Must-Read: There were at least six different Cold Wars. Respectively, the Cold War in:
- the United States,
- the North Atlantic,
- Eastern Europe,
- East Asia
- Africa, and
- Latin America.
The Cold War in the United States saw realistic yet idealistic centrist advocates of containment by and large, successfully but imperfectly, hold the line and win the three-front long twilight struggle against the adversary behind the iron curtain, against the naïve who did not understand the dangers of Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism, and against the sinister who sought to win domestic political dominance via bad-faith arguments that the containerizes were cowards.
The Cold War in the North Atlantic saw the same struggle--save that the center and reasonable left were united against an unreasonable left that was, nevertheless, more dangerous because the GSFG on the far side of the Fulda Gap was closer.
The Cold War in Eastern Europe saw the rich and lazy of the Western alliance sacrifice two generations to suffer under the knout of the Kremlin, and then saw the rich and lazy refuse to pay the weregild they owed for their indolence.
The Cold War in East Asia saw the United States, tragically, failed to understand in Vietnam that its soft power was much stronger than its hard power; but otherwise rescue a third of a billion people from Mao's dungeons, communes, and work camps.
The Cold War in Africa saw a disaster of moral equivalence as the well-being of the continent who sacrificed for a generation as great powers competed to entrench identical-looking military dictatorships.
The Cold War in Latin America--well, I still want to know what Ronald Reagan told Jeanne Kirkpatrick and what Jeanne Kirkpatrick told her friends among the Argentine generals that made them think at the aid they had given d'Aubission and the contras gave them a check they could cash in to conquer two small islands, 1000 English-speaking shepherds, and 50,000 sheep.
Curiously enough, people's opinions today on Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine seem strangely determined by which Cold War they learned the most about when they were younger.
The past is not only not dead. It is not even past:
Patrick Iber (March 2016): @PatrickIber:
Jeet Heer @HeerJeet: @PatrickIber Would love to hear your thoughts on Chait!
Patrick Iber @PatrickIber: Oh, man, really? OK. Caught a bit of the conversation between you and @davidimarcus and that covered a lot. Here is the Chait essay everyone on the left hates today: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/reminder-liberalism-is-working-marxism-failed.html.
