Introducing The Next Cold War
Welcome to The Next Cold War: a place focused on US imperial ambition and the forces getting in its way.
While for many Americans the end of the Cold War in 1991 represented a
happy and glorious event that was both affirming and relieving, not
everyone was imbued with new hopes.
a lucrative business opportunity and an inspiration for that faction of
the US elite often referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex. Fighting
the Soviet Union yielded immense government contracts to insiders and
an opening to promote a clear worldview of a struggle between good and
evil. For them, the end of the Cold War went beyond the economic
hardships caused by lost urgency for defense and intelligence spending;
it was an existential crisis.
Through the 90s there was a considerable effort to reclaim the old
clarity and opportunities of the Cold War with nominally-Communist China
filling in for the Soviet Union, but to no avail. The former Soviet
Union, including Russia, was too burdened by instability
to even appear to be a threat. Though the US continued expanding its
power and influence across the globe, no peer competitor emerged to
challenge it.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Islamic extremism seemed
poised to finally offer a grand and comprehensive enough foe to replace
the Soviet Union, but the hazards of asymmetric warfare and the muddy
morality of Middle East politics led to an American public
less-than-enthused and by no means galvanized behind a new vision of
security and meaning.
The failure of the “War on Terror” paradigm to
articulate an enemy dangerous enough to support a massive defense
budget and unite an increasingly polarized population has not thwarted
or even diminished those determined to find a new great opponent and
justify an empire without end.
So begins The Next Cold War, thank you for stopping by.
