Honestly, I just liked the turn of phrase and the circumvolution of suggesting that Russia had fallen on hard times and bizarre polticaly only to flip it back on the current state of affairs in the US. Of course, neither post-Soviet Russan nor the United States qualifies as a post-apocalypic, distopian hell-hole, but both nations have serious problems resulting from the sudden end of the Cold War and the lack of preparation for the post-Cold War world environment, and each failed in its own way to live up to the newly offered potential.
The Soviet Union’s ultimate failure was Gorbechev acknowledging that it needed both market and social reforms, and in order to realize those it would have to loosen the iron fist it had used to hold its Warsaw Pact “client states” like Poland and Czechoslovakia in check. However, nobody anticipated just how a little liberalization would lead to a mass demand for liberty, and the both good and bad that would follow. I don’t believe the Soviet Union could have limped along indefinitely; a new generation of people who had glimpses of life in the West and no bond of having fought or lost family in World War II, and they had no real alligence to a nation which offered no hope for a future to them. In the end, what destroyed the Soviet Union wasn’t Afghanistan, or Chernobyl, or the Armenian earthquake, or even the disasterous drop in oil prices; it is that the young and coming generation wanted Levis and Bruce Springsteen, and didn’t want to work at assigned jobs to crank out dohickeys for the next Five Year Plan so they could go wait in line for bread and vodka, and then drink their brains out in an apartment shared by two families.
North Korea is certainly unsustainable in the long term; it has survived thus far by the combination of sponsorship, totalitarian manipulation, not carrying that millions of people are on the bring of starvation, and of course, blackmailing other powers into giving aid to prevent them from building nuclear capability which they cheerfully keep on doing anyway. North Korea will keep on keeping as long and only as long as other powers refuse to challenge the regime.
However, I feel it necessary to correct you on the topic of Cuba. Post-Soviet Union when Cuba no longer had a sponsor paying it to grow a monocrop and thumb its nose at the imperialists 90 miles north, it had to find a way to be completely self-sufficient, and has become one of the nations on the forefront of the development of sustainable renewable energy. It still has a largely desperately poor population, a degraded and outmoded energy infrastructure, and is otherwise struggling economically, but it has moved to dramatically reduce dependence on foreign oil and improve energy efficiency, as well as diversify its agriculture so as to provide adequate and diverse nutrition using only domestic yields. It shows marked improvements in many other metrics as well including basic health care and literacy, which are two major factors in future socioeconomic success. Cuba is still a mess (and by no means run by a democratic or just regime), but it is far less of a mess than it was twenty-five years ago.
What “X” is, in this instance, is a hyperbolic figure of speech, which is not nonsense and has a specific meaning clear enough to anyone not in denial. It remains perfectly true that many American urban locations and some rural are post-apocalyptic dystopian hell-holes, and that is a fact which all of us should care about and not nearly enough of us do, and apparently you do not. This is not a thing you can legitimately dismiss as nonsense.
I’m going to disagree with the general tenor and argue that the US had a great deal to do with the eventual Soviet collapse. It started with the Marshal Plan; while the Soviets were installing oppressive regimes in the east the US was pumping money into Western Europe (especially Germany) and Japan. It is largely unprecedented that a victorious nation in a war treated it’s former enemies so graciously.
The US had a large hand in the formation of South Korea and Taiwan into prosperous liberal democracies during the height of the Cold War. Compare that to Soviet/Chinese satellites of North Korea and Vietnam.
The victory wasn’t militarily; it was politically and economically. The Communist side couldn’t keep up with the US.
To be “post-apocalyptic” you first need an apocalypse. Do you have one in mind?
Generally agree, except that I’m arguing that revolution is potentially fatal for its participants, so it can be put off indefinitely. While the mice all agree that belling the cat would be a fine idea, collective action can prove challenging.
I’d like to say that Cuba is an example of this - except that they have a safety valve in the form of emigration to the US. So the parallel doesn’t work exactly. And Brezhnev’s USSR wasn’t quite today’s North Korea. China clearly doesn’t apply as they are practicing capitalism with Chinese characteristics. So I can’t quite test or evaluate my hypothesis. I understand though that the timing of the collapse of the USSR and the eastern bloc countries was a matter of some puzzlement among its members.
Along the lines of your argument, I’ll note that younger members of the elite weren’t especially devoted to the old order. There’s one school of revolution that maintains that they occur when the elite loses its will to defend its institutions. That certainly was occurring during the 1980s.
I’m personally sick of this level of hyperbole when discussing the US economy. It’s very clear to anyone that travels a lot that the US is a very wealthy country and the majority of people live very comfortably (yet may feel poor because they compare their situation to their immediate peers).
Yes there is also genuine poverty and high inequality compared to other developed nations. But if that’s enough to call the US a post-apocalyptic hell-hole, then I want to take you round China and show you real poverty. And of course we’ll then have to label China a “Super mega crazy OMG Cthulhu’s playground within Satan’s nightmares”…or we could just dial back the hyperbole.
WRT the OP, I take the side that believes the US largely won by default…the Soviet collapse was the end of the cold war, but the cold war was not directly responsible for the soviet collapse. Indeed perhaps it helped to defer it as a common enemy can focus attention away from internal problems.