I was debating this with my friends last night. Some of us said it was a draw. I think that we won, because the cold war caused the Soviet Union to collapse. Which is closer to the truth?
Only one political system survived, I have no idea on what grounds anyone could defend a ‘draw’.
I am not sure what there is to debate. The Soviet Union does not exist anymore as much as Putin would like to think otherwise. That is the only measure that you can use. One side collapsed and the other is still around and in fairly good shape. I am not sure how you twist that into a ‘Draw’ unless you are playing by Soviet rules.
What basis were they using to argue it was a draw? I don’t think you could find a more clear cut example of a win for the US than the cold war…the US is still here and still a viable super power (arguably it’s still THE greatest super power on the planet, a position it’s enjoyed since the end of the Cold War) while the Soviet Union is on the ash heap of history and Russia has, despite attempts by our buddy Putin to get all the kings horses and all the kings men, isn’t close to it’s former power or prestige. Russia has been relegated to the status of a mere regional power…and not a particularly powerful one at that (though they DO still have a rather large nuclear arsenal, assuming they still work).
It was only a flesh wound.
Regards,
The Black Knight
Yes we won. We got a cheap trophy with our name spelled wrong on it. Then we lost it when we cleaned out the garage.
Not so much as a US win as a USSR collapse. If Gorbachev had been half the ruthless bastard that Putin is, it would still be alive today. Russia is still a pretty powerful nation that can wield its way in its region, as seen by the annexation of Crimea.
The US only “won” by default. The Soviets destroyed their own country/empire by being enthralled to a stupid system that eventually became unworkable and collapsed. The US didn’t make that happen in any way.
Geez, next you Yanks will be claiming to have defeated the Nazis all by yourselves. Oh, wait…
Arguably? What would be the argument otherwise?
Nice strawman! And so cleverly played. 
We were on the winning side, but that outcome was not a result of our actions. So it depends on what you mean when you say “we won”.
Some people say that China is a rival and roughly equal superpower. Some still think Russia is. I don’t agree with either of these, but there are folks who just want the US to not be the worlds dominant superpower and they are willing to contort or twist anything they can to make it so (or they are rubbing their hands in anticipation that we won’t be in 10, 20 or some other arbitrary number of years it takes).
Certainly the Soviets made a lot of mistakes, as did we, but some portion of the result has to be attributed to our side maintaining a strong defense, and a strong economy. I think had we been more efficient at the former and concentrated more on the latter it could all have been over sooner, but we can take credit for doing some things right.
Is there anyone who isn’t some 16 year old edgy contrarian that would say that China is an equal superpower? Economically, as the world’s sweatshop? Militarily, when their force projection is so meager that they couldn’t invade Taiwan if they wanted to?
The US military could take on the rest of the world and win. China would have trouble projecting force 300 miles away from their border.
Our actions had zero impact on their collapse? I think this is another example of over correction similar to the guys who say the US had no effect in the European theater during WWII and it was all the Soviets (in correction of the folks who say the US did everything in WWII). There were a lot of factors that brought down the Soviets, but the US’s actions were certainly a contributing factor to their demise.
I agree, but I’ve seen people make these arguments here on this board in the past, so it’s not JUST ‘16 year old edgy contrarian’ types. 
The United States and its post-1990 Cold War allies certainly survived the Cold War, whereas the governments of the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact (some of which no longer exist) certainly did not. On that basis it could be defined as ‘a win’ for the former, but with the caveat that it was a largely incidental and somewhat Pyrrhic victory. To understand why that is requires an examination of the geopolitics that led up to the game of brinksmanship referred to as the Cold War.
