In the past year, I have been reading about the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I thought the subject relevant since we are already in a second Cold War for some years.

The books include Nicolas Thompson’s The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennen, and the History of the Cold War through which I learned about Kennen and his famous The Long Telegram.

Others in the list include Jack Matlock’s Autopsy on An Empire, Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union, and Serhii Plokhy’s The Last Empire: the Final Days of the Soviet Union.

I also skimmed through John Lewis Gaddis’ The Cold War: A New History.

All are massive dense tomes that overlap significantly. Collectively, they offer a comprehensive, and surprisingly consistent, perspective on Cold War history and Soviet collapse.

Interestingly, several of them are required readings in China’s Central Party School.

For obvious reasons, Beijing has a deep interest to analyze and understand the period and draw lessons from, especially the collapse of the USSR.

As I read through these works, I was struck by the unmistakable parallel between late-stage USSR and contemporary USA.

I am writing down my reflections from the readings in two essays.

In this first piece, I’ll attempt to compare the political realities of USSR with the US today.

In the second piece, I’ll explore the strange parallel between Donald Trump and Mikhail Gorbachev, as I see it.

The Long Telegram

In February 1946, American diplomat George Kennan dispatched an 8,000-word cable from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State Department that would fundamentally reshape global geopolitics for the next half-century.

The cable became known later as the Long Telegram.

In July 1947, Kennen used the pseudonym “X” to expand his thoughts in an article titled “The Source of Soviet Conduct” in the Foreign Affairs magazine.

It’s a fascinating historical coincidence that the “X” moniker George Kennen picked is shared by another iconic character in Oliver Stone’s 1991 classic JFK.

That Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland, functions as the ultimate deep-cover whistleblower who pulls back the curtain on the assassination.

He delivers a riveting, central monologue to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) at the Lincoln Memorial.

The 15-minute scene was the highlight of the movie.

Video Link

Oliver Stone based the Mr. X character on a very real, highly placed government whistleblower: Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty.

Colonel Prouty served as the Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.

His assignment was to act as the primary liaison between the Pentagon and the CIA, specifically providing military hardware, logistics, and personnel support for the government’s top-secret “black ops” around the globe.

Colonel Prouty later wrote about his experiences in two fascinating books – The Secret Team: the CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1973) and JFK: the CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992).

I plan to write about these two books in a future essay. But I digress.

Going back to the “Long Telegram,” Kennan’s missive diagnosed the Soviet Union not merely as a conventional military adversary, but as a pathologically insecure, ideologically driven, and structurally rigid power.

He argued that the USSR was a totalitarian closed system whose expansionist foreign policy was an existential necessity to justify its domestic tyranny and mask its internal vulnerabilities.

To defeat this adversary, Kennan famously recommended a policy of “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment,” predicting that the Soviet system harbored the seeds of its own eventual decay and collapse.

When the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin in December 1991, Washington celebrated what it viewed as the definitive validation of Kennan’s thesis.

The collapse of the USSR was heralded as the triumph of liberal democracy, pluralistic constitutional governance, and market capitalism over totalitarianism and command economy.

Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “End of History,” asserting that the Western model represented the final, optimal endpoint of human sociological evolution.

However, three decades into the unipolar era, a profound historical irony has emerged.

The contemporary United States increasingly exhibits the exact structural pathologies, ideological dogmatism, imperial overstretch, and institutional sclerosis that Kennan originally attributed to the Soviet Union.

Far from escaping the laws of history, the modern American superpower has steadily converged with its former Cold War rival.

The US today shares the defining structural features of late-stage Soviet power, and without radical systemic reform (which I think is impossible at this point), it is tracking toward a similar historical fate.

Inverted totalitarianism and the mirage of choice: pluralism as a facade

One of the foundational distinctions Kennan drew between the Western and Soviet models was the concept of political pluralism.

The Soviet Union was an explicitly monolithic, single-party state where power was tightly centralized within a secretive Kremlin elite and enforced through ideological conformity.

The United States, by contrast, defined itself through its competitive two-party system, protected civil liberties, and institutional checks and balances designed to guarantee popular sovereignty.

In the twenty-first century, this distinction has largely dissolved in practice, leaving behind what political theorist Sheldon Wolin termed “inverted totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism maintains the outward aesthetic of a free society while structurally hollowing out its democratic substance.

The US today possesses the formal machinery of democracy – regular elections, political campaigns, and free speech – but these mechanisms have been rendered functionally incapable of enacting meaningful reform.

