No, It’s Not The Cold War

Actual analysis of today’s international situation is difficult, so numerous pundits are grabbing for the idea that we are in COLD WAR II!

This is nonsense, and it gets in the way of understanding the situation and finding some ways of dealing with it.

THE Cold War (1947-1991) was between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was called a cold war because the two parties avoided engaging directly in a full-up shooting war. They avoided that engagement partly because the world was tired of war after the first half of the twentieth century and because nuclear weapons could now end civilization. But clients of the two superpowers fought wars. The Cold War was also a time in which the world was learning to deal with nuclear weapons. Some very stupid things were done, like building almost 70,000 of them, but we avoided the stupidest – using them.

The Soviet Union had an ideology that claimed to offer equality and justice, but its practice had become an authoritarian nightmare. It pushed that ideology through any means possible, including propaganda and violence. Europe was recovering from the devastation of the world wars, and the United States and governments there pushed back with an ideology of democracy. The ideological aspect was an enormous part of the Cold War and reverberated within societies as well as between them.

The USSR had its own economic system, separated from the rest of the world. Part of its spoils of World War II were a group of nations, some of which were incorporated into its system as what were called republics (as in Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and others held more loosely as satellites. This was not a treaty system to which those nations had freely acceeded, and most wanted more autonomy.

If you squint your eyes hard enough, you can analogize parts of this to the present. But the overall situation is very different.

We are now dealing with three major powers. Dynamics among three powers are different than the focused enmity of two. Russia is much less powerful than the Soviet Union, having lost those forced allies when the Soviet Union broke up. The exception is their nuclear arsenal, roughly comparable to that of the United States. China is an economic power that is building up its military, including its nuclear arsenal, but both Russia and China are far from the US’s military power. Russia is spending down its military might in Ukraine, but it is also building capability industrially.

Propaganda has a different place in today’s competition and more efficient means of distribution, through social media and other internet outlets. China and Russia share a desire to normalize their systems, and all use cyber methods to spread their own messages disrupt the others’.

The United States and Europe would like to keep their places as arbiters of the world order. What Russia is doing in Ukraine is an attempt to turn back the clock to its 19^th century empire, or perhaps the USSR. China wants to be free to disseminate its authoritarian thinking, but it operates in a less coercive way than the USSR. It’s making only a few inroads via soft power, but it’s also making enemies by being heavy-handed.

The nuclear arms race with the USSR started from nothing, with many unknowns. It grew wildly out of control until people realized it was unsustainable in the early 1960s. We now have an incipient arms race, but we are not facing the 1950s again. The danger of nuclear weapons is clearer, and the United States no longer has the capability to build large numbers of them quickly. Russia and China do. The US and Russia have a treaty, New START, that limits the numbers of deployed nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the United States withdrew from other treaties that had helped to stabilize the situation. The sheer numbers of new ideas to use nuclear weapons are not what they were in the 1950s. Innovations in design are of interest only to the nuclear weapons designers and will not make big differences in levels of destruction or usability.

US and China are economically intertwined, as are Russia and China. Russia is isolated from most of the rest of the world by sanctions, but they use basically the same economic system. As neighbors, Russia and China have a number of potential conflicts. North Korea and its nuclear weapons are a headache for China. Russia’s friendship and arms trade with North Korea exacerbates that.

It’s a different time and a different world. We have different technologies and expectations nationally and of each other. Saying that it’s Cold War II masks all that and gives a sense that we know how to deal with this. Not that we knew how to deal with the Cold War. We’re lucky we came through it without a nuclear war.

Everyone who claims that we are now in Cold War II should be asked what they mean by that. Specifics matter.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner