"One reason why the deadlock lasted so long is ideology. For all the differences between liberal capitalism and state socialism, there was something similar in how the United States and the Soviet Union embraced their respective national ideologies. These ideologies, Robert Jervis argues in his essay in The Cambridge History, shaped the identities of the two superpowers far more than geography or the structure of international politics. Ideology allowed each to present itself as defining the path of human progress and gave each side confidence in the power of transformational ideas. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were born of revolutions that took on universal, rather than nationalist, values. These similarities in approach, Jervis suggests, made their confrontation particularly dangerous -- there could be no resolution until one side was transformed into something closer to the other." - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet