Brownstone Institute
Cold War Nostalgia Explained
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week unleashed a wave of nostalgia for simpler and better times. That’s odd, isn’t it?
Not so much. The freedom revolution that followed his reforms in the old Soviet Union did not turn out as planned. The world never became normal and peaceful as promised. And today, we can only look back on the 1980s with affection for better times.
Back in the day, in the midst of the Cold War, we had an overwhelming sense of the world being held hostage and on the verge of a global nuclear war that could wipe out humanity as we knew it. One wrong move, one bad piece of intelligence, one emotional outburst by a frustrated commander-in-chief, and boom, the world would go up in fire and smoke.
The stakes were so high! It was not just about stopping the end of life on the planet. It was about an epic struggle between freedom (the U.S.) and tyrannical communism (the Soviet Union). That’s what we were told in any case. In our political landscape, much of American politics turned on whether it was wise to risk peace alongside a Soviet victory or go for a full vanquishing of evil from the planet.
The battle over communism defined the lives of many generations. Everything seemed so clear in those days. This was really about systems and ideology: whether society would consist of individuals and communities making their own choices or whether an elite class of intellectuals would override individual plans with some centralized vision of utopia.
In those days, there was no question that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. We had to spy, fight, build up the military, fund the freedom fighters, and generally be strong in the face of godless evil.
Ronald Reagan was just the champion that freedom needed in those days. He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It drove the left nuts and cheered the base. He also attempted to shore up the American system: limited government (at least in some areas), lower taxes, sounder money, freer trade, and more rule of law rather than rule by administrative bureaucrats.
Then one odd day in 1987, late in Reagan’s second term, he and Gorbachev met and decided that they would together rid the world of nuclear weapons. They were giddy about the idea and the whole world went into shock and amazement, especially their respective advisors who rather liked the status quo. As a result, Gorbachev gained a victory at home – he ruled a poor and restless population sick of the nonsense – that encouraged him to seek more reforms, which only fed the appetite for more reform.
Reagan served his two terms and left office. Then dramatic change hit the world from 1989-90. The Soviet Empire fell apart, gradually at first and then all at once. Gorbachev became the country’s last leader as Soviet communism became plain-old Russian autocracy over time. The world could now be free! And the US could go back to normal.
About ten years later, I met Israeli historian Martin van Creveld. He was a scholar on war and terrorism. He held a unusual view. He believed that the end of the Cold War was a disaster and that the evidence was all around us. He said the world would never be as peaceful as it was when two superpowers faced off with nuclear arsenals. He described it as the perfect game for peace and prosperity. Neither would ever risk using the weapons but the prospect alone made states more cautious than they otherwise would be.
In fact, in his view, this nuclear standoff made the world as good as it could be given the circumstances. He admitted that he dreaded what might happen once one of the two powers disappeared. He believed that he was proven right: the world was headed toward chaos and disaster.
This was before 9-11 unleashed US imperial ambitions as never before. So even ten years later, I simply could not accept van Creveld’s position. That’s because I bought the line that the end of the Cold War was really about a victory for peace and freedom. Russia was free. And with the Soviet Union gone, the US could now safely return to its natural and constitutional status as a peaceful commercial republic, friendship with all and entangling alliances with none.
I was all in on the idea that we had finally reached the end of history: we would have freedom and democracy forever now that we knew that those systems were the best systems. And history would adapt to the evidence.
In those days, many on the left and right in American politics were screaming for normalcy. But there was a huge problem. The US had built up a massive intelligence/military/industrial machinery that had no intention of just closing up shop. It needed a new rationale. It needed a new enemy. It needed some new scary thing.
If the US could not find an enemy, it needed to make one.
China in those days wasn’t quite right for enemization, so the US looked to old allies that could be betrayed and demonized. Early in 1990, George H.W. Bush decided that Manuel Noriega was a bad money launderer and drug dealer and had to go. The US military made it happen.
Good show! What else? In the Middle East, Iraq was becoming annoying. So in 1990, Bush seized on a border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, portraying the tiny country as a victim of the big oppressor next door. He would have to intervene militarily. The US won that one too.
