Myths here refer to the widely shared beliefs which have weak empirical validity. Such myths, and legends to sustain them, have played important roles in the political legitimacy of regimes across the world. These myths often relate to such critical attributes of the state, like sovereignty, democratic governance, or secular politics. To the extent that foreign policy has been an important instrument of political legitimacy of the ruling regimes within the over-arching Cold War global system, myths have been as relevant to foreign policy as they have been in their domestic policies, often dialectically linked, underpinning regime stability.

In fact, the era of the global Cold War has been one long phase of increasing sophistication in the technology of myth-making and its globalisation in tandem with global military containment. Many of these myths have been loaded conceptual traps, suggesting built-in policy implications.

For example, the concept of realism itself in the sphere of national security, ab-initio, tended to trivialize all contending paradigms, including collective security, as inferior versions of historical truth. Similarly, such concepts as ‘Soviet expansionism’ and ‘International Communist subversion’, within an ideologically divided global system, implied built-in justification of ‘global containment’. The same was true of such concepts as ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ in the lexicon of Soviet diplomacy of the era to distinguish the non-aligned from the western allies, respectively, in the Third World. The globalisation of the English language, along with realism, has provided additional advantage to the English-speaking world in innovating such conceptual traps with wider global currency.