Cold war Without End; America Never had a Post-Communist Revolution (Strategy‪)‬

THIS YEAR MARKS the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Presumably Putin's Russia won't be in a celebratory mood. The question is: should America be? While the former Warsaw Pact nations dropped their planned economies in search of fresh free-market identities, the collapse of communism failed to inspire a similar civilizational stock-taking on the part of the United States. Might the past two decades--years fraught with wars of sanctions, occupations, and terror--have been different if it had? Precedent for paradigm-shifting change was at hand. A revolution in American foreign-policy thinking had followed the destruction of Nazi Germany; the old isolationism gave way to a rising liberal internationalism sustained by a powerful national-security state. The events of 1989 neither changed nor challenged that. Pentagonistas discovered, rather, a happy new lease on life in the Persian Gulf, the Balkan Peninsula, and elsewhere. The military mindset survived. Two decades on, this metaphorical American "wall" has yet to fall.