Rip Van Romney

One thing that worried me about the way the Cold War abruptly ended was that the United States itself experienced no sudden jolt. Nothing changed. Defense spending continued on as before, even though the Soviet threat had vanished. There would eventually be hell to pay for the lack of a signal to the U.S. population, and its politicians.

And so, twenty years later, American politicians find themselves locked in a fantasy world:

A foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign warned against policies that would aid “the Soviet Union” Wednesday, making him at least the third person from Team Romney — including Romney himself — to refer to a country that hasn’t existed since 1991 in the course of attacking President Obama’s foreign policy.