I was playing a game of chess today. At the end of the game, looking for some way to force a draw or a stalemate, I started to wonder about winning the cold war.

The way I look at it he cold war was a war fought by four techniques.

• Proxy
• Secret Mini Wars
• “MAD”
• Diplomacy

In the end the U.S. is said to have won. The values of the west has achieved an almost universal currency versus a now discredited soviet style communism. The U.S.S.R. no longer exists and there is no global power who has the same military capability, yet.

But what did we win. Well we won the right to clean up a number of failed and failing nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, the states of former Yogoslavia, etc..

Metaphorically, it is almost like instead of having to blow up one massive asteroid headed towards the U.S. we are now left with having 25 different fragments of an asteroid headed in our direction. Not only do the fragments ahve great ability to do damage, but they influence each other.

The peace divident that peole dreamed about will take years to appear until the rule of law, local and international is firmly established in the left over proxies that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. left scattered around the globe.

So when the cold war was on, it mostly seemed like a draw due to M.A.D., but the U.S. slowly kept winning economically until the U.S.S.R. collapsed. Once it collapsed we were left cleaning up the mess, they had created. Seems like a sort of booby prize to me.