Even during the cold war the USA lost constantly. I don’t think it’s incompetence. I think guerilla warfare is simply superior. It’s not like the USA was effect during the cold war. The USSR was famous for it’s ability to hunt Western spies far more effectively than the reverse. The USSR defeated the most powerful Western army ever fielded while they were still trying to modernize their agriculture to stop the centuries-long cycle of famine. The USSR failed not because of the West but because of their own failures to manage reaction and revision in the party.

The cold war was colonial management. So I don’t see why you think managing empire back then made our politicians strong but managing empire now has made them weak. You’re over indexing on present-day failures and last generations successes. They were just as loony in the 70s as they are today, we just don’t keep that stuff in the forefront.

The most significant and most important difference is global financialization and the outsourcing that came with it. The politicians from the 30s to the 70s had to manage domestic industry and the business leaders did too. Since the 70s, with new economic policies allowing freer movement of capital, more financialization and abstract derivatives, and then China identifying the economic angle to kill the empire, todays politicians have never had to deal with real productive forces. I don’t think that makes them better or worse in this case. I think it makes them more prone to abstract thinking with fewer moments of contact with reality.

But both parties have that problem and it manifests not fundamentally as forgetting they are on the same team but rather deepening the contradictions inherent in the system through their domestic policy and rhetoric.