THE USEFULNESS – OR OTHERWISE – OF
COLD WAR COMPARISONS
Writing for Medium, tech futurist Michael K.
Spencer summed up how many felt about
the current state of play between the major
superpowers, when he said that “far from being
the end of a trade war, it’s the very start of
a battle for supremacy in technology and
economy between the U.S. and China.”
For all of the use of terms like ‘cold war’ and
‘iron curtain’ to refer to the conflict, however,
several noted how inadequate such imagery
is for describing a situation between the U.S.
and another leading power that has never truly
arisen before. The BBC’s defense and diplomatic
respondent Jonathan Marcus, for example,
asserted that “the rivalry between Washington
and Moscow during the Cold War years is
instructive. Not because it is a parallel for today’s