This is also a concept in One. The book is a spiritually metaphysical fiction in which Richard and Leslie hop from alternate reality to alternate reality meeting themselves when choices have or have not yet been made, and alternate realities where they meet various different incarnations of their souls. In one such scene, Richard and Leslie meet and spend time with their Soviet incarnations. What follows is not directly the same but with an open mind it's very on point:

"'In any conflict,' said Leslie, 'we can defend ourselves, or we can learn. Defense has made the world unlivable. What would happen if we chose to learn instead? Instead of saying you frighten me, what if we said you interest me?'

'We think our world is very slowly turning to give that a try,' I said.

What had we come to learn from them, I wondered. Them is Us? Americans are Soviets are Chinese are Africans are Arabs are Asians are Scandinavians are Indians? Different expressions of the same spirit from different choices, different turns on the infinite pattern of life in spacetime?

Our evening raced past midnight as we talked about what we liked and what we didn't like about the two superpowers that a grip on our lives. We sat close together, old friends, feeling we had loved these two all our lives.

What a difference it made to know them. After this night, we'd no more choose to launch a war on Tatiana and Ivan Kirilov than we'd fire-bomb ourselves. When they changed from Evil Empire cutouts into living human equals, into people trying as hard as we were to make sense of the world, whatever fear of them we might have had vanished. For the four of us, the treadmill had stopped."