We have read a great deal about a new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the nation was tragically divided against itself. Some of us have ruminated in print, in this publication and elsewhere, on this emergent reality.
With the back-to-back announcements that Finland and Sweden intend to apply for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, "Cold War II" is no longer merely a handy locution for columnists and those who pontificate on barstools.
The accession of these Nordic nations to Washington's principal instrument of power projection is assured and will be complete in very short order. This will solidify the wall Washington and its European clients insist on erecting to divide the world yet more perversely and destructively than it was for the four decades and some of Cold War I.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of this turn of events for Finns, Swedes and Russians, certainly, but also for all Europeans and, at the horizon, for everyone on this planet, alive or yet to be born.
Remember the famous lines from Kipling?
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat"
Kipling published The Ballad of East and West in 1889, the British Empire's high noon, and in it mourned the great divide between the imperial powers and their subjects. His deepest regret was for all the lost humanity obscured by the enduring but artificial line humans etched into the Earth long ago to distinguish the West from the rest.
Judgment Day appearing other than imminent, we will be in for many seasons of regret as Washington constructs the infrastructure that will define Cold War II. The Finns' and Swedes' accessions to NATO suggest an edifice more permanent than either the Iron Curtain or, on the other side of the world post-1949, its bamboo variant. There will be few doors and windows in this wall this by Washington's design. It will be hard to see either in or out.
Cold War II
And here's the thing about this profoundly misguided project. The populations of the Western post-democracies will pay a far higher price for letting their leaders build the thick stone wall of Cold War II than those it is supposed to consign to the wilderness. Westerners will pay this price in blindness, in ignorance, and in isolation from the global majority.
If your proposition is to isolate others and the great majority of humanity wants no part of isolated others and a world of walls you've probably got it backwards: He who would ostracize others will find himself ostracized.
It has turned out to be a hop-skip, I have to say, from "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!" to erecting another as quickly as the stones can be set in place. Now we know what President Joe Biden means by "Build Back Better."
Ever since the Russian intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, we have watched as many perfectly innocent people musical conductors, athletes, professors, artists, writers have lost their jobs or been otherwise censured for refusing to denounce the Russian incursion publicly, or in some cases simply for being Russian. It reminds me of a passage in the New Testament, Matthew 15:11: Roughly paraphrased, he who would defile another defiles only himself.
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