This institutional lock-in is clearly visible in the cyclical nature of modern American presidential politics.

Successive electoral cycles have witnessed the rise of populist figures—most notably Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016—who captured the presidency by promising fundamental structural change to an exhausted electorate.

Obama campaigned on a platform of hope, transparency, and a rejection of conventional foreign interventions.

Trump, in turn, campaigned on an anti-establishment, “America First” platform aimed at dismantling globalist entrenchments and ending “forever wars.”

Yet, once in power, both administrations systematically surrendered to the institutional inertia of the state.

Under Obama, the permanent security apparatus expanded drone warfare, initiated the “Pivot to Asia,” and reinforced corporate dominance following the 2008 financial crisis.

Under Trump, despite anti-interventionist rhetoric, the administration kidnapped and assassinated foreign leaders, openly announced its intent to annex Greenland and Canada, and started yet another Middle Eastern war.

The Biden administration, sandwiched between the two Trump presidencies, structurally locked these exact trajectories in place despite his public denouncement of Trump policies.

Americans today cynically call this phenomenon “whoever you elect, you get John McCain”, originally coined by journalist Glenn Greenwald.

This continuity reveals the presence of a permanent bureaucratic elite. Whether you call it the “deep state” or “the blob”, what matters is your vote doesn’t matter.

Systemic lack of unaccountability

Much like the late-Soviet nomenklatura (elite) during the era of zastoi (stagnation), this political class is completely insulated from the consequences of its failures.

The American electorate is presented with a hyper-polarized, highly theatrical mirage of choice, but the underlying economic architecture and national security dogmas remain immutable and immune to public opinion.

The system has responded to its growing internal contradictions not with adaptive elasticity, but by doubling down on its institutional rigidity.

The imperial presidency and the collapse of constitutional check and balance

Kennan’s description of the USSR highlighted a centralized dictatorship capable of moving unilaterally on matters of war and peace, unconstrained by public opinion or legislative oversight.

The US was intended to be the antithesis of this model, with the Constitution explicitly vesting the sole power to declare war in the legislature.

This design was specifically intended to prevent the executive branch from dragging the nation into reckless foreign entanglements.

Today, the formal constitutional framework of checks and balances has collapsed into an omnipotent “Imperial Presidency.”

Dick Cheney called it the “Unitary Executive”.

For decades, the executive branch has systematically bypassed legislative constraints to wage unilateral war across the globe.

Congress has largely abdicated its constitutional duties to avoid political accountability, allowing the executive branch to wield unrestrained power.

Trump’s war against Iran, including the extrajudicial killing of its supreme leader, is a glaring example of this structural lawlessness.

The Trump regime acted with the absolute unilateralism that Kennan once associated exclusively with the Kremlin.

When the fundamental decisions of war and peace are concentrated entirely within an unchecked president and an unelected national security state, the claim that the US is a pluralistic republic becomes laughable.

This reality makes the modern American system uniquely unsustainable.

Because it is built upon a heavily marketed illusion of freedom, the profound gap between democratic rhetoric and authoritarian practice breeds deep social cynicism and institutional rot, far worse than the overt compliance observed in the late USSR.

Financial hegemony and asymmetric exploitation

Kennan noted that the Soviet Union sought to build an autarkic, separate economic bloc to insulate itself from Western capitalism and project its power.

In comparison, modern day US has achieved a more sophisticated form of dominance by establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency.

However, in the US financial system, global trade is not an indicator of American ideological tolerance, but rather the primary vehicle for enforcing structural economic subservience.

The US-controlled financial system enables the country to run massive, permanent trade and fiscal deficit, importing real physical goods, resources, and labor from the rest of the world while exporting fiat currency.

This creates an asymmetric exploitation far worse than anything the USSR achieved: export-led economies must invest real physical wealth and human capital to earn dollars, while the US subsidizes its global military presence and domestic consumption merely by operating a printing press.

The US further weaponizes the financial system such as SWIFT through illegal sanctions and seizures. Again, economic coercion that the USSR couldn’t even imagine.

Ideological crusades and subservient allies

In the Long Telegram, Kennan warned that the Soviet Union was driven by a militant, monolithic ideology that viewed permanent peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world as impossible.

The Kremlin was structurally incapable of treating other nations as equals; it demanded total compliance and viewed international relations through a zero-sum lens of ideological conquest.

Modern American foreign policy has adopted an identical ideological posture.

