Hope of the Post Cold War

When I was 6, I got my first die-cast toy jet. My fist sized silver Tomcat F-14 with movable wings and detachable bombs and missles was the greatest toy I could imagine. Thanks to my older cousin and childhood hero, Johnny, I had been exposed to Top Gun. This was the first toy I had that was the real deal. Now my G.I. Joe arsenal had a new weapon.

But I was mixing real planes with the cartoon ones… and G.I. Joe’s with the USAF. At age 6, I realized that Cobra wasn’t gonna cut it. I needed a real enemy. Not being familiar with geopolitical advesarial relationships, I consulted an expert; Mom.

“Mom, if America is G.I. Joe, then who is Cobra?” She had this look of panic in her eyes, like she was about to condemn an entire nation as a band of ruthless thugs run by an evil snake. Still, the question still stood.”

“I guess, the closest thing to Cobra would be Russia, the Soviet Union.”

And so, for the next two years of simulated warfare in which nobody ever dies and guns never need ammunition, Russia was Cobra. And we sure showed them, didn’t we?

Until November 9th, 1989. There are days in your life that you remember forever. I was 8, playing in my living room, and my parents called me into the family room. On the TV, I saw people dancing on a wall. My mom told me that the Soviet Union, my childhood Cobra, was falling apart. The Berlin Wall was finally coming down.

Within days, the images of soldiers trading flowers for guns were on every channel on the television. The Cold War, the single unifying Crusade of the free world for 40+ years, was finally over. Peace.

And what did we do with this “peace,” this great opportunity?

In 20 years we’ve seen stagnation on most fronts that we considered important in 1989. Global warming has risen to disturbing levels, the middle class has lost ground economically, AIDS, genocide, and instability flourished in much of Africa, Asia, and South America. This has been accompanied by unchecked greed, and the death of the very concept of a social contract.

America, and with it the world, has lost focus. We’ve failed to make allies out of former enemies. Russia has seen little of the prosperity that capitalism is capable of offering, and as a result they haven’t joined us in efforts to make the world a safer place.

Instead, corruption and squalor has triumphed in much of the former Soviet Union, while their arms, possibly even their nuclear materials, have been distributed to rogue states and terrorists all over the globe. The United States has been continually embroiled in foreign wars an economic imperialism that has made world stability, and middle class prosperity, less of a reality.

I don’t mean to sound like there hasn’t been any progress. But that progress pales in comparison with the former greatness of our nation.

Is it possible that we’ve become G.I. Joe AND Cobra? Maybe. Certainly, we still operate the way we did when the wall was still up. We fear other cultures, we isolate ourselves from their knowledge and their people, and we still attempt to annex nation states in order to feed off of their resources. However, we do so without a clear target, without a moral North Star to set our compass upon.

What happened to our belief in liberating nations by liberating ourselves? What happened to our dedication to our veterans (the GI bill would be considered socialism today, as would Social Security,  the National Parks, and Medicare)? What happened to our dedication to the middle class? Or the lower classes? American industry? NASA? Freedom of speech?

What went wrong? Is it really ok to expect that in 20 years of being an unchecked and unrivaled superpower, neither the United States nor the world has much positive to show for this “era of peace?” I don’t think so.

So what should be have done differently? What should we do now? What should be the mission of the United States, as a nation, in the 21st Century? Let me know. Click on “comments” below this post, and leave some hope.