Now, to be sure, this was not about the US going on some wild new imperial crusade. No no. It was really about punishing aggression just this one time so that the entire world would learn forevermore never to disturb borders again. It was a brief war for peace. It was two weeks to flatten the curve…wait, wrong war. It was two weeks to make the world safe for democracy.
Thus began what became a 25-year occupation. Also wrecked in the meantime were Libya and Syria. Just this week, the palace in Baghdad was ransacked yet again. This once civilized country that attracted the best and brightest students and artists from the whole region is in utter shambles. This is what the US did.
And that was just the start. The US, incredibly, replicated Soviet-style occupation in Afghanistan and ended up staying even longer. This was following the 9/11 attacks carried out as a retaliation against US actions in Iraq in the disputed borders in the Middle East. The Department of Homeland Security came into being and Americans lost vast freedoms though the vast expanse of the security state.
As for NATO itself, it never went away following the end of the Cold War but rather became another tool of provocation that the US could use to poke its enemies. It was too much for Russia, which decided to settle scores in Ukraine, thus provoking US and European sanctions that are driving the price of energy up for everyone but Russia.
All the while, China was on the rise with its new system of communism with Chinese characteristics, which really means a one-party state with no competition and complete control of industry and private life. China showed the world how to lock down to control a virus, and the US copied the idea, unleashing forms of despotism that the US as a whole had never known. Today we suffer the consequences of this fateful choice for control over freedom.
Looking back, the US victory in the Cold War was massively and tragically misspent. Instead of doing a victory lap for freedom and constitutional government — that’s what we believe was the whole damn point — the US used its monopoly on power to go on a global crusade. Whole peoples suffered but for decades we hardly felt it at all here at home. Life was good. The carnage abroad was all abstract.
The pandemic did for state power what not even the Cold War or the War on Terror could accomplish: terrified the population into a level of compliance that meant giving up even the right to educate, buy and sell, associate, worship, and even speak. Not even private homes were safe from the virus police. Not even weddings, funerals, and visits to the hospital were untouched. The Bill of Rights became a dead letter nearly overnight.
With lockdowns and the current political and economic chaos, the global empire has come home to oppress us all in the most personal possible way. We now read tales of life in the Soviet Union and we recognize it all too well. We read 1984 by George Orwell and recognize it in our own experience. This is not what winning the Cold War was supposed to mean.
From 1948 through 1989, the US and Russia were locked in a nuclear standoff. Children were trained to duck and cover should a nuclear bomb go off. People built shelters in their backyards. The enemy was always over there. It was a fight for freedom of tyranny. And yet today, we can only look back with nostalgia for a simpler time.
I’m not nostalgic for the Cold War and I would never want it back. Its end gave rise to a new hope, albeit one that came to be dashed over time.
I am nostalgic for a normal life with a primacy put on freedom, rights, and thriving. A transnational ruling class in government, media, medicine, and technology seem determined to forestall that world from ever coming about again. So yes, I long for the days of a smiling Reagan and Gorby! Together they decided to end the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War. We had no idea just how good we had it.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized—but they’re not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others—like Sweden’s NOAT—are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.
Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they’re banned. The decision looks, at best, strange—and possibly arbitrary.
What the Market Shows
My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.
Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products—more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.
The illegal share wasn’t uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look “cool.” It’s the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.
Enforcement Works
To the FDA’s credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency’s broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.
But effective enforcement can’t solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short—only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.
Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre
The FDA’s own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else—while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.
The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT’s problem is procedural—it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.
This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nicotine pouches have far fewer toxins than cigarettes and far less variability than many vapes. The biggest pouch concerns are uneven nicotine levels and occasional traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, depending on manufacturing quality. The serious contamination issues—heavy metals and inconsistent dosage—belong mostly to disposable vapes, particularly the flood of unregulated imports from China. Treating all “unauthorized” products as equally bad blurs those distinctions and undermines proportional enforcement.
A Better Balance: Enforce Upstream, Widen the Legal Path
My small Montgomery County survey suggests a simple formula for improvement.
