If we stand now on the brink of a second Cold War, as many analysts have argued, it’s because the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, calculates that his odds of winning are better this time around.
Looking back on the lessons of the Cold War — and at the state of our politics now — it would be hard to conclude he’s wrong. It’s much tougher to demonstrate the rightness of your ideology when, increasingly, you don’t seem to really believe in it yourself.
It sometimes astounds me how fast the country moved on from what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle” with communism. Within 20 years of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, most Americans couldn’t have told you what the Cold War was about.
We mostly remember it now as a triumph of sheer American might. The shorthand version holds that America essentially spent the Soviets into submission, driving up the cost of the arms race until Moscow bankrupted itself and broke apart.
This is true — but it is not the deeper truth.
We won the Cold War not because we had better soldiers or more reliable weapons or more disposable income, although all of those were advantages. We won because we were right.
We were right that liberal democracy was a better and more enduring form of governance than statist repression. We were right about the superiority of capitalism over collectivism.
And we were right about the essential power of human rights and liberty. That belief, however imperfectly we might have personified it, rallied much of the world to our cause and inspired ripples of rebellion throughout the Soviet bloc and elsewhere.
This partly explains why President Biden has often used the term “Cold War” when talking about China — because China’s repression is every bit as ruthless as the Soviets’, and ours is still the better idea. In some ways, for policymakers of the president’s generation, the notion of another Cold War must feel like a return to steady ground.
After all, for 30 years, the foreign policy establishment has cast about for a single, recognizable framework to fill the void left by the sudden disappearance of the U.S.S.R. For a while, instability itself was the enemy. Then, after 2001, it seemed the “War on Terror” would keep us busy for decades.
But what cleaner construct could there be than the resumption of a global conflict we already understand and know how to fight? This is what Putin’s bid to reassemble his empire has given us, at least for the moment: a return to clarity.
Just because you win a war once, though, doesn’t mean you’re destined to win it again. And if we think the nation is up for another extended standoff with Russian tyranny, then we need to face the frightening state of the democracy that was once our greatest strength.
The truth is that we’re not ready for this right now.
Our once-sturdy consensus around liberal democracy — a basic commitment to free speech, civil debate, laws and values over demagogues, division and disinformation — is crumbling with alarming speed.
The prosperity that once raised the standard of living for the middle class is waning now, as faithless capital flees to foreign shores and conservatives look to slash every tax they can find, widening the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else.
A Republican Party that once led the fight against godless communism (that’s how all those evangelical Christians got into politics, by the way) now bows to a leader who calls Putin a “genius.” Rather than opposing Russian aggression, Ronald Reagan’s political descendants roll back voting rights and support armed insurrectionists in the U.S. Capitol.
A public that once took pride in its embrace of reality — that laughed at Pravda and clumsy Soviet communiques — is suddenly drowning in disinformation, to the point where we can’t even agree on whether the president is legitimately elected.
Our once-inspiring voice as a leader of nations has been replaced by the echoing chant of “America First.” Our single most important export to the rest of the world — the idea of liberal democracy as the advancement of humankind — looks defective right out of the box.
You don’t have to be a seasoned Kremlinologist to deduce that Putin sees all of this, too. In fact, he has played an active role in fomenting our civil and political chaos over the past five years, meddling in elections and making Donald Trump his patsy before the world.
Through Putin’s lens, we probably look nothing at all like the steely country that won the Cold War, with an almost theological devotion to free markets and free minds. He must see us as a country increasingly like his own, willing to indulge our own brands of tyranny and propaganda, riven by tribal tensions and intolerant of dissent.
When you look at it that way, why wouldn’t Putin roll the dice on another westward lurch? Why wouldn’t he gamble that we lack the moral clarity to triumph again? Why would he stop at Ukraine?
I’m not arguing that America can’t prevail in a rematch of the Cold War, if that’s where we’re headed. Nor am I saying that we should shrink from the military and moral re-investment it might take to contain Putin’s ambitions.
There’s a pinched view on the left that America faces a choice between restoring its own liberties and protecting them around the world. “The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in Foreign Affairs last June, arguing against a Cold War with China, “is taking place not between countries but within them — including in the United States.”
If this was true before Putin’s Ukrainian gambit, then it isn’t now. The United States shouldn’t have to choose domestic investment over confrontation with global bullies; we can, and have, done both. We can afford to do it again.
But it would be reckless to think our political crises at home are somehow separate from the looming conflict abroad. No nation can lead the fight against tyranny abroad if it is busy stamping out democracy and assaulting truth at home.
I don’t know exactly how we find our way back to the broad agreement that no matter how much we might disagree politically, our underlying convictions are unshakable. I suspect it starts with leaders — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is a pretty good example — who are willing to denounce un-American extremism.
But if we forget everything else about the existential threat that dominated many of our childhoods, we should at least remember this: Weapons alone didn’t win the first Cold War. And they won’t win the next one, either.
Matt Bai, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a journalist, author and screenwriter. He spent more than a decade at the New York Times, where he was the chief political writer for the Sunday magazine and a columnist for the newspaper, and five years as the national political columnist for Yahoo News. Twitter