The Cold War of the 1980s killed <i>both</i> the Soviet Union and the US. Both effectively went broke around the same time. The Soviet Union was never rich, and the War destroyed so much that it cost them all they had just to rebuild. (What does it cost, merely to replace 25 million houses?)<p>The US went from the world's biggest creditor nation in 1980 when Reagan became President, to being the world's most indebted nation in 1988 when he left.<p>Yes, both countries 'died'. However, the ghost of the US continued on, seemingly unchanged, because it had something that nobody else had. That 'something else' being the world's reserve currency.<p>The US could keep buying stuff where others couldn't because the Fed printing presses in the US could produce unlimited US Dollars that were accepted as being 'as good as gold' for the rest of the world. Although it was also considered as 'exorbitant privilege' by the rest of the world, hence the movement towards dropping the US Dollar as a reserve currency.<p>It's akin to owning a Credit Card. You can keep spending on your extravagant life-style with a credit card, until the Banks say 'Whoa Boy!'. Then your life-style goes very bad while the Bank forces you to pay back those debts you have incurred.<p>The Soviets/Russians, because of going broke early, only had a 10-year 'time of troubles' before they got their economy 'back in the black', and are doing well with around 500 Billion in reserves.<p>30 years on, the US is 30 <i>trillion</i> dollars in debt, with no practical hope of easily fixing that. It's going to be very long and very hard when the world says 'Whoa,Boy!'