Letters | Is Gorbachev’s greatest legacy making the US the world’s only superpower?
- Readers debate the mixed legacy of the late Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War and paved the way for the US-led international order, and discuss why the same-sex marriage movement should go nice and slow in Singapore
Was Gorbachev’s “policy reform” really about ending the struggle between liberal democracy and communist socialism? I doubt it. At the time, the Soviet Union’s economy was badly hurt by its nuclear arms race with the United States, causing its people to suffer. Instead of ending the Cold War for the sake of the global community, perestroika and glasnost were more of a forced move by Gorbachev to save his people from economic suffering.
With the Soviet Union’s collapse, the US became the world’s only superpower. The US has since gone on to exert a strong hegemony on global political, economic and social development. Liberal democracy based on capitalism became the ideal political economic system followed by most countries around the globe, with those opposing this either sanctioned or condemned. It was only until the rise of China that this structure of hegemony began to change.
Liberal democracy based on capitalism was never an ideal system. Though I value freedom and democracy, capitalistic ideals inhibit both these values as the capitalistic ruling class exerts a hegemony over the working class. Where is the freedom and democracy in this?
Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost ended Russians’ struggles to make a living in the 1990s, and possibly avoided a nuclear annihilation, but it paved the way for the US and its Western allies to force their ideologies onto the whole world.