There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis The End Of History – written at the victory of liberal pluralist democracy over Soviet Communism – is that the victors didn’t see it as such. Americans – or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans – may talk about “winning” the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don’t. Very few British do. These are all formal Nato allies – they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment of euphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them were hot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism. But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was no sense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten their Big Idea ...and, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the west only accelerated.
Indeed. Yet we did not, except for our own European-Americans, fail to view the Cold War as a victory. Why? Because as I've written before, Desert Storm in 1991 was a proxy victory over the USSR:
Remember that this war took place in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the Soviets in retreat in Eastern Europe, many saw the Cold War as ending because of Gorbachov's decisions or as the end of a long exhausting struggle that the US was winning only by default--the last of two combatants to drop their sword and collapse to the bloody ground.
Could we have pursued our course of action with this view of us--and our power--intact?
What changed this developing view of the end of the Cold War was, first of all, our ability to bribe and coerce a large coalition (so how much did we pay for those Egyptian and Syrian divisions that affected the military campaign not a bit?) to go to war on our side. The enemy didn't even matter for this purpose. The point was that instead of a Cold War division of states, choosing sides as they always did between the US and USSR, the world aligned itself with us. Moscow just watched, unable and unwilling to affect the outcome.
Then the war itself, with a stunning display of our military power that crushed the enemy, cemented the view that American power was unstoppable. We beat a mini-USSR with its Soviet equipment and oppressive government. The proxy victory showed Soviet hardware (or Chinese copies) burning and abandoned in the desert, and left us supreme. No longer the exhausted, lucky survivor; we were victorious. And we felt victorious.
And when, by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union, too, went kaput, we became the hyperpower. The progression was clear: Cold War deadlock; Soviet irrelevance; American military victory; collapse of Soviet Union.
We sent a great army to defeat Saddam's Soviet arsenal. Only Britain sent their armored forces into the teeth of the Iraqi army at our side, and they appear not to be as sullen as the continentals who had only France as their standard bearer--and whose small division was too light to do more than screen our western flank.
One can only wonder how Europe would have developed in the last couple decades if they too had roused themselves to send forces into the battles of 1991 and felt the thrill of victory to give them a feeling of confidence in their society and the West.
