The US won the Cold War decades ago. It is paying the price for it today

The loss of the unifying Soviet foe could yet prove as damaging on the Democratic left as the Republican right. Reuters

In 1977, Ronald Reagan neatly summed up the more aggressive American attitude towards the Cold War with the Soviet Union: “Here’s my strategy,” he explained, “we win, they lose.” That’s eventually what indeed happened, but with unfolding long-term results that surely would have surprised him, and most other Americans, both then and now.

Reagan was a proponent of relatively aggressive confrontational Cold War tactics, often dubbed “rollback”, which involved forcefully challenging Soviet assets on the fringes of their sphere of influence through proxy wars, largely in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The more normative approach beginning shortly after the end of the Second World War under Harry Truman was “containment”, a policy that sought to prevent any expansion of the existing Soviet sphere of influence under the assumption that the USSR would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

The anti-Soviet alliance with China achieved by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s was probably the crucial turning point of the Cold War. And blundering Soviet overreach in Afghanistan was aggressively countered by both the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter and his Republican successor, Reagan.

All that certainly contributed to Soviet collapse. But there is little doubt that, ultimately, the consensus American view that the USSR would eventually collapse upon itself proved correct. Efforts at economic and political reform led by Mikhail Gorbachev proved unmanageable. Once the genie of major transformation was out of the bottle, the USSR disintegrated.

Americans largely rejoiced. After all, “we won”, as Reagan had promised, and “they lost”. The revival of a deeply corrupt form of grasping primitive accumulation followed by authoritarian crony capitalism in the Russian Federation seemed to vindicate the US Cold War strategy and produced a decisive victory.

Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently subscribes to this analysis as well, reportedly regarding the downfall of the USSR as one of the worst catastrophes in modern human history. Americans basked in a brief unipolar moment when they had no real global political, military or economic rival.

The anti-Soviet alliance with China achieved by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, after he met Mao Zedong, may have been the crucial turning point of the Cold War. AP

That was obviously going to change, eventually, because unipolarity was clearly an accident of history rather than an ineluctable reality. The Russian Federation would eventually regroup, China was already an evident rising power, and Brazil, India and others were on the horizon too.

Yet, 35 years on, the US “victory” in the Cold War looks far more hollow than many Americans assumed. Arguably, the ill effects of the end of the Cold War on the US emerged more slowly and subtly than they did on Russia, but they are becoming unmistakable.

The loss of a unifying common enemy unleashed a set of highly dangerous domestic political forces, especially on the right, that had been held in check by the Soviet threat. Republican leaders including Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon and even Reagan understood the need to contain the right-wing extremism that informed the pro-fascist “America First” movement of the 1930s, just as Democratic Party leaders marginalised the far left.

The steady drift of the Republican Party to the far right, first heralded by the movement around commentator Pat Buchanan, was allowed to fester until it exploded, after the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, in the far-right Tea Party movement. It has now coalesced around President Donald Trump, drawn together by his charismatic personality and dynamic, if intensely personalised, leadership. Republican leaders avoided every opportunity to contain, punish or marginalise Mr Trump, including two opportunities for the Senate to convict and prevent him from running again for office in his first term.

None of this would have happened without the loss of the Soviet enemy. The same thing has not happened among the Democrats – yet. Their centre continues to hold, but the growing question is, for how long? The loss of the unifying Soviet foe could yet prove as damaging on the Democratic left as the Republican right.

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The devastation on the domestic front is now mirrored by a complete US collapse in foreign policy. The new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration amounts to a unilateral declaration of surrender, or at least total climbdown, to all potential enemies except for traditional US allies in Western Europe.

This head-scratching document treats Russia, China and even Iran as trading competitors and passing annoyances, barely dwelling on the Ukraine war, while unleashing a barrage of rage against the democratic states of Western Europe. They stand accused of suppressing the far right and surrendering western civilisation to hordes of non-white immigrants, mainly from Muslim-majority countries.

The document is so untethered to international realities that it can only be regarded as, effectively, a symptom of neurotic projection in which US domestic political grievances, anxieties and fears are incongruously attributed to Western European societies. The idea, for example, that these countries are allowing themselves to be overrun by non-white migration is effectively untrue, while the transformation of the US into a country with no clear racial or ethnic majority is well under way and seems virtually unstoppable.

The loss of a unifying common enemy unleashed a set of highly dangerous domestic political forces

The same is true regarding accusations that far-right movements are being ruthlessly suppressed. Republicans are much more extreme than most of their rightist European analogues and appear to be projecting their own domestic grievances onto European political landscapes in which they do not belong, much as Vice President JD Vance did, to the astonishment of almost all observers, at last February’s Munich security conference.

From a traditional US foreign policy perspective, the national security strategy reads like a unilateral declaration of surrender on almost all fronts, except this perplexing projection of American political grievances onto Western European realities. Global competitors such as Russia and China appear to have little to fear, and are virtually invited to build their own independent spheres of influences. Revisionist upstarts like Iran and North Korea are similarly off the hook, at least compared to all previous US NSS documents, including from the first Trump administration.

It’s still reasonable to claim the US “won” and the USSR “lost” the Cold War. But, by the end of 2025, it’s become clear that the damage done by the loss of the unifying and clarifying framework of the Cold War to both US domestic politics and foreign policy has been utterly devastating. With victories like this, who needs defeat?