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May 23, 2023

The Soviet Union’s 1989 fall marked the end of a half-century-long Cold War, prompting hopes that such globe-spanning conflicts were finally relegated to the past.  But in the two decades since 9/11, the resurgence of great-power conflict has effectively extinguished those hopes.

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With good reason, many have come to believe, per Michael Lind, that “we are in Cold War II now.”

Meeting such a geopolitical challenge requires that it first be accurately described.  On one side stand the world’s liberal democracies, along with several incipient or partial democracies.  At the core of this group are the Anglosphere, Western and Central Europe, the democratic “Asian Tigers,” and Israel. 

Leading the other side are China, Russia, and Iran — all three being descendants of historically imperial autocracies.  Two features of this new Axis of repression make Cold War II especially dangerous: the Axis members’ ruthless genocidal conduct and their exportable model of high-tech totalitarian tyranny.  These realities present existential challenges, which demand both the attention and the firm resolve of the democracies.

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With respect to genocide, Russia and China are all too experienced in this most malevolent of practices.  The 1930s terror-famine in Ukraine, Stalin’s subsequent Great Terror, and China’s absurdly misnamed Great Leap Forward — through these and similar horrors across dozens of gulags and laogai, Russia and China perpetrated tens of millions of mass murders before and during Cold War I.

Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilians and China’s genocidal imprisonment and brutalization of a million Uyghurs shows that nothing has changed here in Cold War II.  For those on the front lines, this so-called “Cold” War is hot, horrific, and massively murderous.

As for Iran, while its genocidal ambitions remain presently unrealized, its state media make relentlessly clear Iran’s intent to annihilate every last one of Israel’s seven million Jews.  Iran’s having surrounded Israel with heavily armed terror syndicates, along with its unceasing rush to build deployable nuclear weapons, makes clear the extreme gravity of this threat.

The readiness of all three countries to unleash and carry out genocides is not just a moral issue of massive proportions.  It is also a geopolitical signal of great significance — namely, that these countries will stop at virtually nothing in their pursuit of global dominion.

Moreover, unlike our adversaries in Cold War I, this new alliance presents a second existential threat, the likes of which the democracies have never encountered before: a sophisticated, high technology model of totalitarian governance.  Imagine Orwell’s 1984, now powered by semiconductors and supercomputers.

On this front, China is the undisputed leader.  As national security expert Daniel Benjamin explains, China has developed, installed, and “is now exporting internationally a suite of surveillance, facial recognition, and data tools that together equip governments to repress citizens on a scale and with a ruthless algorithmic effectiveness that previous generations of strongmen could only dream of.”