The US won the Cold War decades ago. It is paying the price for it today

In 1977, Ronald Reagan neatly summed up the more aggressive American attitude towards the Cold War with the Soviet Union: “Here’s my strategy,” he explained, “we win, they lose.” That’s eventually what indeed happened, but with unfolding long-term results that surely would have surprised him, and most other Americans, both then and now.

Reagan was a proponent of relatively aggressive confrontational Cold War tactics, often dubbed “rollback”, which involved forcefully challenging Soviet assets on the fringes of their sphere of influence through proxy wars, largely in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The more normative approach beginning shortly after the end of the Second World War under Harry Truman was “containment”, a policy that sought to prevent any expansion of the existing Soviet sphere of influence under the assumption that the USSR would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

The anti-Soviet alliance with China achieved by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s was probably the crucial turning point of the Cold War. And blundering Soviet overreach in Afghanistan was aggressively countered by both the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and his Republican successor, Reagan.

All that certainly contributed to Soviet collapse. But there is little doubt that, ultimately, the consensus American view that the USSR would eventually collapse upon itself proved correct. Efforts at economic and political reform led by Mikhail Gorbachev proved unmanageable. Once the genie of major transformation was out of the bottle, the USSR disintegrated.

Americans largely rejoiced. After all, “we won”, as Reagan had promised, and “they lost”. The revival of a deeply corrupt form of grasping primitive accumulation followed by authoritarian crony capitalism in the Russian Federation seemed to vindicate the US Cold War strategy and produced a decisive victory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently subscribes to this analysis as well, reportedly regarding the downfall of the USSR as one of the worst catastrophes in modern human history. Americans basked in a brief unipolar moment when they had no real global political, military or economic rival.

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