The central goal of American grand strategy during the Cold War was to contain Soviet expansionism and ultimately undermine its attempts to spread global communism. Different American administrations pursued this objective with varying degrees of vigour. Some, such as the two Reagan presidencies, were unyielding in using all the country’s resources at its command to hasten the end of the Soviet Union and to limit the possible spread of communism. Others, including the Nixon administration, had adopted a more pragmatic approach while still not losing sight of the key purpose of American grand strategy. For example, it was Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who had deftly reached out to China within a year of the Sino-Soviet border clashes along the Ussuri River in 1969. The outreach was designed to widen the emerging wedge between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union.

In the end, the United States (US) was successful in realising its fundamental aim: The dismantling of the Soviet Union and delegitimisation of communist ideology on a global basis. In retrospect, the relentless pursuit of these two related goals was a worthwhile endeavour. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, it became more than evident that the system which was ostensibly designed to promote human liberation by ushering in a classless society had done nothing of the kind. An early critic based in Central Europe, the erstwhile communist leader and noted Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas, had already issued a potent warning and critique of the ideological pretensions of communist regimes in his justly famed book, The New Class, in 1957.

Overthrowing the Soviet Union and dismantling communism, however, involved substantial costs: Human, material and ethical. The human costs involved the loss of lives across the globe as the two titanic powers resorted to proxy wars in various parts of the world. Fortunately, either because nuclear deterrence held or through sheer luck, apart from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they never really came close to a direct, violent confrontation. That said, there were a series of near accidents that took place and which are ably documented in the 1993 work of an American international relations scholar, Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety.

The material costs for both sides were simply staggering. One highly regarded estimate, which can be found in Stephen Schwartz’s 1998 edited book, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, concluded that the US alone had spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear arsenal. No comparable assessment is readily available for the Soviet Union, but it can be surmised that they were not substantially lower. These estimates, of course, only deal with the development and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of the two principal antagonists. They do not include the expenditures that US allies, the United Kingdom and France — both of which also developed nuclear weapons — incurred to acquire their deterrence. We also know the terrible human and material costs that the PRC paid in the quest for its own nuclear arsenal. An excellent book, China Builds the Bomb, by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, shows how Mao Zedong, pursued nuclear weapons as millions starved thanks to his misbegotten attempt at backyard industrialisation during the Great Leap Forward between 1958 to 1962.

Moral failures

Finally, the US’ role in the Cold War also involved cutting any number of ethical corners in the conduct of its foreign policy. To that end, it often had to make Faustian bargains. These involved supporting any number of squalid regimes in the global south which were far from democratic if they were suitably anti-communist. Worse still, several US administrations ranging from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Nixon were involved in both successful and unsuccessful attempts to overthrow both democratic and authoritarian governments in Central and Latin America. Probably, the most egregious of these involved the Nixon administration’s role in ousting the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. In its wake, the military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, unleashed a reign of terror, brutally suppressing any form of dissent. All the while, the US did little to rein him in owing to his staunch anti-communism.

Closer to the Indian subcontinent, as is well known even to casual observers in South Asia, the Nixon administration played a truly ignominious role during the East Pakistan crisis of 1971 that culminated in the creation of Bangladesh. Plainly stated, it supported the murderous regime of General Yahya Khan almost entirely because it had played a crucial role in facilitating Nixon and Kissinger’s overture to the PRC. And to the chagrin of both prime minister Indira Gandhi and the Indian political leadership, it had subjected India to a form of gunboat diplomacy through the deployment of the naval task force in the Bay of Bengal.

These gross ethical lapses should, under no circumstances, be overlooked even as the anti-communist impulse of the US was a worthwhile endeavour given the human costs that communist regimes imposed on their citizenry. Nevertheless, it would do an injustice to the historical record to suggest that the US made no effort to uphold human rights during the entire span of the Cold War. The Jimmy Carter administration explicitly made the advancement of human rights a key component of its foreign policy platform. In this effort, as former US State Department official, Sandra Vogelgesang, noted in her splendid book, American Dream, Global Nightmare: The Dilemma of US Human Rights Policy, the US often faced competing and indeed conflicting goals. These involved balancing immediate and compelling national security interests while simultaneously remaining true to its commitment to human rights.

At the end of the Cold War, the US emerged as the sole superpower with the demise of the Soviet Union. Many scholars then argued that the global system was now unipolar. But others, most notably the American academic, Christopher Layne, argued that unipolarity was, at best, fleeting. Invariably, he argued that new powers would arise to challenge US global dominance. He was, of course, correct.

In part, the US’ strength was dissipated owing to the two wars that it embarked upon during the first George W Bush administration. The first, though perhaps not carefully thought out, was the decision to invade Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime. The initial effort was successful. Tragically, the US-led International Security Assistance Force, quickly got bogged down in an insurgency which dragged on for two decades until the Biden administration decided to withdraw from the country in 2021.The other war that the Bush administration started against Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein proved to be costlier both in material and human terms. According to a Harvard University study, the war cost the US taxpayer $3 trillion. Almost 4,500 US military personnel lost their lives in the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

In February, the Donald Trump administration, initially in conjunction with Israel, launched a war against Iran. This war, which the administration had hoped would be swift and decisive, has proven to be otherwise.

It has significantly dissipated US military capabilities, the Pentagon is now asking for a substantial supplement to cover the costs of war wastage, and it is requesting a defence budget close to $1.5 trillion.

The US budget deficit is hovering around $40 trillion. Most mainstream economists believe that this debt-to-gross domestic product ratio is simply unsustainable.

As several international relations scholars had predicted at the Cold War’s end, the US is now faced with a genuine peer competitor, the PRC.

As the US shifts personnel and material away from the East Asian theatre to deal with the crisis in the Persian Gulf, it may be providing the PRC an opportunity to exert its military influence in the region. Despite decisively winning the Cold War, albeit at considerable cost, far from maintaining its unipolar status, the country is at serious risk of jeopardising its long-term prosperity and well-being.