I'll fall back to one of the wisest statements I've seen on FR in a long while: "Things seldom happen for one reason." You said it a few posts back.
Wars are seldom fought for one reason. Many of us were in the Cold War for freedom, for God, for Western Civilization, for simple human decency. Others were in it for money, or worse. The trouble is, once the War was over, the mercenary crowd managed to do two incredible things: 1) it gained a sort of superficial legitimacy, and 2) it got a hell of a lot more powerful.
I never completely figured out how this happened. I've always blamed it on a deft repositioning by the Left toward the so-called "Third Way." The new Third Way Left managed to shed all of its baggage from the Cold War and immediately begin implementing a program of rapid globalization and economic materialism. They did as the inheritors of the "peace dividend" and the new leaders of the victorious "West."
It's all so complicated; as I said, I haven't begun to figure it out. But I'm pretty sure these people weren't really in control of the West throughout the Cold War.
Maybe it's what you mean, but said that way it can be easily misunderstood. Many of those in a position to make or influence decisions have only one reason (at least one so overwhelmingly important to them that secondaries and tertiaries are irrelevant) but alliances are formed among individuals who have different "one" reasons, and often without each knowing what the others' priorities are.
It's all so complicated; as I said, I haven't begun to figure it out. But I'm pretty sure these people weren't really in control of the West throughout the Cold War.
My first point relates to this also. No one was "in control of the West" during the Cold War years; it was a continuous struggle among competing interests to find a course which fit the priorities of each. Every corner of the Western political apparatus had input, including communists, neo-fascsts, One-Worlders of left and right, and virulent anti communists. That it played out the way it did was, IMO, more accident than design. Related to this, I think glasnost and Prerestroika were intended to deceive the West to help the Soviet's pull their chesnuts out of the economic fire, but it got out of hand. As it got out of hand the upper-tier nomenclatura saw some things they liked and have since been trying to weave limited democracy, capitalism, corruption and authoritarianism into a Red flying carpet.
BUT I'LL BET ZVIADIST AND ASKEL5 HAVE A BETTER-INFORMED VIEW