We won the Cold War. We lost the peace.
As we gear up for another wild and wacky week, I want to turn back to a moment in history which set everything we're experiencing into motion.
1989. The Soviet Empire had fallen. The West had won the Cold War.
After the Second World War, the US enacted the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe. It offered the plan to the countries of the Soviet bloc, but, at Josef Stalin's not-so-veiled insistence, every nation behind the Iron Curtain turned it down. Western Europe recovered and morphed into the European Union, one of the world's economic superpowers. Eastern Europe was left to the decay to which it was accustomed by centuries of benign neglect by the West.
Fast forward forty years. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Warsaw Pact is no more. A war as devastating as World War II had been won by the Western allies. Surely, just as after 1945, they would offer the East a leg up? Give it the same resources it had received from a fat United States?
No.
Neither Western Europe nor the US thought it had to win the peace. The war was over. The West had won. Now, via economic shock, Eastern Europe would be brought into the capitalist world. Instead of helping rebuild, the West engaged in triumphalist rhetoric, "the end of history" and all that nonsense.
What we neglected was that Eastern Europe and Russia knew nothing of either democracy or capitalism. And that that region was long accustomed to the West betraying it. So instead of receiving the same largesse France and Germany received from the US, they were left to the tender mercies of economists trained by Milton Friedman, who advocated a "shock treatment" and a wholesale selling off of state assets for rock-bottom prices. And thus we got the oligarchs.
While economies went into a tailspin, we also didn't give much attention to governments, thinking that having open elections was all that mattered. But without economies which would benefit the majority of the citizens, revanchism and isolationism were bound to take hold. Thus we have Orban in Hungary and Putin in Russia now. The 2016 hacking of our elections can be traced back directly to our actions post-1989. We were too besotted with our victory to take a long view, that building a democratic ally in Russia should have been our primary goal, not crowing about the glories of capitalist democracy.
Winning wars can be easy compared to winning the peace. Peace requires attention and diligence, traits which seemingly vanish once the fighting—either cold or hot—is over. Time to come home and celebrate, not stay behind in foreign outposts helping those you just defeated. The US realized it had to do just that after 1945, or the world would again descend into violence and barbarity. That it and its allies didn't realize they had to do that again post-1989 is the true geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.