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Where Have All the Cold Warriors Gone?


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where_have_all_the_cold_warrio.html
American Thinker:

In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the foundations that had undergirded world politics for decades were crumbling, John Mearsheimer penned his celebrated article: "Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War." In the years since, the article has come to embody a specific, nostalgic lament. Yet, viewing Mearsheimer through the prism of today's circumstances, one must ask: is it really the Cold War that we miss?

It's important to clarify that Mearsheimer's piece is not exactly what many caricaturize it to be. Notably, the article is focused, to the exclusion of all else, on the dynamics of security and stability in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet empire. What the Cold War had given Europe, Mearsheimer argued, was a cure for the "untamed anarchy" that had plagued the continent for so many centuries. With that ballast eroding away, you'd likely see the resurrection of old interstate rivalries and quite possibly nuclear proliferation in the region. In the end, whether we got the old Europe of constant warring or a nuclearized Europe with a problematic multi-polar deterrence, we would almost certainly "miss the Cold War."

Looking back on it, the utter Euro-centrism in Dr. Mearsheimer's most famous (or infamous) piece of writing seems positively quaint. That's a point that has been made often. Critics have been unrelenting.

What's even more striking, though, is how Mearsheimer could have been so right for such wrong reasons.

We do certainly miss the Cold War, but not because Europe, in the intervening years, has reverted to its 18th-century self. It obviously hasn't. No, the reasons are very different from those anticipated by Mearsheimer.snip
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