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Hi, my name is Andrew Basevich. I'm the author of the article, Freedom Without

Constraints, How the U.S. squandered its Cold War victory, which appeared in The Guardian back in

2020. The essay explains my disappointment, and I think the disappointment of many Americans,

that the end of the Cold War failed to yield the benefits that many of us expected. More than

anything else, what surprised me about the end of the Cold War is that it didn't

yield anything approximating peace and harmony for the United States or for the world more broadly.

On the contrary, immediately following the Cold War came a sequence of conflicts involving the United States,

sometimes involving allies, but cumulatively costing billions and billions of dollars,

along with thousands and thousands of casualties.

So since this essay appeared, in my estimation, things have gotten worse.

And the currently ongoing war between the United States and Israel on the one hand and Iran

on the other is the best example of how the Cold War has

yielded outcomes, results, other than those that people like me expected back at the end of the

1980s.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

Freedom without constraints.

How the US squandered its Cold War victory.

By Andrew Basevich. Read by Kelly Burke and produced by Esther Apoku Jenny.

Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American?

...