The Fruits of Victory
The reason we got here is quite simple. Ironically, it’s all due to how the USA won the last World War, and the Cold War that followed.
The United States emerged from the Second World War almost uniquely unscathed. All our cities remained intact and the people preserved from genocide and massacre. We had a massive and growing industrial base, a functioning government, and the ultimate power of the atomic bomb. Good times for us. Meanwhile most of our allies, especially the Russians, had suffered horrific losses, and our recent enemies even more.
The former balance of power was wrecked. All the old European domains were shattered and humbled, even our allies. Yet America enjoyed finally being on top. We immediately became the power most invested in preserving the shiny new status quo, even occasionally at the expense of everyone else.
The US was top dog, yet Stalin would not let us in his junkyard. He preferred the old order of business, where empires had definite, fixed frontiers that others respected over the wide-open ways of the West. So to keep us out, he built the Iron Curtain and used Eastern Europe as a buffer zone. Our aid went to rebuilding Western allies and former enemies, but not a dime more for Russia or China, which they resented. Instead, all our efforts for the next half-century would be aimed directly against them.
Historically, such irritating geopolitical imbalances generally get settled eventually by another great war. Sooner or later, one empire or coalition would beat all the others, dictate terms to the losers, and build a new world order by cooperation, coercion, and/or bloodshed. There would be peace on Earth at last, even if it were one of universal oppression at the end of a sword.
But the A-Bomb spoiled everything. It meant that total war would result in total destruction. No winners, only losers. While this made the need for a planetary government urgent, one that has only grown in the decades since 1945, the United Nations was not to be our salvation.
For the UN has no real power at all. It is totally dependent on member states. It cannot coerce anyone, compel anything, collect taxes of any kind, or field its own army. Just like the previous impotent old boys club, the League of Nations, the United Nations has only moral authority and persuasion.
Russians soon got the Bomb, too, helped by thefts of information by naive idealistic spies in the Western programs who saw destructive parity as the only means to save socialism. Both sides thus became quickly chained to very expensive and existentially unsafe wonder weapons that could never be used and yet dare not be abandoned. This paradox would shape everything until this very day.
To stay below the nuclear threshold, only limited conflicts could be allowed. And thus, instead of World War III, a Cold War was begun. Everything from Third World wars on the fringes of the power blocks including Korea and Southeast Asia, guerrilla uprisings and brushfire wars from South America and Africa to Central Asia, and grand propaganda contests across fields as diverse as sports, fine arts, and space exploration served as the new theaters of conflict.
After the war, the Soviets tried to revive their world-revolutionary ideals to overcome capitalist riches with socialist virtue and brute repression whenever that failed. But over time, the appeal of the rich, decadent West was just too much. Ultimately they could not compete with the West without adopting the West’s methods, and that doomed them.
Supposedly the straw that finally broke the proletarian back was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – SDI. Maybe “Star Wars” would have made nuclear war finally possible, but the Russians could not afford to develop effective counter-measures in any case. The Cold War and the Soviet Union both quietly ended without a bloodbath, but the Russians felt no gratitude for the West’s steadying influence, only shame at their own humiliation. America won the first Cold War, but would it stay won?