The Cold War We Forgot
Thirty years after its end, the Cold War's lessons have been largely misread. The errors have consequences for how we think about the new competition with China.
The standard American narrative of the Cold War is a story of democratic triumph over totalitarian adversity: the West's combination of moral clarity, economic dynamism, and military deterrence prevailed over the Soviet Union's ideological rigidity and economic stagnation, demonstrating that freedom works and that the United States, as its leading exemplar, should lead the post-Cold War international order.
This narrative is mostly correct as far as it goes. It is also missing large portions of the story that are directly relevant to the new competition with China — portions that the triumphalist framing tends to obscure because they complicate the moral clarity the narrative requires.
The Cold War was not only a story of democratic idealism against Soviet totalitarianism. It was a story of American support for dozens of authoritarian governments across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, whenever their alternatives were perceived as Soviet-aligned. It was a story of covert interventions — in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and elsewhere — that undermined democratic governments in ways whose long-term consequences are still being lived with in those countries. It was a story of proxy wars that killed millions of people in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and Central America while the major powers avoided direct confrontation.
What containment actually was
George Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 and the subsequent "X Article" in Foreign Affairs articulated the strategy of containment that would define American policy for four decades. Kennan's argument was specific: the Soviet system was internally fragile; it depended on an external enemy to justify its internal repression; patient containment of its expansion would, over time, produce either its moderation or its collapse.
This argument was correct in its core prediction and was almost immediately distorted in its application. NSC-68, the 1950 policy document that translated containment into a military posture, treated Kennan's essentially diplomatic concept as a military program and justified a massive rearmament on the grounds that the Soviet threat required overwhelming force rather than patient diplomacy.
Kennan spent the rest of his career criticizing the militarization of the strategy he had articulated. His critique — that the United States was responding to a primarily political challenge with primarily military means, and that the militarization was producing the very confrontational dynamics it was supposed to deter — was consistently dismissed by policymakers who found the military framing more actionable.
The application of this lesson to contemporary China policy is direct. The administration of Xi Jinping, like the Soviet system Kennan analyzed, faces internal vulnerabilities — demographic decline, financial fragility, nationalist pressures that constrain foreign policy flexibility — that may, over time, produce moderation or internal disruption. Patient management of the relationship while competing vigorously in the domains of technology, trade, and political influence may be more effective than the militarized framework of great power competition that is currently dominant in Washington. The lesson of containment, properly read, suggests patience over confrontation. It is not the lesson that is currently being applied.
The nuclear legacy
The Cold War's most significant legacy — the existence of approximately 13,000 nuclear warheads split between the United States and Russia, with additional smaller arsenals in France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — is both routinely discussed and consistently underweighted in serious strategic analysis.
The closest the world came to nuclear war — the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 — was resolved not by superior American resolve or strategic clarity but by back-channel negotiation, deliberate ambiguity, and significant luck. The declassified record of the crisis, which includes accounts of Soviet submarine commanders on the verge of launching nuclear torpedoes in response to what they incorrectly understood as a US attack, suggests that the deterrence system that was supposed to prevent nuclear use came closer to failing than anyone in the American national security establishment acknowledged at the time.
The doctrines that emerged from the Cold War — deterrence through mutually assured destruction, crisis stability through secure second-strike capability — worked in the bipolar superpower confrontation they were designed for. They are poorly suited to a multipolar nuclear environment in which three or more major powers must simultaneously manage deterrence relationships with each other, and in which the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons and hypersonic delivery systems is compressing the decision timescales that deterrence theory requires.
Metaculus forecasts a 12 percent probability of nuclear weapon use — any use, anywhere in the world, by any actor — before 2030. Twelve percent is low in absolute terms; applied to an event of civilization-threatening consequence, it is not a number that serious people should be comfortable with.
What the Chinese Communist Party learned from the Soviet collapse
The CCP's analysis of the Soviet collapse is one of the most consequential intellectual projects of the past thirty years. The conclusion drawn — that the Soviet Union collapsed primarily because Gorbachev permitted political liberalization before economic reform had generated the prosperity that could sustain an opening, and that this error must not be repeated — has shaped Chinese domestic policy in ways that are directly relevant to the current strategic competition.
The emphasis on maintaining the Party's monopoly on political power, the suppression of civil society, the co-optation of the commercial class, and the systematic construction of surveillance infrastructure that allows social control at population scale — all of these are explicitly understood by the CCP leadership as lessons drawn from the Soviet failure.
Whether the lessons will prove adequate — whether the combination of economic growth and political control can indefinitely sustain the social compact that legitimates CCP rule — is the central strategic question of the coming decades. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was resolved by the Soviet system's internal failure. A Cold War with China will be resolved differently, or will not be resolved.
Priya Nair is a contributing writer at The Auguro covering South and Southeast Asia. She was previously a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.