Alex Lubin on Penny M. Von Eschen’s *Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989*

At the time of this writing a recently elected congressman from Nassau County, New York is facing media and political fire for fabricating key features of his biography to appeal to voters. Among George Devolder Santos’ myriad biographical lies is that his grandparents were Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium who fled the Holocaust, then changed their surname and converted to Catholicism. Santos also claims that his mother had been in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2021 and that her cancer death was due to the toxic smoke she inhaled on that day. Santos also claimed to have been among the first in the nation to contract the Covid-19 virus, although his account of his illness, including its timing, continues to shift. The content of these lies reveals something important about contemporary political culture in the United States.

As Penny Von Eschen argues in her brilliant and relevant study, Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989, Santos is but one iteration of a political culture steeped in nostalgia for the Cold War and in a fierce distrust of reality. The invocation of the Holocaust, of 9/11, of the Covid-19 pandemic play on triumphalist narratives of American benevolence and supremacy during the Cold War and beyond. Ironically, these lies are intended to generate feelings of loss, redemption, and resurrection – they are the very same feelings that helped catapult Joseph Biden to the U.S. presidency, albeit via legitimate and truthful claims about his personal tragedies and family losses.

Paradoxes of Nostalgia reads as a guidebook for our present political conjuncture. In a rich, deeply researched book, Von Eschen develops a smart analysis of U.S. nostalgia for the Cold War and the ways that U.S. triumphalism following the world war undermined possibilities for multilateral geopolitical alliances. To what ends have Cold Warstalgia and U.S. triumphalism been put? According to Von Eschen,

Tracing the rise of the frantic construction of new domestic and international enemies illuminates the historical roots of the global rise of right-wing nationalisms. These historically interwoven processes suggest that the triumphalist and paradoxically nostalgic claims made about the Cold War and its demise in the West were necessary conditions for the hegemony of neoliberal economics and unilateral military interventions epitomized by the US wars in Iraq (6).

Paradoxes develops its analysis in seven chapters that engage social history, histories of U.S. foreign policy, and cultural studies. Key to Von Eschen’s methodology is a commitment to locating cultural production as a site of meaning making for policy makers and the public. Thus, in the first chapter of the book Von Eschen focuses on how western proclamations of the “end of history” and related triumphalism surrounding the Cold War foreclosed possibilities for post-Cold War multilateral geopolitical conditions. It was partly through popular culture, argues Von Eschen, that U.S. triumphalism – the notion that capitalism and the west had vanquished alternative social relations forever – was made meaningful. Von Eschen focuses on films like The Hunt for Red October, to show how triumphalist understandings of the benevolence and victory of the west over communism were made meaningful.

Cold War triumphalism, however, did not usher in an era of military de-escalation—quite the opposite. Von Eschen focuses on the years following the fall of the Soviet Union to identify the seeds of military escalation in this supposedly post-war era. Former Soviet republics expressed desires for political sovereignty, but also for a world order not dominated by NATO or the Warsaw Pact. Leaders like Polish President Lech Walesa, Czech President Vaklev Havel, and Russian President Mikael Gorbachev sought self-determination for their countries without Cold War era super-power relationships. Yet, within the United States, these post-Soviet leaders were lionized for illustrating the promise of the west and capitalism to triumph over communism, and hence over the post-Cold War World order. Divergent views of both the past and the future ultimately undermined post-Soviet states political leaders’ power, as they would be replaced with leaders more compliant with the U.S. view of world history. The possibility after the Wold War for a very different geopolitical order, one respectful of multilateralism, was thwarted, Von Eschen argues, by U.S.-led triumphalism and nostalgia about the primacy of the west and its supremacy over any other geopolitical formation.

Von Eschen shows how, following the Cold War, any state leader who challenged US hegemony and neoliberalism were accused of being committed to the resurrection of a failed system, the Soviet Union. In this way, buttressed by Cold War nostalgia, anti-communism continued to the be the modality through which U.S. geopolitics were waged following the Cold War. The Reagan administration, for example, was adept at labeling global dissent from the US order as communist-inspired. Such logic drove mandates that former soviet state embrace privatization and neoliberal economic relations.

