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Honduras. Guatemala. Berlin.
    The Cold War was a uniquely total war, not in movements of armies but in its social and economic effects. Dwight Eisenhower warned against a “military-industrial complex,” with its vast army, intelligence apparatus and defense industries mobilized for a war that would wipe out human civilization. For the better part of five decades it absorbed anywhere from a quarter to a half of all U.S. government spending and 10 percent of the nation’s GNP. The Cold War shaped America, in ways not always obvious. The interstate highway system was originally built to speed military logistics from one part of the country to the other. Today’s Internet, with all its transformative effect on commerce and daily life, began as a military communications network designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear strike. The federal loans that generations of young Americans have relied upon for college began with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a crash program launched after Sputnik to win the “brain race” against the Soviets. The California dream rode the tides of defense spending pouring into the state, swelling its population from 5 million before the Cold War began to more than 30 million by the time it ended. A whole new economic order evolved within the Cold War’s shadow: Bretton Woods. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The United Nations. The U.S. Agency for International Development. The Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild postwar Europe. Postwar investment in Japan and the network of international trade and security organizations that spanned the globe, from SEATO to NATO to the Warsaw Pact, Cominterm and the Common Market cum European Union. All were creatures of the Cold War.
    It usurped Western culture, which in turn diffused throughout the world. In American schools of the 1950s and early 1960s, kids “ducked and tucked” under their desks against atomic blasts. When they grew up, they explored the trade-offs between guns and butter in Economics 101. They were fluent in the lexicon of confrontation:
containment, mutually assured destruction,
the
domino theory.
Everyone knew about the nuclear button, the “hotline” between Washington and Moscow, the briefcase, aka the football, the satchel of nuclear codes that to this day accompanies the president everywhere. The Cold War was hip: James Bond,
The Third Man,
Graham Greene, John le Carré, Tom Clancy. It was the stuff of pop-culture thrillersand avant-garde films:
Z, State of Siege, Dr. Strangelove.
It wasn’t enough to be merely American. The best and the brightest were all-American—patriots, not pinkos. The Cold War was counterculture, too. The Generation Gap. The antiwar activists of the Vietnam era. Rock ’n’ roll grew up as a protest song against the Cold War.
    We told ourselves that we won it. But it is equally fair to say that we also lost it, or at least shared amply in the loss. Clearly and simply, the Cold War was a catastrophe. Seldom in history had a conflict lasted so long, swept up so much of the world and cost so dearly. Within a few decades, as living memory dies, the Cold War will seem as distant as the Thirty Years’ War. We will read about it as ancient history, much as we read about the battles of the kings and princes of 1648. We will forget that this greatest of the world’s conflicts came at a commensurate cost, perhaps because we perceive ourselves to be the uncompromised victors and have never had to fully reckon the magnitude of the expense: how much treasure we expended, how economies were distorted, how we ourselves and our societies were changed by a half century’s obsession. Our view is Churchill’s, not Gorbachev’s, when in truth it should be both.
    Some have attempted an accounting, a Cold War “butcher’s bill,” if you will. Focusing purely on defense expenditures, the Brookings Institution in 1998 performed