It's a form of the worst nostalgia politics and not a useful tool for understanding a very different geopolitical reality.
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Replying to @Pinboard
Strongly disagree; the first cold war was much more complex, changing, and varied than we paint it as, and looking at and studying from it is extremely important. But the core problem remains.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
Everything is more complex than the story about it. The cold war was an improvised reaction to a transformative technological leap (nuclear weapons) and had a genuine, transnational ideological core that is simply missing from the plain vanilla great power conflict with China
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Replying to @Pinboard
Getting that ideological core back is one reason to call it a second Cold War - the recognition that this isn't just country-vs-country, but a party that *will always feel threatened* unless it can crush its enemies globally.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
John Garnaut has a good summary of the ideological side of this, which is repeated again and again in Xi-era texts - https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta …
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
The difference in my perception is that there is no content for a non-Chinese audience here. Lenin, Stalin, Mao believed in world revolution. Xi's ideology as far as I can tell is not internationalist at all, but profoundly rooted in Chinese exceptionalism.
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Replying to @Pinboard
And what we're fighting against is the attempts to use that Chinese power - mostly through local elites - to enforce that ideology globally in the ways that matter to the CCP: mostly silence. That's not *identical* to global revolution. But it's close enough for government work.
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @Pinboard
This, by
@bentleyballan and others provides one way to think about it - their argument is that China can’t readily provide an alternative global order because it doesn’t have an ideology that resonates with other states -https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-organization/article/distribution-of-identity-and-the-future-of-international-order-chinas-hegemonic-prospects/6B178D9A058C016F6C7A50A089AA7290 …2 replies 1 retweet 4 likes -
'keep your people quiet, do as you're told, and we'll help you stay in power' *is* an ideology
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer @henryfarrell and
Blood and soil nationalism didn’t keep far-right movements in interwar Europe from sharing resources and strategies that helped them come to power. The common enemy - republicanism/communism - was enough. Sounds eerily familiar don’t it
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Right-wing xenophobic movements have always been almost comically internationalist in practice. It reminds me of how anarchists love structure and bureaucracy
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer and
Should’ve added capitalism to the list of fascist bugbears...
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