Radical privatization was enabled by claims about the Cold War that discredited even the most successful mixed economies. The equation of freedom with the free market undergirded devastating politics of neoliberalism, ensuring that from the end of apartheid South Africa to Russia and the Eastern Bloc, reforms that had been grounded in aspirations for economic justice. . . played out on a geopolitical terrain of radical privatization and a rapid escalation of inequality (55).

In military interventions in Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Bosnia and other places, the U.S. asserted its role as the guarantor of global order and affirmed the righteousness of neo-liberal economic policy; it justified this approach by appealing to its “victory” in the Cold War.

Importantly, U.S. advocacy for privatization and capitalism in former Soviet territory extended to the domestic arena, as neoconservative attacks on the social wage ushered in the ascendance of neoliberalism. Neoliberal economic policies precipitated disinvestment in the social wage coupled with massive outsourcing of American manufacturing and a decommitment from federal civil rights. The neoconservative movement successfully linked government spending on the social wage to socialism and tyranny. While the administration of Ronald Reagan sought to get “government off our backs,” American popular culture turned to conspiracy dramas like the X-files which helped foster a distrust of government and a fear of racial outsiders. Although the X-files promised that “the truth is out there,” Von Eschen argues that the show contributed to a cultural shift in which truth itself came under attack. The X-files was one among many cultural forms that hinted at vast government conspiracies, the preponderance of official lies, and the danger posed by non-normative social and political beings. This was a logic that targeted social welfare programs as akin to alien invasion at home, and that labeled multilateralism and socialism abroad as tyrannical.

Long before the Mueller investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russian oligarchs, Von Eschen shows that the U.S. catapulted the political leadership of Russian and Eastern Bloc nationalists and oligarchs, who it saw as friendly to a neoliberal economic order dominated by the United States and a military order dominated by NATO. According to Von Eschen, “the root of a later convergence between the US alt-right and Russian conservatives can be seen, in part, in early sympathy with Russian nationalism as a default mode of opposition to any vestiges of Soviet internationalism” (127).

Cold War nostalgia facilitated the hegemony of neoliberalism in the United States as well as in former Soviet States. Any hope of a mixed economy that offered a social wage among former Soviet states was dashed by the dominance of American unipolar power and its cultural machinations. Within popular culture, former Eastern bloc countries were increasingly represented as potential terrorist states, as U.S. popular culture turned to dramas about “loose nukes” or James Bond spy thrillers that presented the Eastern Bloc as sites of insurgency and potential violence. As Von Eschen demonstrates, these panics about post-Soviet republic’s violence, were the prequels to the War on Terror’s construction of ungovernable, disorderly Middle Eastern terrorists. Over time, the logic that drove U.S. unipolarity and its related demand for neoliberalism was not anti-communism, but a theory of clashing civilizations.

Paradoxes of Nostalgia offers rich analysis of several different modalities that articulate to produce meaning. Von Eschen reads foreign policy and State Department interests in relation to popular culture, ephemera, and video games (like Call of Duty) to show in detail the construction of common sense. The most haunting aspects of the book are its incisive analysis of how Cold War nostalgia rests on quotidian attacks on reality and truth itself. We can understand the popularity of blatant lies about election fraud, or George Santos fabrications, as symptomatic of the geopolitical and cultural transformations Von Eschen locates in an earlier, post-Cold War moment.

Paradoxes of Nostalgia is a brilliant and complex book. Its focus on Central and Eastern Europe and the United States makes sense, as the book is about the ascendance of a global order dominated by the Atlantic powers in the aftermath of the Cold War. However, one wonders how we might account for geopolitical power emanating from the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa) nations and more recently, from China, as countervailing sites of geopolitical power. How do triumphalism and nostalgia animate new and emergent geopolitical rivalries?  What is the fate of alternative geopolitical imaginaries in a world of American unipolarity? And finally, where does a word without truth and reality inevitably lead? These questions, and others are inspired by Von Eschen’s hauntingly smart book.