The first formal use of the term ‘cold war’ in a political context was by Bernard Baruch (an advisor to Roosevelt and Truman) in which he described a state of permanent political schism within Europe, drawn along East-West lines. Although Orwell’s famous essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb” is often described as the source of the term, there are several other possible origins as well, and Orwell was specifically talking about a concerted effort by Russia to attack and break up the British Empire as a kind of nuclear-fueled extension of the 19th Century ‘Great Game’, whereas in fact the British Empire was coming apart all on its own without any help from the Soviets by dint of being no longer economically viable. The US entered into this, and eventually became the dominant player, largely on the basis of having the only nuclear arsenal and therefore the only perceived force that could prevent the Soviets from rolling right through Central Europe and claiming the war-ravaged for themselves (which to an extent that was permitted by treaties, they did).
Ideologically, the Soviets ostensibly supported a worldwide revolution of the working class against their capitalist systems, originally through the Communist International (Comintern) and in the post-war via the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). This included the planned economies, collectivization of agriculture, and government ownership of all means of production inherent to the doctrine of Stalinism, which was in opposition to the ostensibly free markets of the Western powers, although the latter can be viewed as “free” only by neglecting to consider the use of government power to disrupt labor organization and interfere with the internal politics of nations which supplied needed goods and resources by American companies, and can credibly be considered an extension of 18th and 19th century colonization by the European powers save that the US largely did not seek to possess or overtly control nations (with some particular exceptions).
Realistically, the Soviets installed puppet governments in most of the nations that would become the Warsaw Pact (ironically established by the “Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance”) and used these nations as both a buffer zone against invasion and for the finished goods they could provide which Russia was unable to maintain. This did not stem from a desire for international expansion without limit, as feared by the West and according to the internationalist Marxism-Leninism doctrine. In fact, the Soviet Union became quite insular and strove to make sure that nominally Communist allies were beholden to Russia, to the point that they repressed competing socialist and Communist elements which were not in line with Stalinist doctrine, invaded Hungary to put down a ‘revolt’ (more like a mild demonstration) by a faction of democratic socialists which sought greater interaction on the international stage, and generally tried to impose Russian culture and language on both its internal Slavic and Baltic republics, and upon its ostensible allies. In other words, the Soviet Union was looking to carve a chunk of the world for itself that would protect cultural Russia against its perpetual fear of invasion from all sides (a few borne of being invaded from all sides since the time of the Kievan Rus’.)
The proxy conflicts in Southeast Asia, Africa, and later South America, were largely a means by which the two powers tested one another, but also provided the Soviets with access to needed perishable resources like grain that they were unable to produce internally through their collectivist system. They had very little to do with the actual ideology of capitalism versus communism, and the proxy governments for both sides largely mouthed the verbiage of the doctrines while continuing to fight long standing conflicts drawn along historical ethnic or socioeconomic lines. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the other major Communist power, the Peoples Republic of China, deserves its own discussion but suffice it to say that centuries of cultural distrust undermined any commonality that may have existed in political doctrine and despite some technology sharing and attempts at cultural exchange, the nations could never have been considered allies in any practical way, the assessments of political and military cooperation between the two powers by the Central Intelligence Agency (which are risible to read with what we know today) notwithstanding.
The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact ultimately failed largely on its own merits. The economic system, never sustainable, collapsed under the weight of its own failings to produce even adequate amounts of basic goods, forcing the Soviets to sell natural resources at pennies on the dollar to buy grain from Canada, manufactured goods from Yugoslavia, and public goodwill from Africa. Many like to credit the military buildup of the 1980s for finally destroying the Soviet economy, but it was long for the grave well before Reagan stepped into office, and the Soviet buildup of its expensive to produce and maintain nuclear arsenal (the real ‘missile gap’ of the 'Seventies rather than the bogus one that Kennedy had campaigned to the presidency upon) occurred while the United States was in-between armament cycles, having deployed only a modernized generation of Minuteman III ICBMs and Poseidon SLBMs with slow and halting development of successor systems and platforms (Trident C-4 was deployed in 1979 after being accelerated by the Carter administration, Peacekeeper ICBM not until 1986; while the Soviets deployed over a dozen strategic weapon families in the same period). If anything accelerated the decay of the Soviet system it was the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan (fomented by the Carter administration’s Zbignew Brzezinski, later expanded under the Reagan administration), the costly competition to build a winged spacecraft analogous two the American STS ‘Shuttle’, and the explosion of Chernobyl reactor #4, the delayed admission of which until discovered by atmospheric sampling completely undermined confidence in the Soviet Union as a legitimate, responsible nation and required a massive and costly containment effort. The failure of the Soviet Union was a fait accompli at that point, although to be fair nobody but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn predicted just how fast or cleanly it would fall, and even he was optimistic by as much as a decade.
