In the National Security Council's "Cold War Objectives" (NSC-68) document a description of the fundamental design of the Kremlin portrays a grim image of inevitable confrontation with the Soviet Union. In the context of describing the Kremlin’s design, the document positions the US as a perceived obstacle and adversary of the Kremlin and assumes that the Kremlin view includes an imperative to destroy or subvert the US by any means necessary. While the document called for a massive peace time mobilization and increase in spending to contain the military threat in the Soviet Union, decades later, the fall of the Soviet Union can be seen as either the ultimate success of the policies it advocated or rather the repudiation of its gross exaggerations of Soviet power.

Contrary to assumptions in NSC-68, the economic power of the Soviet Union would turn out to be on path of decline rather than improvement and it would eventually lead to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. With indicatives lead by Soviet leaders Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev, the Soviet Union aligns itself towards marketization in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. With the economy in limbo, a re-alignment of Soviet foreign policies ensues virtually ending the cold war. Gorbachev pursues what is seen as concessionary foreign policy based on the idea that the world is all interdependent and that global relationship would prevail over East-West divide, effectively an annulment of the idea of the Cold War.

In the 1950’s, NSC-68 had portrayed the Soviet Union as an expanding antidemocratic oppressor entity that worked to enslave populations and destroy the governing and social structures of dominated nations while being a direct enemy of freedom which is represented by the US. Although the document portrayed the Soviet Union as an inferior economically, it also painted a seriously grim image of a military