US/USSR 
Anatol Lieven
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.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Anatol Lieven reported from Moscow for the Times from 1990 to 1996 and is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. His latest book is Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World.
Other articles by this contributor:
Preserver and Destroyer · Pakistan’s Predicament
We do not deserve these people · America and its Army
A Trap of Their Own Making · the consequences of the new imperialism
The Push for War · The Threat from America
print layout
tell a friend