The demise of international communism seemed to represent a triumph of the American mythology over that of the Soviets, but the actual moral tale was more complex. Waging the Cold War had provoked moral crisis. Though the dilemma of reconciling American virtue and power had seemed simplified by the Cold War – they were necessarily conjoined in the great crusade – that conflict had merely exposed the contradictions more painfully. No final or satisfactory solutions to the dilemma had been found as America began its “war on terror”. Americans thus stumbled headlong into a new era of conflict, entangled less by damaging alliances than by their own continuing moral confusion, now masquerading as moral certainty.