Falling Forward: US Direction Since End of the Cold War
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Falling Forward
Submitted by Gonzalo Lira
Sat, 18 Dec 2010
America's Loss of Direction Since the End of the Cold War
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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?
us-russiaWhy, 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 “unfairlyâ€
