In the first Cold War, the United States and our allies had a secret weapon against the Soviet Union and its satellites.
It didn’t come from the CIA. Nor was it a product of DARPA or the weapons labs at Los Alamos. It was communism.
Communism aided the West because it saddled an imperialist Russian state with an unworkable and unpopular economic system that could not keep up with its free-market competitors. “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” – the quintessential Russian joke about working life in the workers’ paradise – goes far to explain why a regime with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads simply petered out.
Now we are entering the Second Cold War, this time with China. That’s the takeaway from this month’s U.S.-China summit in Anchorage, Alaska, in which both sides made clear that they had not only clashing interests but also incompatible values.
A few days after the summit, China and Iran signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic pact, including provisions for joint weapons development and intelligence sharing.