Featured image: (Pacer Graphic/Dylan Sucler)
Everyone in modern-day America says the Cold War ended in 1991.
What they didn’t mention is that we act like it never did. In 1991, the news screamed, “The Cold War is over!” or “America won the fight!”
The Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell and America came out as the hero, like we always seem to do. Cool, great ending. No lives were lost, and everyone packed up and went home. End of story, right? Not really.
If you listen to how U.S. officials talk about the world, it sounds suspiciously familiar. Different countries, same script and same rhetoric. New decade, same mindset. America just stopped calling it a “Cold War” and started using words like rising tensions, strategic threats and global security. Which is basically all the same things, except better PR.
The truth is very simple to anyone who looks hard enough: The Cold War didn’t end. We kept the energy and updated the words we used to sound fancy. And that mindset is doing what it always does, splitting the modern world into heroes vs. villains and then throwing its hands up, surprised when everything falls apart.
Dr. Jeffery Bibbee, professor of history and the dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, said that he believes the Cold War ended as the pinpointed conflict of the United States vs. the Soviet Union. But he also argued the way people think about conflict hasn’t fully changed or moved past it.
“We often still try to create binary structures in which we see conflicts as us vs. them,” Bibbee said, noting that the “them” has changed since 1990. The structure of the familiar remains the same.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, guys: Nuance is not America’s strong suit, especially when it comes to foreign policy. America doesn’t do “complicated global history with 12 contributing factors, here’s A, B and C.” We do: Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy?
Take Iran as an example. In most political conversations, Iran is not presented as a country with its values, but rather as a country with its human rights violations. It’s presented as a warning label, that it’s the villain, the guy in the black ski mask sneaking through the night. A problem that has to be dealt with.
That’s it, no entry point into history unless you actually read into it. There’s no real explanation at all, and the American government tells us when we learn about conflict: Don’t question it, be good capitalists and defend democracy. People absorb that because it’s easy to digest. It fits the Cold War template perfectly: target a country first and explain it later, if anyone actually cares. That’s not information, it’s conditioning us to be good little Americans and not question our governmental overlords.
Now look at China. The way the U.S. talks about China sounds like we installed the DLC. Trade wars, tech wars and soft power wars. As if most are asking, “Who’s winning the century?” It’s always framed like a stick measuring competition, and there’s a scoreboard no one agreed to keep. Yet everyone is expected to care. Sure, there are real issues, but the way it’s regurgitated to us turns into a competition of male ego. Like the entire planet is in a group project and whoever puts their name on the PowerPoint first wins the game.
It’s not an analysis of who’s actually a threat; it’s sports commentary with destructive stakes. Bibbee also pointed out that the simplification of it all isn’t just a political game; it’s human nature.
“We believe in a binary world, tall, short; fat, skinny,” he stated. “It’s always been this idea of easy and quick division as a way to understand complex situations.”
The worst part of all this is that it works, and not because of the accuracy, but because it’s so very easy to understand. The part no one likes to admit is that labeling is an addictive art in the world. It makes situations clear and gives the labels of who the protagonist is in the story and who the antagonist is. It makes it easy for people to point the finger at something and say, “That’s the world’s problem!” It’s easier to label than to admit the world is complicated, globalized and not built for the global drama club.
Bibbee also said to be cautious of oversimplification. He said that public understanding is way bigger than just the news media.
“Our understanding of the world does not come exclusively from news,” he said. “It also comes from movies, television and books and social media and TikTok influencers and a whole range of individuals and sources that can help influence our thinking.”
He also said that people associate all too often government ideals with the people of a country.
“We have to separate the general public from their political leadership,” Bibbee said. “Russians were just as frightened of us as we were of them.”
So, a revolution is a 360-degree circle, and we called the Cold War a democratic revolution. It really is a 360-degree circle because we ended up back where we started. It’s the same as 1955: different countries, same ideals and mindsets, different headlines, same rhetoric, different era, same need to define ourselves as the police of the world. The Cold War may be over, but we keep bringing it up in new places and calling it something else, like America tends to do.
