Welcome to The Next Cold War: a place focused on US imperial ambition and the forces getting in its way.

While for many Americans the end of the Cold War in 1991 represented a happy and glorious event that was both affirming and relieving, not everyone was imbued with new hopes.

The Cold War had the virtue of being both a lucrative business opportunity and an inspiration for that faction of the US elite often referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex. Fighting the Soviet Union yielded immense government contracts to insiders and an opening to promote a clear worldview of a struggle between good and evil. For them, the end of the Cold War went beyond the economic hardships caused by lost urgency for defense and intelligence spending; it was an existential crisis.

Through the 90s there was a considerable effort to reclaim the old clarity and opportunities of the Cold War with nominally-Communist China filling in for the Soviet Union, but to no avail. The former Soviet Union, including Russia, was too burdened by instability to even appear to be a threat. Though the US continued expanding its power and influence across the globe, no peer competitor emerged to challenge it.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Islamic extremism seemed poised to finally offer a grand and comprehensive enough foe to replace the Soviet Union, but the hazards of asymmetric warfare and the muddy morality of Middle East politics led to an American public less-than-enthused and by no means galvanized behind a new vision of security and meaning.

The failure of the “War on Terror” paradigm to articulate an enemy dangerous enough to support a massive defense budget and unite an increasingly polarized population has not thwarted or even diminished those determined to find a new great opponent and justify an empire without end.