When the Beatles sang "back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.R." in the late 1960s, I suspect they were trying to rile up the dyed-in-the-wool anti-communists of their parents' generation by wittily likening the Soviet Union -- then safely tucked away behind the Iron Curtain -- with the United States, defender of the free world.

How times have changed.

You may not be able to fly in to Moscow from Miami Beach on the now-defunct British Overseas Airways Corporation, but apart from that all of those seemingly far-fetched American delights described by the Fab Four can be found right here in post-communist Russia.

What's even more surprising is how much the United States has come to resemble the old Evil Empire. George Orwell, another sardonic Brit, would have been amused.

Russians who lived through the years of "developed socialism" remember well the inane, almost surrealistic slogans and policies of the time. If you happen to feel any nostalgia for the years of stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev, try taking a trip back to the U.S. of A.

You can start at the U.S. Embassy, which many Russians describe as the last vestige of the Soviet Union in Moscow. If fortune is kind and you actually receive a visa, brace yourself for your introduction to the world of Big Brother at the U.S. border, where you will be photographed and finger-printed. These procedures may seem irritating, but they could be big attractions as part of a retro-tourism package.

The renaming of French fries and French toast as "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" in the cafeterias of the U.S. House of Representatives last year takes the gateau, as it were. Too bad the Supreme Soviet never came up with this idea. Just imagine a decree changing the Russian word for skunk -- amerikanskaya vonyuchka, or American stinker -- to "freedom stinker."

Freedom is the buzzword in American newspeak. In Orwell's novel "1984," newspeak is a language that contains only words needed to express approved ideas. It has been calculated that in five speeches on Iraq last year, President George W. Bush used the words "liberty," "free" and "freedom" 131 times. In addition to freedom fries we have Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. The building that will replace the World Trade Center will be called -- what else -- Freedom Tower.

This unhealthy obsession with freedom is reminiscent of the old Eastern Bloc, where words such as "People's" and "Democracy" were liberally sprinkled in the names of member countries such as the People's Republic of Bulgaria. This trend lives today in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. As civil liberties are increasingly curtailed in the wake of 9/11, "freedom" may soon ring almost as hollow in the United States as it did in the Soviet-era people's democracies.

Patriot II, or the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, for example, stipulates that providing material support to terrorists is punishable with the loss of U.S. citizenship. There's just one snag, of course: This practice is expressly banned by the U.S. Constitution. Citizenship can only be renounced voluntarily. Not to worry. According to the Justice Department, a person's intent to renounce his citizenship need not be expressed verbally. It can be inferred by the authorities from his actions. Prosecutors at Stalin's show trials would have admired this twisted logic.

The comparisons are endless. Consider the new Iraqi flag, unveiled in April. With two blue stripes and a blue crescent against a white background it looks so much like the Israeli flag that you can't help but recall the 15 look-alike national flags of the former Soviet republics.

However amusing, alarming or appalling, these are facile parallels, of course. A more serious resemblance can be found at the level of government policy. Like the decisions of the Soviet leadership, U.S. policy is increasingly driven by ideology, not based on facts. In the old days, the U.S. government took a conservative, realistic approach to managing the economy. The Soviets, armed with scientific Marxism, were great believers in economic miracles. Shift productive assets from the rich to the state and -- presto -- you've got a highly industrialized, efficient and prosperous economy.

Today, Russia has finally realized that double-digit economic growth will have to be sustained for a decade before the country can catch up with Portugal. Americans, by contrast, have come to rely on economic miracles. First it was the new economy of the 1990s, and now the massive tax cuts intended to generate universal prosperity. What ever happened to the proverbial Yankee with both feet firmly planted on the ground?

The Bush administration's foreign policy is even more worrisome. It rejects the traditional approach that served the United States so well in the past in favor of Soviet-style adventurism. During the Cold War, Washington pursued a policy of containment, opposing Soviet expansionism and preserving the status quo. Now, driven by newfound ideological zeal, the United States is bringing down foreign regimes and exporting freedom at gunpoint.

Ideology is the cause of America's current woes in Iraq. There is no need to plan carefully when you possess the one true creed. Minor setbacks will be overcome, and the glorious prospect of Iraqi Freedom makes it all worthwhile. This explains why the Bush administration never bothered to develop a realistic strategy for pulling out of Iraq, and why control over U.S. forces in the country is lax enough to permit the much-publicized atrocities against Iraqi prisoners.

According to the ideology of freedom, the Iraqis, like every other nation in the world, should have embraced U.S.-style democracy and hailed the Marines as liberators. The fact that something closer to the opposite has happened is still being dismissed as a bump in the road to freedom, the work of a few Baathist extremists and foreign terrorists. Blinded by ideology, Bush administration officials appear increasingly divorced from reality when they discuss the situation in Iraq.

As the Soviet experience has shown, you can live in this kind of dream world for a while, but not forever, even if you possess the most powerful military in the world.

Alexei Bayer, a New York-based economist, writes the Globalist column for Vedomosti on alternate weeks. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.