US/USSR

Anatol Lieven

• The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis
  Allen Lane, 333 pp, £20.00, January 2006, ISBN 0 7139 9912 8
• The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad
  Cambridge, 484 pp, £25.00, January 2006, ISBN 0 521 85364 8

America’s struggle with the Soviet Union and Communism during the Cold War is the key founding myth of the modern American state – a state in many ways utterly different from the one that existed before the 1940s. The Cold War ended in what has generally been portrayed in the US as absolute victory, involving not just the crushing defeat of the enemy and the disappearance of its ideology, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state. The extent of this perceived victory has been responsible for much of the subsequent pathological behaviour of the US political establishment, from blind adherence to the doctrinaire capitalist pieties – moral as well as economic – of the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1990s, to the almost universally shared belief in a ‘unipolar world’ dominated by the US. Victory in the Cold War confirmed in the minds of most Americans much deeper nationalist myths about the inevitable triumph of American power and goodness, and so its effects have survived the deepening disillusionment with the Iraqi and Afghan interventions.