What did the United States win in the post-Cold War world? It won the opportunity to befriend former opponents, forge strong political and commercial ties across Europe to assure a free exchange of technology, coherent and viable long-term energy strategies, isolate and marginalize radicalized ethnic conflicts that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact members had long been suppressing by force, and generally assure unimpeded and historic growth of liberty and social justice, as well as overcoming the political and sociological hurdles that keep half of the world population living in desperate poverty. It could have meant a long term plan for the exploration and use of space resources that was not based on comparing penis length, an honest exchange of cultures from East to West to overcome the misunderstandings that have plague a European understanding of the Asiatic-influenced Russian culture for centuries, and a global focus on protecting and preserving the world environment rather than just dumping waste and producing toxic byproducts wherever nobody important lives. Most importantly, we could have disassembled nuclear arsenals to a minimal size; although we’ll never be free of them completely, we could have ensured by treaty and cooperation that the number of weapons and total yield on immediate standby were insufficient to destroy nations or kill hundreds of millions of people.
Did we realize this? Not well, and certainly not even to the minimally optimistic extent that we could have. Fears that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact were a sham delayed strategic disarmament (economic concerns about the costs of maintaining massive deterrent arsenals largely drove retirement of weapons systems); we have a no more coherent energy policy or means of dealing with global poverty than we had circa 1989; space exploration and the use of space resources has been a herky-jerky effort often retarded by anti-scientific factions who desire to conceal the true conditions of our wasteful and short-sighted development during the Cold War; and we are arguably further from ensuring justice and security for the developing nations around the world than we were back when the Soviet Union and the United States were using those nations as sock puppets. We won the opportunity to clean up, and instead sat in a corner collectively sucking our thumbs, to the point that the United States is no longer a leader in industrial manufacturing, research in the basic sciences, venerated for our benevolent assistance to the indigent, or otherwise particularly well regarded. We are a leader in spying on our own citizens and allies; per capita use of carbon and petrochemical based energy; creationism and similar flaketastic anti-intellectualism; and generally turning into the biggest asshole on the international stage by swatting at the fly of global terrorism with a flamethrower regardless of where it is pointed.
In the view of future historians, the American response in the post-Cold War and early 21st Century is going to be one of massive disappointment in opportunity squandered and basic principles of liberty and justice abandoned in the service of making a quick buck.
Stranger
I agree that the US didn’t make the Soviet system collapse, but it’s hard to argue that we didn’t hasten it significantly by making the Soviets feel threatened enough to prioritize military spending over consumer products for decades in an attempt to keep up/defend themselves from the West.
The real issue is that Western economies tended to be stimulated by all the government money being poured into the defense industries, while it sapped the Soviet economy to do the same thing, since it was all centrally planned, and in a certain sense, every tank that was built translated into that many fewer refrigerators or washing machines or whatever. Meanwhile, in the Western economies, building a tank put more money into the entire supply chain, and into workers’ hands, and back into the economy, growing it.
Yeah. It’s kinda like we stood around and watched a tree rot, and when it fell over, yelled “We won!”
Perhaps the OP’s friends were thinking of the possible outcomes of the cold war as including one in which the “winner” could expect to rule the world. In that sense, you could say neither side won. The Soviet Union collapsed, but it didn’t become a Western democracy, nor did Russia’s strategic interests miraculously align with the West’s. The West didn’t collapse, but it didn’t get to re-order the world to its liking (particularly, say, in the Middle East).
But then, nobody came out of WW2 in the kind of position they might have imagined they would be when they got into it.
Wars are like that.