The two major superpowers, still militarily head and shoulders above
the rest, hardly added to the stability of the situation.
The politics of the United Commonwealth, formerly the United States of
America, remained the politics of a child. The 'new Americans'
continued to claim God, family, and self-righteous free enterprise (to
their Republicans a god in itself) as the sole and irreproachable
motive for all their actions. Thus everything they did in the realm
of foreign affairs, usually only half understanding it themselves, must
(in their eyes) inevitably be right, and for the good of all who
followed the true path of capitalism and democracy---in that order.
Soviet Space, meanwhile, had become equally intransigent. The Soviets,
in their turn, hailed as their banner the liberation, equality, and
self-rule of the working classes. These, so the Party line claimed,
had built civilization, but been denied the fruits of their achievement
by the corrupt upper classes, who, like Narcissus, were blind and
self-serving, inherently evil and doomed to fail, but not before
sucking the blood of true humanity and preventing the dreams of Marx
and Trotsky..... And so on, disturbingly similar to the old communist
propaganda. And of course they made no mention of Stalin, the purges,
and the brutal repression of the KGB.