The US-Soviet conflict was an inexact trailer for today’s great power tussle. Communism was a mostly closed world: a “cold war” with the globe’s number one goods trader will take some doing. Still, one theme promises to hold and that is the company the US had to keep, or felt it had to keep, against the lapping tides of communism. The Greek colonels, the Pakistani generals, the gallery of rogues in Latin America: it was at times a flexible sort of free world that America led.
