My TakeCold War 2.0 may end up saving US and China from domestic implosion
- Thousands of bridges, roads and bypasses are without funding for urgent repair across the United States, but more than 1,000 expensive US military bases and sites are maintained around the world that never lack funding. By conjuring up a common threat or enemy, those overseas bases may be what ultimately hold the country together
Civil war or another cold war? Facing the possibility of national break-up, the more powerful or influential countries of today will much prefer the latter, among which are the United States, Britain and China. Perhaps we can add a few more, say, India, Russia and the European Union? And if, in the end, the last cold war saved us from nuclear annihilation, precisely because it exposed humanity to it, maybe Cold War 2.0 will be the new emerging structure of international relations to keep nations and blocs from imploding.
A new cold war will make the great powers stand against each other and force lesser ones to pick a side. We are already seeing it today. Nothing holds a community together more effectively than having a commonly accepted threat and an identifiable enemy. Recent polls have shown ordinary Americans (and western Europeans) on one side and Chinese on the other increasingly see each other’s country as a primary threat. “Us vs them”, “with us or against us”: for all our civilisational and technological progress, such basic or primitive political realities, grounded in human nature, still dictate our behaviour.
Now, consider the centrifugal forces at work in those same societies that are pulling themselves apart because of intensifying civil strife. The failure of society is when it cannot address existential threats through established political channels and institutions. And all those countries mentioned are showing such symptoms. The failure of human civilisation will be our collective failure to address the existential threat of climate change.
The United States
The Financial Times recently ran a long provocative review of three books. The article’s headline and subheading went: “Is America heading for civil war? A clutch of books makes an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861”.
The three books cited are: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, and The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche.
“In 2022, America’s two parties are increasingly sorted along racial and identity lines,” the reviewer wrote. “Republicans are white, small town and rural – the party now holds just one truly urban congressional district in New York’s Staten Island. Democrats are now almost entirely urban and multi-ethnic. The habits of a normal democracy in which the losing party forms a loyal opposition are vanishing.
“More than a third of Republicans and Democrats today believe violence is justified to achieve their political ends, compared with less than a tenth apiece in 2017, the year Trump took office. His rhetoric opened the floodgates to separatist feelings. When one party loses, its voters feel as though their America is being occupied by a foreign power. America, Walter points out, has become ‘a factionalised anocracy’ – the halfway state between autocracy and democracy – that is ‘quickly approaching the open insurgency stage’.”