The appetite for a simple and warm Cold War memory comes from troubling impulses about how to interpret and handle the present. They blind us to the bloody realities of a struggle, bound up in other struggles that brought terror to nearly the entire world. These distortions do violence to the ambiguities, danger, and demagoguery of that world. All this looks enviable in a time of ambiguity abroad and partisan deadlock at home.īut upon closer inspection, the wishful reminiscence and patronizing dismissal of a simpler, more stable time both fall apart. For periods, there was agreement on the essentials and a degree of consensus. There was an obvious major adversary, and most Americans and their allies agreed it was worth containing it while it slowly rotted. It cast its shadow across the world from the escalating rivalries of the late 1940s until the collapse of the Eastern bloc and then the Soviet Union itself between 19. To acknowledge a basic truth: The Cold War was a long security competition between two superpowers that defined a period in international life. Likewise, the stable and simple Cold War appeals for reasons worth investigating. We convert the dilemmas of 1914 into a parable to serve other impulses, for reassurance that we now know better. In 2014, the centennial of the First World War revealed that despite historians’ best efforts, folk memory still recalls the war’s participants as essentially stupid, innocents marching enthusiastically to war in the summer of 1914 expecting a short and glorious picnic, when actually they expressed a more stoic sense of duty during national emergency. The Cold War becomes quaintly straightforward and passé. Alongside admiration for the “wise men” who steered the West through the crisis, the resistance behind the Iron Curtain, and the spies and militaries who guarded us in our sleep, the conceit of a simpler, more stable time reflects a tendency to look down on one’s forbears, or one’s former self. There is also a whiff of condescension in this nostalgia. But at least, the logic goes, we knew what and where the threat was. For the nostalgic, it was grim work to patrol the battlements and keep watch against the Soviet empire. The Cold War becomes shorthand for a yearned-for clarity, though clarity of a spartan kind. As the Cold War recedes into the distant past, it becomes almost attractive compared to today’s unsettled “threat picture,” with revolutions and invisible enemies, an imploding Middle East, and repeated fiscal crises. Politicians and professional militaries appear to see our current season of globalized insecurity as singularly complex and dangerous. Yet, this warm tale of a simple and stable Cold War is inaccurate and dangerous. Today’s rivals in China, North Korea and Russia “ are not rational, not logical, they’re nuts.” James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, misses the time of rational bipolar stability when both understood mutually assured destruction, both “knew” what the other “had,” and the Soviet Union could restrain its client states. For Secretary of State John Kerry, compared to the bipolar world, “today’s world” of accelerating change and connectedness “ is more complicated than anything we have experienced.” More complicated, and therefore more dangerous. Gates recalled the Cold War as a “less complex time,” being “almost nostalgic” for its return. When he was secretary of defense, Robert M. The American people knew what the rules were.” Others share Clinton’s nostalgia. “We had an intellectually coherent thing. “ Gosh, I miss the Cold War,” President Bill Clinton remarked in 1993, with a chuckle.
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