looking forward to being officially able to call it the First Cold War
-
Show this thread
-
Acknowledging that this is a new cold war - one started by, and ardently prosecuted by the CCP - is also the only way we start talking realistically about how we fight it and how it ends.
9 replies 20 retweets 90 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @BeijingPalmer
It's a form of the worst nostalgia politics and not a useful tool for understanding a very different geopolitical reality.
2 replies 1 retweet 4 likes -
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.
1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes -
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
4 replies 1 retweet 4 likes -
Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
If you want that rich, genuine Cold War™ flavor, you need an opponent whose goal is for-real world domination. Does anybody seriously think this about China? That the ultimate goal is to impose Xi Jinping Thought on Uruguay?
3 replies 1 retweet 3 likes -
Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
I don't buy that stalin's Russia had any real focus on world domination, that ship sailed in like 1935. The cold war was great power conflict with an ideological veneer, little more.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @atonal440 @Pinboard
I think the ideology went deeper than you might think - consider how big a factor nostalgia for the revolutionary idealism of their youth was in drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan, for instance. (AFGHANTSY, by the former British ambassador, is excellent on this)
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
Yeah, you don't get monstrosities like the Khmer Rouge with just ordinary great power politics. The ideology packed a punch; even Communist leaders who thought world revolution was neither imminent nor achievable through conquest saw it as a scientific historical inevitability
-
-
Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
This remains the most baffling belief of doctrinaire socialists: that their narrative of history is a scientific inevitability on par with, like, entropy or something.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likesThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.