How did we get here? Simply put, our political class failed to appreciate why the United States triumphed over the Soviet Union. We won not because of the power of liberal ideals—though they were important additional enablers of American foreign and security policy against the Soviets—but because in 1947, when the Cold War competition was fully joined, our country possessed a massive industrial base, the global reserve currency, the largest gold reserves, half of global GDP, a navy larger than all the world’s navies combined, an expanding population and rapidly growing middle class, and a monopoly on atomic weapons.
True, over the course of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union (the latter for a period aligned with communist China), the balance began to shift somewhat. The economies of war-ravaged Europe and Asia recovered, and the relative power position of the United States would never approximate where the country was in 1947. Nonetheless, there was little question that in terms of the power indices of the era, America had an unmatched edge in every aspect of technology, research and development, manufacturing, and overall wealth when compared to its adversary. Few in the captive nations of Eastern Europe doubted that American free-market capitalism, and what the West represented more generally, was superior when it came to both wealth and freedom. What kept them mouthing communist slogans was the reality of being occupied by the Red Army and dragooned into the Warsaw Pact against the very America (and West) they admired. But we won largely because America’s hard power was undergirded by our unmatched industrial base and R&D institutions.
Yet we failed to grasp that the Soviet Union did not implode because the liberal democratic ideal overpowered the tenets of communism. Few argued at the time that we had won because our adversary could not match our industrial base and innovative research universities and labs—especially as we moved into the digital age—and that henceforth it should be the government’s sacred duty to preserve and protect advantages that took generations to build. The implosion of the Soviet empire was greeted by Washington’s intelligentsia as an ideological triumph par excellence. In a bizarre replay of the Bolshevist fiction about the universality of Marxist dogma, our elites post-1990 seemed certain that a new globalist age had dawned in which America’s sui generis history and political tradition would first claim a universal quality and ultimately dissolve in the new global order. At think tank conferences, political science conventions, and increasingly in government and Congress, our elites succumbed to the temptation to view 1990 not as marking the end of a long twilight struggle in which the nation’s industrial base and military alliances had ultimately carried the day, but rather as the culmination of an inexorable drive toward the fulfillment of a grand universalist promise. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis was transformed into the equivalent of now-discarded communist teleological reasoning, only this time built on liberal clichés, not Marxian canon.