Cold war

Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. So is Ukraine. And so are we. Imagine the good guys win tomorrow. What exactly will we have won? Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe even before the war. Afterward it will remain as dependent on American dollars as it is now — and on American arms. Russia will not have disappeared, after all. The last war-torn and impoverished country that required open-ended American support was Afghanistan. Yet all the weapons and funds we lavished on Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani failed to keep the Taliban at bay after we left. The money also didn’t help with Afghanistan’s corruption problem. Will it help with Ukraine’s? In 2021, Transparency International ranked Ukraine second only to Russia as the most corrupt country in Europe.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine opened the most dramatic divide between East and West since the Cold War. Most of these divisions were clear beforehand — Hungary and Turkey were longtime thorns in the side of NATO, for example. Yet South Africa’s warming ties with Russia and China seemed to come out of nowhere. South Africa's initial reaction to the invasion was the same as much of the Western world, demanding that Russia leave Ukraine. That did not last, however. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on March 17 that “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.

Yoon Suk-yeol isn’t a household name in the United States, but his comments this week have put him in the international spotlight. Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday, the South Korean president openly surmised that if North Korea’s nuclear weapons program continued unabated, Seoul may have to explore an option the United States wouldn’t like: producing nuclear weapons of its own. Referring to Pyongyang’s weapons programs, Yoon said, "It’s possible that the problem gets worse and our country will introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them on our own. If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.” The remarks generated immediate pushback from nuclear security experts.

If you think the falsehoods spilling out of Ukraine about casualties and atrocities are shocking, meet the greatest lie of modern history. August 6 marks the seventy-seventh anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and death of some 140,000 non-combatants. Yet the only nation in history to employ a weapon of mass destruction on an epic scale, against an undefended civilian population, shrugs off the significance of an act of immorality. Beyond the destruction lies the myth of the atomic bombings, the post-war creation of a mass memory of things that did not happen. This myth has become the underpinning of American policy ever since, and carries forward the horrors of Hiroshima as generations pass.

My favorite spy movie cliché of all time is the secret agent stuck in the 1980s. The threats have gone asymmetrical, terrorists slip across borders, but our hero longs for the simple days when the world was divided between good Westerners and bad Russians. “You’re a fossil!” sneer his girlboss department administrator, his vegan drone pilot, his tech whiz who has just hunted down a non-state actor by crosschecking the latest SIGINT with a Yelp! review of an Iraqi yoga studio. Cut to him muttering under his breath à la Judi Dench in Casino Royale: “Christ, I miss the Cold War.” Now, suddenly, those who miss the Cold War are having a moment.

As the Ukraine situation heats up, you can already picture the insider account Vice President Kamala Harris will publish one day in her 2025 bestseller Thirty-One Days in February. But then, as any survivor of the Cuban Missile Crisis is bound to tell President Joe Biden, “I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, and you, Joe Biden, are no Jack Kennedy.” One of the clichés if not the myths about the Cuban Missile Crisis was that President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were playing chicken and Khrushchev “blinked." Under threat of potential nuclear war, he then decided to withdraw the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. We now know that what really happened was more complicated than the initial reports made it appear.

However much it is denied, we still live in an imperial age, at least metaphorically. Just as the withdrawal from Afghanistan registers the momentary decline of the American empire, it registers the momentary rise of the Russian and Chinese ones. America failed in Afghanistan because its military, while capable of fighting high-tech wars on land and sea, could not fix complex Islamic societies on the ground. Indeed, Afghanistan demonstrated how the deterministic elements of geography, culture and ethnic and sectarian awareness can vanquish Western ideals of democracy and individual liberty.

Last week’s arrest of a security guard employed at the British embassy in Berlin, on suspicion of spying for Russia, serves as a stark reminder that the UK and its allies are in the thick of a new Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communist regimes, it appeared that the East-West stand-off had come to an end. Nato allies breathed a collective sigh of relief and looked to new horizons, believing their principal objective had been achieved and that Russia’s days as a superpower were consigned to the history books.