Falling Forward: America’s Loss of Direction Since the End of the Cold War

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.

Insert enemy here. 

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.

Nevertheless, there are still eighteen Ohio-class boomers, endlessly and pointlessly patrolling the waters around the globe. Their acquisition and operational costs are astronomical, and they have no practical use except as a delivery system for a massive nuclear counter-attack against a surprise, overwhelming inter-continental ballistic missile nuclear strike—a thing which now will never happen.

Yet the United States military continues to deploy these vessels, over 20 years after their practical use ended.

Much of the American military’s expenditures continue in this direction: Deploying weapons and strategies developed for fighting the Cold War, and still being implemented today in 2010—even though the Cold War ended in 1991, and ended in victory.

The cost of all this pointless military expenditure boggles the mind—literally: It makes your mind bump around in your skull like a big ice cube in a small glass. If one considers that the American military budget over the last twenty years has been roughly $600 billion per year in inflation adjusted dollars (not counting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), and if one supposes that, say, 25% of those budgets are spent on strategies and weapons systems that are useless in a post-Cold War world—such as ICBM submarines—then about $3 trillion have been literally thrown away, since the end of the Cold War.

$3 trillion—and that’s a conservative, back-of-the-envelope number. I wouldn’t be surprised if the refined number is closer to $6 trillion, if not higher.

The reason the military was not cut immediately after the end of the Cold War was because the G.H.W. Bush administration (1989–1993) was not in office long enough to implement any intelligent military or strategic reassessment.

His successor, Bill Clinton, could not fight the military-industrial complex because his political liabilities rendered him harmless to that cabal of interests. Between his draft-dodging, and the military-industrial complex’s brilliant manipulation of the gays-in-the-military issue, the Clinton administration left that interest group alone. So money was spent on pointless, outdated strategies that served no purpose, other than to enrich weapons manufacturers, and shore up the egos of the general staff.

The George W. Bush administration, of course, was full of draft-dodging cowards who tried to cover up the fact of their cowardice with a rah!-rah! militaristic clamor—and once 9/11 happened, the money-spigot was opened for the military until quite literally, they did not know what to spend all the money on.

(It always amazes me how cowards who dodged their Vietnam military service, like Shrub and Cheney, could so cavalierly throw away the lives of young men on pointless wars—how do such cowards sleep at night? Have they no conscience? Or are they so monstrous as to not realize the moral depravity of their actions?)

On a strategic level, the United States continued fighting the Cold War in the sense that it continued to project global power—rescinding its isolationist temperament in favor of an aggressive, Globo-cop, interventionist approach to world affairs.

The United States—as every urbane foreigner knows—is essentially a nation of isolationists: Americans are uninterested in the affairs of the rest of the world. Even putatively sophisticated and cultured Americans are as naive as country bumpkins, when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.

The only reason the U.S. became mixed up in foreign affairs was because of the Cold War: Up until Roosevelt’s third term, Americans had traditionally shied away from the rest of the world.

That changed with WWII, and especially the Cold War: Fighting the Cold War—which was a global war—meant intervening and interfering and competing against the Soviet Union on every country on earth.

But after the Cold War, the United States continued with its ham-handed foreign intervention—but without the strategic interests it had had when the Soviet Union still existed. American intervention had previously been in order to prevent a Soviet toe-hold. But after the Cold War, American intervention became an end in itself—a pointless exercise that served only to antagonize other countries.

So in defense policy and foreign policy, the United States never realized it was no longer fighting the Cold War—it continued acting as if the Cold War was in full swing.

This only points up to the fact that, in an intellectual, zeitgeist sense, America failed to understand what the end of the Cold War meant.

I was at Dartmouth immediately after the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc: There were no panel discussions of what the end of the Cold War meant. It wasn’t even acknowledged. The end of the Cold War was treated like a strange bit of news that was met with blank faces, and then ignored.

This is understandable: In 1991, the American academy was dominated by leftist Baby Boomers who for temperamental reasons could not accept that the United States had won the Cold War. Who could not accept that the United States had been right.

