At Yahoo News Aarthi Swaminathan and Michael B. Kelley report that historian Niall Ferguson declaims that we are now in “Cold War II” with Russia and China:
“Cold War II is different, though, because in Cold War II, China’s the senior partner, and Russia’s the junior partner,” Ferguson explained. “And in Cold War II, the first hot war breaks out in Europe, rather than Asia. This is a bit like the Korean War was, in 1950, where suddenly discovering that cold wars sometimes run hot, but this time, Ukraine is the battlefield.”
He attributes the war in Ukraine to NATO’s not making Ukraine a member.
Ferguson stressed that the “the worst possible thing that we can do is to talk about NATO membership without delivering it. That was what made Ukraine so vulnerable.”
There are many other differences. Imagine that during the original Cold War we had been dependent on the Soviet Union for strategic materials, that our annual trade deficit with the Soviet Union was greater than $300 billion, or that the Soviet economy had been as large as our or larger. Or that we had opened the original Cold War by undermining the international banking system.
If we are in a new Cold War and if we are to prevail, a lot will need to change and, frankly, I see no willingness to make those changes.
