Cold War Christmas Messages We Must Not Forget

by Claudia Rosett:

Too often these days, the Cold War is treated as ancient history — as something from a simpler age of the world. It ended years before the advent of the high-speed Internet, Google and Facebook. It ended a decade before the Sept. 11 Islamist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York. It was a confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR, which sounds a lot simpler than the polyvalent landscape of 2012. Now we have the tumult of the Arab uprisings — mixing promise and menace; the Islamist terror webs probing for targets within our shores; Iran closing on nuclear weapons; North Korea testing nuclear bombs and long-range missiles; the rise of a militant China and a nationalist dictatorship in Russia; and economic debacles in the West that just keep compounding. What possible lessons could be gleaned from the Cold War to address the enormous complexities of our world today?

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