Contra and counter cold wars
The political and financial might of the United States, combined with the centrality of its tech platforms and English as the lingua franca, ensures voices from that one country tend to occupy an outsized role in discourse and thinking. Certainly, what happens there is deeply consequential for the world, and so it is important, it does matter. Yet sooner or later, there is a tendency to elide US perspectives and concerns with global ones, the narcissism of great powers is powerful.
This chart is slightly old but conveys the basic point: most of the world is not in the United States, is not in North America, is not in Europe, and so on. While obvious, it needs to be emphasised precisely as it is so regularly forgotten in practice. There are a whole series of inter-connected reasons for the fracturing of the US-led liberal international order, one being simply that what the rest of the world is doing is continually becoming more and more consequential.
With all of the focus on the political dysfunction in the United States, there is a tendency to overlook how blinkered and barren so much of the analysis has become. That distinct finish of AI-generated images so perfectly matches the commentary being offered. With this, foreign policy discourse increasingly mirrors the ‘Marvel model’ approach to moviemaking, geopolitics adopts the style of kitsch.
Niall Ferguson has become one of the most prominent commentators expounding the bad sequel version of international politics in the form of ‘Cold War 2’. Against this, he identifies two main schools of counter-argument:
the Aspen Strategy Group/Harvard University view is that the US-China relationship is not as bad as the US-Soviet relationship…
Then there is the Yale University/Hoover Institution view… the global situation today more closely resembles the world on the eve of one or the other of the world wars.
Missing, however, is the other obvious counter-argument, one developed here from outside of an American institution, namely: the frame of Cold War actively hinders comprehension, it points us in the wrong direction.
Returning briefly to Ferguson, who channels his inner Thomas Friedman with this remarkable conclusion:
Finally, a question: Who gets fat on Diet Cold War?… That’s another hard question for American policymakers. Like Diet Coke, Diet Cold War could leave a bitter aftertaste.
Unfortunately, diet op-ed pieces do not taste much better. Nonetheless, returning to counter-arguments, a wider range are presented in response to the deadening stupidity of Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher’s, ‘No Substitute for Victory’, in Foreign Policy:
Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war… Like the original Cold War, the new cold war will not be won through half measures or timid rhetoric.
They further propose that ‘a cold war offers a relatable framework’, echoing the logic of the movie reboots and sequels that fill our screens. In a similar vein, Hal Brands has argued that, ‘although the Cold War isn’t a precise match for today’s competitions, it isn’t such a bad one, either’ and that ‘the Cold War is a vast repository of knowledge about longterm competition.’ Perhaps, but less considered are the costs that come with adopting ‘Cold War 2.0’ as a master-narrative, how doing so might actively inhibit understanding the stakes of the present.
To make another obvious but necessary point: a frame always includes and excludes, it brings certain features into focus and moves others into the background. In adopting the Marvel movie approach to geopolitics, it places the United States and its concerns at the centre, it emphasises great power competition, encourages binary thinking, and keeps us comfortably tethered to the twentieth century. As these traditional issues that fit within within existing frames are foregrounded, more challenging global and systemic risks are pushed out of sight.
Simply put, adopting the Cold War frame means moving climate change and environmental degradation down the list of concerns. This is evident in Ferguson’s lively ‘We’re All Soviets Now’ piece:
As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison.
An alternate view is being articulated with increasing stridency by Adam Tooze, who writes:
In the next 12 months there are two crucial cliffhangers in global climate policy. The one that will hog all the attention in the West is the American election on November 5 2024. The one that matters more is Beijing’s decision on the next phase of its decarbonization program.
He introduces the stakes in the following terms:
China’s climate policy is the single most important political factor deciding the future of the global environmental.
The escalating climate crisis will be driven by natural mechanisms and tipping points, whose effects we are now seeing every day. Business decisions and technological developments are crucial. But insofar as policy matters, and it does, it is China’s policy that matters most, no longer that of the USA or the EU. Time is running out. If we are serious about stabilization by mid-century, decisions have to be made now to significantly accelerate the pace of decarbonization worldwide.
What Tooze is engaged in here is a conscious and concerted reorientation of perspective, one that mirrors the image above, one in which around 60% of the world lives in Asia. Yet this is truly where discomfort can be found: a framework in which the United States is not the lead protagonist, in which its pathologies simply matter less.
It is hardly surprising that Ferguson has been so dismissive of ‘polycrisis’, as it offers a radically different frame to the weird nostalgia that infuses ‘Cold War 2’. In the garden of forking paths, the Cold War that we had was one in which nuclear war did not eventuate, but in many other possible worlds, this surely would have been the outcome. If a first Cold War managed to stay cold, what is the likely probability that a second one could too? Reflecting on the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, John Lewis Gaddis observed that ‘the tendency afterwards was to lower the odds’ of war occurring. He reflected:
Calculating risks retrospectively is almost as difficult as trying to anticipate them: in any complex system so many things can go wrong that it is difficult to know what might - or might have.
This challenge of calculating risks equally applies to our present reality, faced with increased stresses at the international and global levels. Ultimately here is an analytical wager: how distinctive is our present conjuncture? What matters more: the ‘old’ of great power conflict or the ‘new’ of planetary boundaries?
In a LRB essay on climate change and uncertainty, Geoff Mann notes that, ‘one thing we do share with the frostiest years of the Cold War is how little we know about the way this disastrous future might unfold.’ In reflecting on the role of probability and the use of modelling for climate change, he observes:
Another way of putting it would be to say that the problem isn’t probability, but the faith we have put in probability as a way of dealing with uncertainty. … I think there is something about probability that fundamentally misconstrues reality. When the models run hundreds, even thousands of times, each time using slightly different parameters, it is as if there were dimensions parallel to our own, all with of more or less plausible futures, from which our own world is assembled. Modelling supposedly gives us access to the full range of these futures, so we consider them without having to actually experience them. But in our collective reality, we don’t get thousands of runs at life and future. We just get one.
This is the unbearable lightness of our heavy conditions, what works for LLMs does not for polities. We have only one roll of the dice.
Geopolitics is impoverished by its narrow and narrowing view, the subject might be war and peace, but few have read Tolstoy. With that in mind, finishing with Milan Kundera, someone who was keenly aware of the ‘kitsch-man’s (Kitschmensch) need for kitsch’, just as the kitsch-analyst needs their ‘Cold War 2’ frame. From his famed novel:
Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated.
In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.
Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czechs' country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation's freedom for many decades or even centuries. Should they have shown more courage than caution? What should they have done?
If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses.
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind's fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
History light and the planet heavy, what do we want to prioritise?