Will armchair crusaders ever come round to declaring, ‘one Cold War was enough’?
The ‘Cold War’ – which began as a struggle of allegiances in Central Europe that spread to the four corners of the world – was not ‘won’, except if you believe it to have been a fight between those who wanted the struggle to end violently and others who wanted it to end peacefully. The latter group prevailed not by winning a world plebiscite between good and evil, capitalism and communism, or any other cosmic opposition. It ended peacefully, on the whole, because leaders on each side had the good sense to call it off. That the Western way of life also prevailed did not signify anything other than the good sense on the part of a plurality of people around the world who stuck their finger in the wind and judged which way it was blowing, due mainly to advances in certain technologies. The wind and the finger could just as easily have shown a different direction if those advances had been mastered in different places and at different times.
China’s leaders today appear to understand that simple point. They are right to spurn another silly, egotistical concept like the Cold War. They want to be rich, powerful, and supreme in their homeland, and will do whatever they like elsewhere in order to obtain that result. Whether they and their ‘democratic’ neighbours (including the USA, which remains an Asian power) will accommodate themselves to it peaceably or acrimoniously – which is to say, creatively or clumsily – is the choice at hand, not whether China-in-the-world is the vanguard of a long twilight struggle between autocracy and democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a common European home had a good deal to do with bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end. The common European home still needs to be built, and not many people speak of a common Asian home. Maybe it would be better to do both of these things instead of savouring another Cold War.
For those who latch on unthinkingly to a Kulturkampf – particularly a recycled one – tend to be the losers.