ve been pushing for a good long while: You were so hell-bent on pushing at the thing—the car stuck in the ditch, the heavy door that wouldn’t budge—that when it finally does move, you over-balance. You fall forward. You might even trip up. You might ever fall on your face—and painfully, at that.
This is what’s happening to the United States: After the long struggle of the Cold War, America is falling forward.
And this falling forward is turning into an epic tragedy.
The United States and the Western allies fought the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact between 1945 and 1991—roughly 45 years.
And it was a war, whatever the revisionists might claim: Proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan; guerrilla wars in just about every other continent on earth; propaganda wars on every front, in every category. There might not have been open combat between the U.S. and the USSR, but that didn’t make it any less of a war—constant and unabated.
Psychologically, the United States and the West were gearing up for a full-on, total war with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I remember reading two best-selling novels that outlined exactly how such a war would take place: The Third World War: August 1985 (1979) by Gen. Sir John Hackett, and Red Storm Rising (1986) by Tom Clancy.
Everyone was preparing for full, open, total war. Everyone was expecting a full, open, total war.
But the war never came—instead, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed from their own weight.
When Hungary opened its border to Austria in August of 1989, it was like the tipping of the first domino in a string of them: In rapid succession, East Germans flooded to the West, the Berlin Wall fell, other Eastern Bloc countries started to collapse, and in August 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to be.
Not a shot was fired by any army of the West. It was a bloodless and altogether anti-climactic event—but it had consequences: Consequences we are still grappling with, and which have defined the last twenty years.
To the rest of the world, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc rendered Socialist ideology simply untenable—not to say stupid.
The collapse of the Soviet Union broke the intellectual appeal of Socialism and Leninism more decisively than any military victory ever could have. Had the USSR collapsed because of defeat on the battlefield, there would have always been the lingering sense that the West won “unfairly”—that its ideas weren’t better, merely its armies stronger.
But the fact that the Eastern Bloc collapsed from internal rot, rather than a battlefield defeat—and an internal rot brought about by the application of Marxism-Leninism—rendered the socialist ideal indefensible, and unsustainable as a political ideology: After 1991, no political party in any country that truly wanted access to political power could appeal to the masses with visions of a Socialist Paradise.
I remember quite clearly how Hard Left parties in Latin America were suddenly shown to be ridiculous and foolish, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Ambitious politicians of the Left quickly rebranded themselves as “renewed Socialists”—i.e., capitalist, non-Leninist Socialists. Or in other words, center-Left politicians who fully embraced capitalism, and fully renounced Socialism. Even a whisper of a Leninist, the-Party-as-the-leading-edge-and-guiding-light-of-society talk, was considered—rightfully—idiotic and ridiculous: Laughable.
And as everyone knows, nothing kills a political position as effectively as ridicule.
So in the ideological, intellectual sense, the Western Democracies’ victory over the Eastern Bloc was total and overwhelming: The West had won the battle for hearts and minds—the fabled goal of all those years of Cold War confrontation.
After 1991, there was really no ideology that could seriously compete with the West’s combination of representative democracy and capitalism-with-a-safety-net. The world finally understood that the capitalist democracies of the West were superior to the Marxist-Leninist states of the East—and no one could seriously say otherwise.
But—supreme irony of ironies—the United States failed to understand its own victory. The victor in this decades-spanning war didn’t realize what it had achieved. America failed to understand the very fact that it had won the Cold War.
Like one of those Japanese soldiers on some forgotten island, still fighting WWII—like a basketball team still playing aggressively and without pause, long after the end of the fourth quarter and the other team has left, defeated—the United States is still fighting the Cold War.
This has been the tragedy and miscalculation that has dominated the last twenty years of world history—a failure of understanding which I think is leading to the collapse of America.
The most obvious consequence of this failure of understanding was that America has yet to de-militarize after the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. continues with its enormous, globe-straddling military—an unnecessary and back-breaking expense, because the basic rationale for this enormous military expenditure is gone: The Warsaw Pact is no more.
To give just one practical example: Ballistic missile submarines. Part of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, this weapons system class was developed during the Cold War explicitly and specifically so as to be able to deliver a nuclear counter-attack, most likely in the event of a surprise blanket nuclear strike by one side against the other.
But once such a threat ceased to exist—that is, once the Cold War was over and the threat of total and overwhelming preemptive nuclear attack was gone—there was no need for such a weapons system. That’s because ballistic nuclear submarines don’t make any sense outside the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
