Who Really Won The "Cold War"?

"Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work...It was approximately under this kind of infatuation -- an exaggerated sense of power and an imaginary sense of mission -- that the Athenians attacked Syracuse and Napoleon and then Hitler invaded Russia. In plain words, they overextended their commitments and they came to grief."

-- J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power

Who could forget the triumphalism more than a decade ago when the Soviet Empire imploded and the Berlin Wall came crashing down, when chauvinists and nationalists seemed to have every justification to celebrate and to gloat? A mauvais philosophe, filching the thesis of Daniel Bell's End of Ideology, proclaimed America's "victory" to be the "end of history," her mix of pluralism and private enterprise to be the omega point of human social achievement. Innumerable others concurred, and in all the sermons and speeches and columns at least one point was made loud and clear: that anyone inclined to dwell on the darker side of American power, at home or abroad, should forever be reminded of the score, and that whatever the ills and underbellies of American liberal democracy, it always was and still is the best hope for humanity. The death of the rival could be used as a bludgeon to keep dissenters at bay, or relied upon always to end an argument: "Socialism is dead. Where have you been?" -- "If you think it is so bad here, try living in those other societies" -- "Ours is the only country in the world in which the poor can become obese."

The sudden changes in Eastern Europe came at a time when our own Empire might have looked squarely at itself and found much to amend and to reform: the dirty practice, for example, of supporting murderers and thugs in other lands, such as the contras in Nicaragua, the death squads in El Salvador, Hussein in Iraq, the mujahideen in Afghanistan; the tendency of the rulers to do whatever they please, irrespective of the popular will or the strictures of law (consider, for instance, the speculative shenanigans of Wall Street firms and of certain self-centered mavericks in the eighties; the Iran-Contra Affair, which was every bit if not more a "constitutional crisis" than Watergate; the savings and loan debacle, &c.); the irresponsibility of pouring taxpayer dollars down the drain of military enterprise (spending increased more than 100% during President Reagan's two terms) while millions live in poverty and millions more live without the security of healthcare coverage.

"Who won the Cold War?" was thus as much a rhetorical weapon as it was an honest question, and it seemed all the more powerful as our nation entered into another period of outstanding economic growth. All the important questions -- about imperial rule, the ruthlessness of foreign policy, the wisdom of existing social policy -- could well be ignored or postponed until the next recession and the next stock-market bust, or until a little-known and aggrieved enemy would decide that the best pedagogy is mass homicide.

It is clear that the systole and diastole of the world economy is private enterprise, and that very few nations look upon collective economic control with any favor. But this acknowledgement does not inoculate the Cold War question from further scrutiny. What if, far from being a simple contest between two enemy ideologies, the Cold War was more a lesson about the ultimate fate of unaccountable power -- the death of the Soviet Union merely being the first of several chapters? And what if the narrative's epilogue has yet to be written, and the best (or worst) is yet to be told? And what if the tale has more to do with the ramifications of greed, brutality, and power than with the unchallengeable superiority of one kind of economy and society?

The lazy acceptance of conventional Cold War "lessons" seems untenable when one considers many other aspects of recent history and ties together loose threads of fact and meaning:

-- No matter how backward and poor, desperate and sick, the various republics of the old Soviet Union at least confronted the rot of centralized authority and fought for a more dignified and autonomous existence. One might ask what commensurate zeal exists now in the U.S. for excising its own lesions of corruption and fraud. What landmark legislation can be expected out of Congress to remedy the systematic lying of brokerage houses and financial analysts? When will independent candidates of all stripes have at least a fair chance to compete in statewide and national elections? When will the nation's wish for national healthcare be granted? When will lavish military and economic aid stop flowing to those regimes abroad that flout human rights? The list here could be multiplied a thousand times, and the point would still not have been exhausted.

-- It is the victor, not the vanquished, which appears to be more vulnerable to the "nightmare scenario" -- Washington and New York, not Moscow or Beijing, which appear the likelier places for the detonation of a "dirty bomb" or for the release of fatal chemicals into the air. The impartial analyst must find it a cruel irony that a superpower can spend literally trillions of dollars on "national security" over a five-decade period and still be at the veritable mercy of a ragtag band of determined killers. And can there be any question that there will be another horrendous catastrophe on our soil? Of what relevance will all the apotheoses of country and all the accumulated "lessons" of the Cold War be then?

-- For all the bluster about the marvels of free enterprise, the tally of corporate shams and disasters over the years is quite long. Consider the plight of companies like Cendant, Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing, Enron; the ultimate fate of the laughable dot.coms (or dot.cons as John Cassidy would have it); the dive of hotshot biotech and genomics companies (just two years ago the price of Celera [CRA] stock was valued around 200 bucks a share; today the stock hovers around the 12-dollar range, and that isn't owing to any 2-for-1 or 3-for-2 splits); go look at a three-year chart of even blue-chip companies like Walt Disney or JP Morgan Chase or Dow Corning or Ford Motor Company or GlaxoSmithKline -- the fall in equity value is staggering, and it seems almost certain that some percentage of retirees is beginning to feel the hardship. Consider the difficulties of erstwhile titans like Xerox and AT&T and Rite Aid. Recall the begging and pleading of the airline industry for federal subsidies after the September attacks, the role of various companies in the inflation of utility prices in California, the overall rotten customer service one gets from telephone and cable companies these days. Somehow, in the popular imagination, this gravamen isn't serious enough to call the overall legitimacy of the capitalist system into question. It were as though one could cite a thousand examples of corrupt corporate practices -- of insolvency, double-dealing, lying, extortion, manipulation -- and the list of negatives can still be written off as anomaly.

-- Those who hold up the American model of pluralism and democracy almost always forget to note that half of all registered voters ever bother to turn up at the polls during presidential elections, and that one-third of voters ever bother to turn up in off-year elections. Eulogists must also skip over the rigged primary system, the decisive role of money in choosing candidates and policies, and the widespread disgust with the two major parties.

Perhaps history's reckoning of the Cold War will be as equally one-sided and half-adequate as the official version today. The corrective will have to come from the scholar who doesn't see the narrative ending after the second chapter, who is aware that history doesn't end the moment intellectuals wish it to, and who seeks ambitiously to understand the American Empire at a fair remove -- a vantage point seemingly inaccessible to many writers and thinkers today.

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