Cold War Analogies: Francis J. Gavin on how (and how not) to use the Cold War as a guide

We reach for the Cold War as if it were a really good pocket tool: compact, familiar, ready to deal with any problem in today’s world. U.S.–China rivalry? “Cold War 2.0.” Russia and the West? “Cold War redux.” The appeal is obvious: the Cold War offers a story we already know how to tell—great-power tension, nuclear standoff, ideological blocs, and finally, a tidy ending.

But as Francis J. Gavin argues, analogies always smuggle in assumptions. To label something a “new Cold War” is to commit to a whole strategic script: decades of rivalry, fixed blocs, and an expectation of how the story ends. But what if the conditions that defined the 20th-century Cold War—its nuclear stability, its institutions, even its duration—don’t apply now? And what if these words “Cold War”that you use do not mean what I mean by the words “Cold War”?

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age and Thinking Historically: A Guide for Policymakers.

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