Putin caught flak for saying the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, as if he meant that Russia should go back to Stalinism.

What’s clear is that the fall of the Soviet Union was also a geopolitical catastrophe for American politics.

Look at our corrupt intelligence agencies, our feckless and meandering foreign policy, and our devastated industrial policy.

Not all of it can be pinned on detente and the fall of the USSR, but so much can. The Soviet Union was our raisin d’etre and we’ve never really found a new one.

Rather than monitoring Communist Party meetings, the FBI is encouraging young Muslim and young conservative men to build bombs so they can nail them on terrorism charges.

Since “freedom won” in the Cold War, we just moved on to the next objective: making “freedom win” in the Middle East, as if these were Central European nations like Czechoslovakia with longstanding nationalist movements.

And the turn to a consumer-oriented economy was partially strategic: As relations with the USSR normalized, we saw that we could win a cultural victory by further emphasizing the already superior consumer products our economy churned out.

If we make them envy our jeans and Coke, they’ll drop the hammer and sickle. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t totally wrong. But then we never re-adjusted... we just kept trying to win a consumer economy battle in which we’d already wiped the floor clean.