The Cold War is heating up

Suppose Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in the mid-1980s and woken last week to the news that the United States was updating its nuclear deterrence strategy to face the growing likelihood of a joint strike by Russia , China , and North Korea . How might our work-shy Dutch American react?

His first thought would surely be that little had changed. The West was still being threatened by communist expansionism. Authoritarian governments still resented open societies. There was still a global struggle between freedom and collectivism, a struggle that might lead to nuclear catastrophe if it got out of hand.

Rip would be on to something. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, old fault lines remain. Russia is now Orthodox and nationalist rather than atheist and revolutionary but is still run on the basis of dictatorship, exploitation, and the subordination of the law to the whims of the elites.

China has given up on Marxist economics, but not on Leninist politics. Since President Xi Jinping took over in 2012, the country has become terrifyingly autocratic, with independent journalists, bloggers, and lawyers silenced, and tech companies conscripted to create a surveillance state.

Look around the world and marvel at the extent to which Cold War alignments continue to shape geopolitics. Only the countries of Eastern Europe, including the Baltic States, have shaken off the legacy of authoritarianism and become pluralist.

Elsewhere, states allied to the old Warsaw Pact are generally still friendly to postcommunist Russia. In the Middle East, Syria remains the Kremlin’s strongest ally. Although the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen ceased to exist in 1990, the Houthis have taken over as the local enemies of the West.

Further East, Vietnam and Laos never stopped being communist, but postcommunist Mongolia remains friendly to Russia and China. In Africa, the autocrats generally attract support from old Cold War allies, such as Mali. In the Western hemisphere, three states are dependably anti-Western, and two of them, Cuba and Nicaragua, date that stance from their membership of the anticapitalist bloc in the 1980s. Only Venezuela is new to the party.

Marxism, in the sense of common ownership, may have lost ground. But the coercive societies it created have proved depressingly durable. Consider North Korea, the state that has arguably changed the least since our henpecked hero fell into his alcoholic stupor in the 1980s, perhaps from too many Blue Hawaiians. It is still notionally socialist. Yet it is also a dynastic autocracy of a kind that would have been recognizable to any Iron Age slave emperor. We see in North Korea what a lot of Western intellectuals refused to see while the Cold War was at its height, namely that revolutionary socialism is a racket, a way to maintain what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call an “extractive state.”

Extractive states have been the norm throughout human history because, by definition, they suit the people running them. But the worst kind of extractive state is the totalitarian state because it will not tolerate civil associations.

When they seized power, communists nationalized or proscribed every voluntary group that used to fill the space between state and citizen. When, for example, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party seized power in 1948, Janos Kádar, as minister of home affairs, abolished over 5,000 independent associations: churches, charities, chess clubs, Boy Scout troops, and village bands.

After such vandalism, it is hard to rebuild. Totalitarianism teaches people to disbelieve, distrust, and dissemble. Sir Roger Scruton aptly called it “the great sin that lay at the heart of the Communist system — the sin of isolating individuals from their fellows, and then turning the spotlight of interrogation on them so as to watch them squirm.”

The surprising thing is that some postcommunist states have managed to become open societies. It turned out that Estonians, unlike Eritreans, and Czechs, unlike Chinese, had just about enough democratic muscle memory to fall back on. But, after the initial rush to liberty in 1990, things stalled and began to go into reverse.

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Since 2012, more states have ceased to be free than have moved in the opposite direction. Unfree states, now as during the Cold War, hate open societies because they don’t want their own serf-like populations to pick up dangerous ideas. Hence Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and hence the need for continuing Western vigilance and deterrence.

In recent weeks, two things have happened that, during the Cold War, might easily have been triggers for an all-out nuclear conflagration. First, Israel and Iran have come to blows. Second, NATO weapons have been used directly against Russian troops. The Cold War, it seems, isn’t over. It isn’t even cold.