by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org
During the decades-long Cold War the belief in America was that the Soviet Union had an ideology of world domination. Every nationalist movement, such as Vietnam’s effort to throw off French colonialism, was misinterpreted as another domino falling to Soviet world conquest. This mistaken American belief persisted despite Stalin’s purge of the Trotsky elements that preached world revolution. Stalin declared: “socialism in one country.”
As the Soviets did not have the aim that the US attributed to them, the two governments could cooperate in reducing the dangerous tensions that nuclear weapons presented.
The rise of the American neoconservatives and their doctrine of US world hegemony has given the United States the expansionist ideology formerly attributed to the Soviets.