EP 741 Are We Now in the Midst of a Second Cold War?

America has more than a rooting interest in wars taking place in places like Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere around the globe.  If we go back to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s, we were led to believe it was the ‘end of history’ and that our ideas about a liberal democratic political framework and a capitalist economic system had prevailed and the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.  Yet, by virtue of a world in conflict, it seems as if that message was not received in the way we had hoped.  The big question is: did America overplay its hand when we strode across the globe as the only superpower?  Could we have embraced a different framework, one our guest calls ‘charter internationalism’ more fundamentally than an adherence to ‘liberal internationalism’?  In his compelling book “The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War,” Richard Sakwa explains how America erred in wanting other powers, most importantly China and Russia, to adopt our governing philosophy when it would have been more advantageous to have them simply accept a rules based order.  How this overreach played out is the source of much of the turmoil we see today and the basis for his book and our discussion.

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