Mediaboss Marketing

Jonah GoldbergTribune Content Agency

Its hard to pick up a foreign policy journal or even turn on the TV without encountering someone predicting, recommending or lamenting a new Cold War with Russia, China or both.

This is entirely understandable and even justifiable, if you mean a new period of strategic competition, pressure and geopolitical tension that falls short of all-out war. Such a lower-case cold war is already on display.

The U.S. and our allies are doing nearly everything short of declaring a hot war on Russia for its immoral aggression against Ukraine. Things are not so tense with China, but theres a broad consensus, particularly among Republicans, that containing China to use a Cold War term should become central to American foreign policy. And even many who disagree believe we are entering a new Cold War with China whether we want one or not. After all, sometimes wars, cold or hot, are not wars of choice.

I agree that new cold wars with Russia and China are simultaneously necessary and not necessarily desirable. But I worry that the semantic confusion of the historic Cold War and this new cold war could get us into trouble. George Orwell observed in Politics and the English Language that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

People are also reading

The Cold War was wholly a creature of its time. Indeed, as Orwell himself observed in his 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, our conflict with the Soviet Union was a product of the nuclear age, and he predicted that nuclear weapons would make the kind of war that had just concluded a few months earlier unlikely.

The fear of nuclear war still constrains our actions and I hope our adversaries but the differences between the Cold War era and today are profound.

To start, the Cold War was not a time of sustained peace. The Korean and Vietnam wars were part of the Cold War, as were the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

It was very easy to cut off economic relations with the Soviet Union, because we had so few to begin with. The same holds to a large extent with contemporary Russia, which may be a nuclear superpower but is an economic piker. Its GDP is less than half of Californias (Russias per capita GDP is an eighth of Californias).

Meanwhile, China is the worlds second largest economy and a global manufacturing powerhouse. Any expectation that the U.S. and the international community would sever ties with China over a Taiwan invasion the way they have over Russias invasion of Ukraine seems overly optimistic. China crushed democracy in Hong Kong and is putting Uyghurs in concentration camps, and the international business community has for the most part shrugged.

The Soviets vowed to liberate the world from capitalism, bourgeois democracy and religion. That kind of ideology made it comparatively easy to garner political support for containment yet even then, there was ample domestic and international opposition to Americas anti-communist policies.

Indeed, under God was officially inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance to differentiate America from the godless Communists. When Sen. Homer Ferguson, R-Mich., introduced the legislation, he said, I believe this modification of the pledge is important because it highlights one of the real fundamental differences between the free world and the Communist world, namely belief in God.

No one in the House or Senate spoke in opposition to the change.

For good or ill, it seems implausible anything like that would be possible today. Religion no longer binds the nation the same way and our domestic culture wars whether over COVID-19 pandemic response or school curricula or Vladimir Putin as anti-woke hero do not seem very compatible with a new cold war. And freedom itself is no longer the rallying cry it once was on either the left or the right.

Orwell argued that some phrases come to us like parts of a prefabricated hen-house and end up doing our thinking for us. We may indeed face a new cold war, but we need fresh thinking that doesnt necessarily flow from old phrases like Cold War.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch. Goldbergs column is provided by Tribune Content Agency.

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

Read this article:
Jonah Goldberg: Let's not confuse the Cold War of the 1950s with what's happening today - Lynchburg News and Advance