It was a structural victory for the "maritime order": a system rooted in trade, innovation, institutions, and positive-sum commerce (neoliberalism).
History has been shaped by the tension (conflict) between Continental Powers (Russia, China) and Maritime Powers (Britain, and today the U.S.-led order).
Continental Strategy is zero-sum reasoning: securing territory, building buffer zones, centralizing control, and insulating the state from external pressures.
Maritime Strategy tends towards positive-sum: open seas, trade, alliances, rules-based commerce.
Its focus is less on conquest than on preventing instability (at acceptable cost) via deterrence /containment.
1991 A stagnant Continental Empire (Soviet Union) collapsed when face with a system built on maritime prosperity.
The mistakes came afterward. The West assumption that integrating China into the global trading system would encourage convergence toward the maritime model.
Instead, China used access to that system while retaining characteristics of a continental power.
The centralized impulse that defined the twentieth century did not disappear. It evolved. Economic communism was discredited (stagnation / failure), yet Western societies adopted centralized approaches to economic management, regulation, (propaganda) information control, yada.
Political and cultural conflicts came to be viewed through a zero-sum (contential) lens. Trust in institutions weakened, social cohesion was bulkanized through open borders (and university indoctrination), politics became polarized.
The West won the Cold War, but it never understood the conditions that made victory possible. It certainly did not secure the peace.
The maritime order, for all its flaws, remains the most successful positive-sum system humanity has ever devised.
Today, W. faces pressure from both external rivals (China and Russia) and internal strife, complacency, and declining confidence in the principles that underpinned its success.
Russia and China continue to operate according to classic continental mindset.
There are those who argue against a second Cold War. I am not among them.
The sooner we insulate ourselves from the zero-sum thinking of the continental powers and return to the principles that historically worked, the better.
We can trace this maritime tradition (prosperity) all the way back to ancient Greece. It was not something invented wholecloth after the First World War, (although it was refined and institutionalized during that period).
It is increasingly clear that Russia has chosen to leave the maritime fold, and China is not far behind for a simple reason:
To fully integrate China into the maritime order would require the dismantling of the CCP's monopoly on power.
That's not going to happen.