Sorry to nitpick, but this is a pretty big snag when it comes to World Modelling for most people. The original Cold War started in the wake of WW2, by all the people who oversaw WW2 and were getting promotions heaped on top of them due to their contributions.
The important thing is that 1) the Cold War was started with extremely similar mentalities and people as WW2, and 2) it was started with intent to nuke (carpet bombing metropolitan areas was considered standard military doctrine during WW2). The mentalities and doctrines that sculpted the Cold War were replaced before the Cold War even ended. So calling it “another Cold War” is epistemically harmful because it prescribes a long list of features (e.g. elites believing that diplomacy will inevitably fail and that carpet bombing will be with nukes), and any actual conflict in the modern world will never, ever check the requirements needed in order to resemble the environment of the Cold War. So the idea of “either we go back to the Cold War or we don’t” is a misleading misnomer. The world can definitely share some features with 1950-1990, but it will never share most of the features with that time period.
Huh. I always thought that if we were magically/hypothetically given the option to limit the death and destruction caused by the next drawn-out competition among great powers to that caused by the Cold War (which includes of course the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) we should jump at the chance to choose that option.
I always thought that the Cold War turned out remarkably benignly given the weapons available to the warring sides and given previous conflicts between great powers.
Do I read you correctly as believing that humanity has entered a more enlightened era where outcomes as bad as what happened to people who got caught up in the Cold War are unlikely?
The important thing is that 1) the Cold War was started with extremely similar mentalities and people as WW2, and 2) it was started with intent to nuke (carpet bombing metropolitan areas was considered standard military doctrine during WW2).
Do you have any citations for those claims? Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation is a memoir of the early days of the Cold War, and shows that, at least in the US, policymakers dropped the intent to nuke pretty quickly. Indeed, George Kennan wrote his famous long telegram, outlining the strategy of containment, in 1946.
Yes, there were hotheads like MacArthur, who advocated total (thermonuclear) war in order to wipe Communism off the face of the Earth, but they were a small minority. Vocal, but small.
Yeah I basically agree. My intention was a period of heightened tensions and overt conflict between the China and the US, not usually escalating into direct combat, but involving much of the world and using most of the available political, economic, and military leverage. The belief in nuclear armageddon seems like the biggest difference between this time and the original Cold War. Perhaps there’s also less ideological difference, though I’m not sure about this.
I agree that wording it as “It’s part of a larger strategy of economic decoupling from China in preparation for another Cold War” was really helpful and went a long way to give me a sense of why decoupling is being taken so seriously, and I have no idea how to word it better.
I also think that decoupling is often seen by many as the big factor that distinguishes the current Cold War from the old one, but that might be popular bias, since lots of people are paid to analyze that whereas both nuclear beliefs and democracy-versus-authoritarian ideologies involve tons of black box institutions and military secrets.
Sorry to nitpick, but this is a pretty big snag when it comes to World Modelling for most people. The original Cold War started in the wake of WW2, by all the people who oversaw WW2 and were getting promotions heaped on top of them due to their contributions.
The important thing is that 1) the Cold War was started with extremely similar mentalities and people as WW2, and 2) it was started with intent to nuke (carpet bombing metropolitan areas was considered standard military doctrine during WW2). The mentalities and doctrines that sculpted the Cold War were replaced before the Cold War even ended. So calling it “another Cold War” is epistemically harmful because it prescribes a long list of features (e.g. elites believing that diplomacy will inevitably fail and that carpet bombing will be with nukes), and any actual conflict in the modern world will never, ever check the requirements needed in order to resemble the environment of the Cold War. So the idea of “either we go back to the Cold War or we don’t” is a misleading misnomer. The world can definitely share some features with 1950-1990, but it will never share most of the features with that time period.
Huh. I always thought that if we were magically/hypothetically given the option to limit the death and destruction caused by the next drawn-out competition among great powers to that caused by the Cold War (which includes of course the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) we should jump at the chance to choose that option.
I always thought that the Cold War turned out remarkably benignly given the weapons available to the warring sides and given previous conflicts between great powers.
Do I read you correctly as believing that humanity has entered a more enlightened era where outcomes as bad as what happened to people who got caught up in the Cold War are unlikely?
Do you have any citations for those claims? Dean Acheson’s book, Present at the Creation is a memoir of the early days of the Cold War, and shows that, at least in the US, policymakers dropped the intent to nuke pretty quickly. Indeed, George Kennan wrote his famous long telegram, outlining the strategy of containment, in 1946.
Yes, there were hotheads like MacArthur, who advocated total (thermonuclear) war in order to wipe Communism off the face of the Earth, but they were a small minority. Vocal, but small.
Yeah I basically agree. My intention was a period of heightened tensions and overt conflict between the China and the US, not usually escalating into direct combat, but involving much of the world and using most of the available political, economic, and military leverage. The belief in nuclear armageddon seems like the biggest difference between this time and the original Cold War. Perhaps there’s also less ideological difference, though I’m not sure about this.
I agree that wording it as “It’s part of a larger strategy of economic decoupling from China in preparation for another Cold War” was really helpful and went a long way to give me a sense of why decoupling is being taken so seriously, and I have no idea how to word it better.
I also think that decoupling is often seen by many as the big factor that distinguishes the current Cold War from the old one, but that might be popular bias, since lots of people are paid to analyze that whereas both nuclear beliefs and democracy-versus-authoritarian ideologies involve tons of black box institutions and military secrets.