Short thread - I’ve seen a lot of pieces invoking the Cold War as an analogy, and many others rejecting the comparison. Neither position is very helpful by itself, because it hides a very important duality at the heart of the analogy. 1/7
There are two ways of thinking about the Cold War - as an international system and as a geopolitical rivalry. People who compare the Cold War to today often mean it in the second sense. But people who critique that comparison often mean it in the first sense. /2
Historical analogies do get mishandled all the time, but this policing of metaphors seems beside the point. If we’re talking about the international system, there's no comparison to the Cold War. Relatively rigid global bipolarity was a weird and historically unique condition. /3
But as a *world-endangering geopolitical rivalry*, the situation is similar in some ways but different in others. Purely in material terms, Russia is weaker than the USSR. But that’s not necessarily better for stability. Weakness constrains, but also invites desperation. /4
Ideologically, Russia actually has an easier task than during the Cold War. It only has to chip away at the dominant hegemonic narrative rather than build up their own alternative like in the Communist days. And we’ve seen Russia trying to chip away more and more visibly. /5
Probably most worrying, compared to CW, is that we have tons of arms proliferation but very little arms control. Nukes didn’t stop working just because the Berlin Wall fell down. This is where comparing today to the Cold War is actually helpful in reminding us of the dangers. /6
Ultimately, the Cold War metaphor remains important because so many policy-makers still approach Russia in those terms. This is bad if it exacerbates the ideological confrontation; good if it encourages them to be cautious about escalation. 7/7
