“We could make really bad decisions and still win because we were pretty much the sole dominant economic and military power around,” Kerry said. “That’s not true anymore.”

Kerry said that during the era of mutually assured destruction “choices were less varied, less complicated, more stark, more clear.” He said everything was clear cut and split into camps “communism, democracy; West, East; the Iron Curtain, the great line of divide. And many things were subsumed and quashed by that force of that bipolar world.”