Haydon’s remark captures something unsettling about the late Cold War moment — and perhaps about the present as well. Liberal capitalism continued to function, but it struggled to explain what it ultimately stood for beyond prosperity and stability. The Circus itself hardly resembles the heroic bulwark imagined in Cold War propaganda. Beneath the ideological drama of the Cold War lay a darker possibility: that both systems had already begun to exhaust themselves. Liberal capitalism increasingly struggles to justify itself except through comparison with its enemies, while its enemies offer little more than more brutal forms of domination.