thefp.com
I first argued that we are living through a second Cold War, with China as the main ideological rival to the US, back in 2018, says Niall Ferguson. That view is less controversial now than it was then. But what struck me more recently was that perhaps it’s the US in the role of the USSR. Maybe “we are the baddies”. If that sounds risible, “take a closer look”.
We see a version of the “soft budget constraint”, a key weakness of the Soviet system, in the US’s inexorably rising budget deficit. Biden’s industrial policy has inserted the central government into the investment decision-making process. Productivity gains in the US non-farm business sector have been stuck at just 1.5% since 2007. The share of GDP going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what is spent on national security by 2041, despite the growing threats posed by the “new Chinese-led Axis”, and the US is saddled with a military that is “simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts”. All these failings have a Soviet feel to them.
“Even more striking” are the political, social and cultural resemblances. Gerontocratic leadership was “one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership”, for example. Cynicism about public institutions was also a notable feature of late Soviet life. Surveys of US public opinion find a “similar disillusionment”. The “mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase ‘deaths of despair’”, from the abuse of opio
