"While it existed, the Soviet Union was critical in defeating and deterring US military action and confining it to proxy wars. Even Reagan's high-decibel 'evil empire' rhetoric only justified the that was more industrial policy than military policy when US deindustrialisation was becoming an issue. Only in the 1990s, flush with the false triumphalism of its pyrrhic 'victory' in the Cold War, did the United States shift to ever more unilateral military aggression, beginning with the 1992 Gulf War, continuing with wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the hope that ‘American military might could effectively police the world and at the same time ensure the continuing centrality of the United States in the global political economy."