one thing about Cold War 2.0 is it’s going to be a lot more cynical than the first Cold War, which might have also been an...
one thing about Cold War 2.0 is it’s going to be a lot more cynical than the first Cold War, which might have also been an exercise in great power relations but could at least be spun as a clash of ideologies: freedom and democracy for the people, equality and liberation for the people, but what have we got today? state capitalism with American characteristics vs. state capitalism with Chinese characteristics? your human rights abuses excuse my human rights abuses? it’s much harder to paint this conflict as anything other than nationalist competition between two strains of authoritarianism and that’s a dreary thing indeed.
do you know how weird and distorting it was that we understood so much of the Cold War as capitalist democracy vs. communism rather than nationalism vs. imperialism?