Under the banner of neoliberalism, free markets, and liberal democracy, Washington frames the 21st-century geopolitical landscape as a binary, existential struggle between “democracy and autocracy.”

This ideological crusade is used to justify an expansionist foreign policy that seeks to project American power to the borders of its major geopolitical rivals.

Such expansionism is manifested in the steady, decades-long expansion of NATO, deep military interventions throughout the Middle East, and the systematic encirclement and technological containment of China.

When American politicians speak of “alliances,” the rhetoric implies a community of equal, democratic partners. In reality, the U.S. global alliance network functions as a rigid hierarchy—a modern vassal system with Washington at the apex.

This is exactly Kennen’s criticism of the USSR.

Within this system, US “allies” in Europe and Asia suffer from asymmetric interdependence.

They rely heavily on the American military umbrella, which gives Washington immense leverage to dictate their foreign and economic policies.

This subservience is vividly illustrated when the U.S. pressures its allies to cut off vital trade relations, energy supplies, or technological transfers to Russia and China, even when doing so inflicts severe economic harm on the “allies” themselves.

While defenders point out that US allies rarely face the direct military invasions that the Soviet Union inflicted upon Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, the structural coercion is no less absolute.

The threat of financial exclusion, political isolation, and Epstein Files style covert pressure ensures that subordinate states remain firmly locked within the imperial orbit.

Trump went as far as threatening annexation of Greenland and Canada, something even the Soviets didn’t do with its Warsaw Pact vassals.

The “rules-based international order” is fundamentally a hierarchical system designed to enforce obedience, completely indifferent to the specific governmental form of its partners, whether they are absolute monarchies, military dictatorships, or social democracies.

Loss of vitality: the onset of American Zastoi

The most visible parallel between the contemporary United States and George Kennan’s description of the USSR lies in the profound loss of national vitality and the breakdown of domestic cohesion.

By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union entered the period known as zastoi (stagnation).

The country was characterized by an aging gerontocracy, crumbling infrastructure, widespread social cynicism, a decline in life expectancy, and an institutional inability to address systemic crises.

Modern day USA shares all the same malaise.

The Soviet leadership was fully aware of the structural decay but was bureaucratically paralyzed, choosing to repeat empty ideological slogans rather than attempt meaningful reform.

The US today has entered its own version of zastoi. The American political class is visibly aging, reflecting a gerontocracy that mirrors the late Soviet Politburo.

As of September 2026, the average age of US Senators is 65. 89 US Senators have served in the Senate longer than Vladimir Putin has served as the President of Russia (22 years and 8 months).

Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, has served as a Senator for more than 51 years – an overachiever with little known public contribution.

Joe Biden bears a remarkable resemblance to Konstantin Chernanko, the last Soviet chairman before Gorbachev. Both are old and senile when elected as head of state.

Chernanko died in the office and Biden was a walking dead in his last year as POTUS.

As the USSR, the nation’s physical infrastructure—roads, bridges, power grids, and public transit—is in a state of advanced neglect.

More significantly, the internal cohesion of American society has broken down.

The country is plagued by an epidemic of despair, characterized by skyrocketing wealth inequality, a devastating opioid crisis, declining life expectancy in key demographics, and a total collapse of institutional trust.

Reporters and politicians, the very pillars of “democratic” institutions, are the two least-trusted professions in the country, lower than used-car salesmen.

Just as the late Soviet state responded to its internal failures by retreating into ideological rigidity, the American establishment has responded to its domestic decay by aggressively reinforcing its existing security, financial, and geopolitical dogmas.

Rather than investing national treasure into rebuilding its own society and restoring domestic vitality, the US political class remains obsessively focused on maintaining an expensive, expansionist global empire through proxy warfare and aggressive containment strategies.

Conclusion: two paths to the same fate

George Kennan concluded his Long Telegram with the confident assertion that the Soviet Union’s internal contradictions would eventually cause the system to shatter from within.

History ultimately proved him correct.

However, Kennan failed to foresee that the very strategy of global containment and imperial maintenance he initiated would eventually transform the United States into a mirror image of the adversary it defeated.

By adopting the exact pathologically expansionist, ideologically intolerant, and institutionally rigid behaviors that George Kennan diagnosed in his 1946 Long Telegram, the USA has engineered its own systemic trap.

In its obsessive quest to contain and outlive the Soviet Union, the American superpower inadvertently inherited its structural soul, and with it, its ultimate vulnerability to decay and fall.