OPINION:
Oh, for the halcyon days of the Cold War’s end when we all breathed easier and those of us old enough to remember duck-and-cover exercises at school could stand in the sunlight once more (“We’ve entered a new Cold War with China,” web, March 7).
Wow, weren’t those few years good? Boris Yeltsin groomed Vladimir Putin as a post-Soviet New Ager, Ukraine cashiered its nuclear weapons, George H.W. Bush rallied the good guys against Saddam Hussein’s Kuwait grab and we danced to Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”
But we should have remembered an insight from Karl Marx: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
We may have to reprise some of that duck-and-cover, for there is nothing farcical when nuclear threats are lobbed around by an irritated Russian tyrant, a rebarbative Iran is on the brink, North Korea regularly fires delivery vehicles into the Sea of Japan and China’s last trace of inscrutability is disappearing into the mists off the Taiwan Strait.
A new cold war very much like the old one is brewing, and we had best be prepared.
PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati
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