Many of these Baby Boomers had dodged the draft and/or protested the Vietnam War. The excuse so many of these people used in order to explain away their unwillingness to fight in Vietnam was that America was evil—America was really Amerika, first cousin of Nazi Germany. Therefore, not fighting in Vietnam was excusable. Indeed, commendable

The simple-minded extension of this argument, of course—and an extension most Baby Boom intellectuals in fact made—was that if Amerika and all it stood for was evil, then the Soviet Union was good, all evidence to the contrary. Therefore, by the standards of this manichean logic, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact deserved to win the Cold War—not the United States and its Western allies.

This psycho-drama is incomprehensible to non-Americans, but intimately understandable by most in America. The Baby Boomers’ resentment—and indeed, hatred—of America comes from a one-two punch: The failure of nerve of the Baby Boom generation, when it came to fighting in Vietnam; and the collective envy and resentment of the Baby Boomers against the generation that preceded them—their parents, the Depression Baby/World War II generation, who conducted themselves more stoically, competently, and admirably than the Baby Boom generation ever did.

For the Boomers, to accept that America had won the Cold War would have been to acknowledge that the Vietnam War had been necessary, and that the anti-Americanism so prevalent among the Baby Boom generation had been severely misguided, not to say treasonous, not to say wrong—not to say evil.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the horrible truths of the Eastern Bloc that were revealed as a result, served only to show off the failure of the intellectual Baby Boomers. It showed that, in fact, they had collectively supported and defended and even championed an ideology that was—at the heart—evil, and wrong.

So the victory of the Cold War was ignored by the American intelligentsia—because it would have shown off their own failings.

Since the middle-brow mainstream media in America traditionally takes its intellectual cue from the academic highbrows, the culture itself seemed to ignore the momentous fact that the Cold War had been won.

As far as I can recall, there was only one serious stab at a mainstream discussion of what had happened—Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. But that fine book was completely—and I think deliberately—misunderstood by academia and the mainstream media. Fukuyama wasn’t saying that “history” in the sense of events occurring, was over and done with—he was referring to “history” in the Hegelian sense of the development of freedom was over. Speaking as a former student of Hegel’s political philosophy, Fukuyama was right—but he was dismissed by academia and the mainstream media.

(Parenthetically, and just to clue you in as to how brilliant I truly am: I understood roughly 25% to 30% of The Philosophy of Right. You may applaud if you feel so moved. As to The Phenomenology of Spirit? I understood almost 10% of that book—which goes to show you that I’m a fucking genius!)

Why was Fukuyama dismissed? Because he was pointing out that the Western capitalist democracies had won out over the Eastern Bloc—a hard fact to be faced, by that intelligentsia. Hence Fukuyama was caricatured and then dismissed, so as to avoid having to confront the painful fact that the West was right. The Cold War had been worth fighting. The Eastern Bloc—and all its supporters—had been wrong.

Because of this inability—or unwillingness—to celebrate the victory in the Cold War, and the failure to come to grips with that victory’s full implications, the United States continued as if it were still fighting that war.

In other words, the United States is falling forwards: It is still fighting an enemy that no longer exists.

What have been the consequences of this?

Well, first of all, such a stance requires a real, actual enemy, to take the place of the missing Soviet Union—and the chosen enemy has become Islam.

And we have a winner! The enemy is . . . Islam!

The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001—spectacular though they were—were trivial. I don’t mean to belittle the suffering of those affected by the incidents, but in a world-historical sense, 9/11 was insignificant in and of itself.

It was the reaction to the events of 9/11 which were important—or in the case of the United States, America’s over-reaction.

