People who destroy whole nations do not have the right to teach us democracy and the values of living free. Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Another recent report, from the International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, noted that more than half of all democracies have experienced a decline in at least one aspect of their democracy over the last 10 years, including the United States. American President Joe Biden

We consider ourselves a Democracy, it’s in our DNA. Moreover, our Democracy is so strong and so good that we have entrusted ourselves to be the protectors of Democracy: worldwide. At least that is what we tell ourselves, incessantly, more than is seemly, it seems to me. It’s like we need constant reassurance that we are not the bad guys. Our national story is that we are such a good democratic nation that our very existence is a threat to autocratic states – or fascist states if you prefer – because we are an advertisement for the wonders of Democracy.

We also, somehow, relate Democracy with Capitalism, in a soft sort of way. Nobody would say that Democracy and Capitalism are the same thing, but, in our national story, they are closer than distant cousins. When the Old Soviet Union imploded, our national reaction was less like “Oh boy, now they can control their own destiny by voting.” and more like, “Oh boy, now they’ll be able to get the nice things that are only available under Capitalism; they won’t have to put up with the shoddy clothes, cars, TVs, airplanes – the list is close to endless – that are a result of grey, faceless, Communism.”

However, our natural enemy isn’t really autocratic states – and here I was going to say it is Communist or Socialist states, but that is also wrong – we are fine doing business with the Saudis or China, or, even Russia, we are fine with selling weapons to Vietnam, after all. Looking again, it seems to me that our natural enemies are really countries that threaten our global hegemony.

For the first forty years or so after World War II, that threat came from the USSR – the United Socialist Soviet Republic – and they were our enemy. We fought a forty-year war over who would be the most influential – which is sort of a euphemism for most powerful – but, because both the United States and the USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear devices¹, both countries were afraid that the war would turn into a nuclear exchange destroying both countries. So we rarely fought directly and, then, not on the battlefield. Neither country wanted to be obliterated. In 2014, I wrote a post entitled, World War I and Cold War II in which I postulated that we were entering another Cold War that had been generated by the same mistakes we made with Germany after World War I that resulted in World War II (check it out here).

To quote myself, Russia is pushing back just like Germany did when its troops marched into the Rhineland, and we will not like it, but there is not much we can do except move troops around and install sanctions. I don’t think that the new Cold War II will turn into a shooting war but I do think it will involve a lot of pushing around the edges and posturing. It will make it much harder to solve our mutual problems.

However, I was sort of wrong on the no-shooting war prediction part. However, if President Volodymyr Zelensky hadn’t been so brave and President Joseph Biden hadn’t been old enough to have been around for the first round of the Cold War, Russia might have rolled over Ukraine as they did in Georgia and Crimea. But Zelensky seems to be another Hồ Chí Minh and Biden, unlike Bush or Obama, saw this as a continuation of the first Cold War in which the US and the USSR fought by proxy.

I know that this war doesn’t look like a proxy war: it is in Europe so it looks more like World War II than Vietnam, and, to state the obvious, the Russo-Ukrain is a shooting war for the poor souls who are actually in Ukraine and we see on TV. But it is similar to the Korean War or the Vietnam War in that one side is fighting a war with an opponent supported by the other side rather than fighting the other side directly. What is different from Korea or Vietnam is that our side is the covert player and Russia is the overt player. What I think is also different from Vietnam is that we are on the side that is fighting for their independence, the side that is trying to break away from the oppressor. In other words, what is different from Vietnam is that we are on the right side of history.

1. In 1985, the USSR had about 39,700 nuclear devices and we had about 23,000. Now, because of treaties, both sides have drastically reduced their nuclear capability. (France and the UK had about 350 each to give you an idea of scale.)