First, keep enforcement targeted and focused on suppliers, not just clerks. Warning letters clearly change behavior at the store level, but the biggest impact will come from auditing distributors and importers, and stopping bad shipments before they reach retail shelves.
Second, make compliance easy. A single-page list of authorized nicotine-pouch products—currently the twenty approved ZYN items—should be posted in every store and attached to distributor invoices. Point-of-sale systems can block barcodes for anything not on the list, and retailers could affirm, once a year, that they stock only approved items.
Third, widen the legal lane. The FDA launched a pilot program in September 2025 to speed review of new pouch applications. That program should spell out exactly what evidence is needed—chemical data, toxicology, nicotine release rates, and behavioral studies—and make timely decisions. If products like NOAT meet those standards, they should be authorized quickly. Legal competition among adult-oriented brands will crowd out the sketchy imports far faster than enforcement alone.
The Bottom Line
Enforcement matters, and the data show it works—where it happens. But the legal market is too narrow to protect consumers or encourage innovation. The current regime leaves a few ZYN products as lonely legal islands in a sea of gray-market pouches that range from sensible to reckless.
The FDA’s treatment of NOAT stands out as a case study in inconsistency: a quiet, adult-focused brand approved in Europe yet effectively banned in the US, while flashier and riskier options continue to slip through. That’s not a public-health victory; it’s a missed opportunity.
If the goal is to help adult smokers move to lower-risk products while keeping youth use low, the path forward is clear: enforce smartly, make compliance easy, and give good products a fair shot. Right now, we’re doing the first part well—but failing at the second and third. It’s time to fix that.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans each year. Everyone knows it, including the Food and Drug Administration. Yet while the most lethal nicotine product remains on sale in every gas station, the FDA continues to block or delay far safer alternatives.
Nicotine pouches—small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip—deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved.
Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This “Swedish Experience” shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily—no prohibition required.
In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head. Since Congress gave it sweeping authority in 2009, the agency has demanded that every new product undergo a Premarket Tobacco Product Application, or PMTA, proving it is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” That sounds reasonable until you see how the process works.
Manufacturers must spend millions on speculative modeling about how their products might affect every segment of society—smokers, nonsmokers, youth, and future generations—before they can even reach the market. Unsurprisingly, almost all PMTAs have been denied or shelved. Reduced-risk products sit in limbo while Marlboros and Newports remain untouched.
Only this January did the agency relent slightly, authorizing 20 ZYN nicotine-pouch products made by Swedish Match, now owned by Philip Morris. The FDA admitted the obvious: “The data show that these specific products are appropriate for the protection of public health.” The toxic-chemical levels were far lower than in cigarettes, and adult smokers were more likely to switch than teens were to start.
The decision should have been a turning point. Instead, it exposed the double standard. Other pouch makers—especially smaller firms from Sweden and the US, such as NOAT—remain locked out of the legal market even when their products meet the same technical standards.
The FDA’s inaction has created a black market dominated by unregulated imports, many from China. According to my own research, roughly 85 percent of pouches now sold in convenience stores are technically illegal.
The agency claims that this heavy-handed approach protects kids. But youth pouch use in the US remains very low—about 1.5 percent of high-school students according to the latest National Youth Tobacco Survey—while nearly 30 million American adults still smoke. Denying safer products to millions of addicted adults because a tiny fraction of teens might experiment is the opposite of public-health logic.
There’s a better path. The FDA should base its decisions on science, not fear. If a product dramatically reduces exposure to harmful chemicals, meets strict packaging and marketing standards, and enforces Tobacco 21 age verification, it should be allowed on the market. Population-level effects can be monitored afterward through real-world data on switching and youth use. That’s how drug and vaccine regulation already works.
Sweden’s evidence shows the results of a pragmatic approach: a near-smoke-free society achieved through consumer choice, not coercion. The FDA’s own approval of ZYN proves that such products can meet its legal standard for protecting public health. The next step is consistency—apply the same rules to everyone.
Combustion, not nicotine, is the killer. Until the FDA acts on that simple truth, it will keep protecting the cigarette industry it was supposed to regulate.
Author
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