(A parenthesis: I refuse to call the incidents of September 11, 2001, an “attack”—they were a series of crimes, no different from a stabbing or a rape or a burglary. Would you call the Zodiac murders “the Zodiac Attack”? Would you speak of the “Son of Sam Attack”, in capital letters, as if referring to the Devil or some other boogey man? No you would not. To call the 9/11 incident an “attack” invites the inference that there is some oppositional enemy—and imbues this imaginary oppositional enemy with power and stature that he does not have. The plain fact is, these people who carried out the 9/11 incident were a bunch of criminals—criminals who are now dead, of course, and who therefore can cause no more harm.) 

The invasion of Afghanistan in pursuit of the people responsible for 9/11 was reasonable and understandable—but the unprovoked war of aggression on Iraq was not. Nor is the constant goading of Iran, nor the secret wars in Yemen and Pakistan.

Why have these things happened? Because of an oversized military, and a foreign policy that views American intervention as “necessary and natural”.

In researching the causes of the war in Iraq for a piece I will be posting soon, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the main reasons for the war in Iraq was the U.S. military’s need to prove its usefulness. 

The enormous size of the U.S. military—a relic of the Cold War—was bound to come under scrutiny, eventually. The American military needed an enemy in order to justify its disproportionate size—because once the Soviet Union was gone, the rationale for its massive size was gone with it. 

So it seems increasinly clear to me that one of the main reasons (though certainly not the only reason) for the pointless war of aggression in Iraq was for the American military to justify its size and composition. 

Hence the American military, running riot through the Middle East—with no clear purpose, no clear strategy, where “victory” cannot be defined, or even articulated without recourse to empy and meaningless clichés. 

The only conclusion a serious observer of the situation can arrive at is that, as a direct result of the 9/11 incidents, the United States declared war on Islam. 

To Muslims, and to every other outside observer in the world, this is a non-controversial statement of fact. Americans might vehemently disagree. Americans might plausibly argue that “declaring war on Islam” was not a choice that the United States consciously or deliberately made, it just sort of happened—

—which proves my point: The U.S. fell forward into a war with Islam, because of its failure to come to terms with the end of the Cold War. 

Some people might well argue that the U.S.’s actions have all been aimed at “fighting Muslim radicals”—but as every sensible observer of the situation has pointed out, attacking a people and invading their land creates these “radical Muslim terrorists”. What would you do if, say, Chinese soldiers invaded your town in Indiana? Greet them as heroes? Throw garlands of flowers on their tanks? 

Or try to kill as many of these invaders as you could, by whatever means you could? 

Invading and occupying countries creates resistance fighters. Americans might call these people who resist the U.S.’s invasions of these countries “terrorists”: But to these people, they’re simply and nobly resisting and fighting a foreign invader—

—us. 

Falling forward: Like I said at the beginning, when the truck you’re pushing suddenly gets out of the ditch, if you’re not careful, your liable to fall flat on your face—

—or worse:

One of the great things about fighting the Cold War was that it required America to redefine—almost on a daily basis—what it stood for.

By its opposition to the Soviet Union, the United States and its Western allies were forced to constantly remind themselves of what they would defend to the death—freedom, human rights and dignity, due process, free speech and democracy—and what they were constitutionally against—a self-selected elite controlling the people, cronyism, undemocratic State diktats, lack of free speech, lack of due process, selective prosecutions, torture, concentration camps—

—everything that embodied and defined the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

But now that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are gone, this constant process of self-examination and redefinition of priorities is gone.

Hence the degeneration that we have seen:

• The human rights abuses—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The blatant lies—WMD’s and all the rest of it—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The secret prisons—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The violation of due process—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The effective elimination of habeas corpus—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The cronyism and institutionalized corruption—perpetrated by Americans. 

• The limitations of free speech, and its persecution by selective prosecution—perpetrated by Americans. 

By not coming to terms with the end of the Cold War, the United States has fallen forward: It has engaged in an imperial war, it has betrayed all of its core principles, it is slowly devolving into a fascist police-state—

—come to think of it, the United States is looking more and more like the Soviet Union.

That is the supreme tragedy of America today—it is becoming that which it fought so nobly against, and which it rightfully despised.

To see other posts discussing the American situation, please click here.