Why We Will Soon Miss The Cold War Analysis
Adam Jacobson – Transnational Security – Position Paper 3 – 9/30/15
In the film “The Great Muppet Caper,” Kermit the Frog sits on a park bench, holding a glass slipper a la “Cinderella” (it belongs to his missing paramour Miss Piggy). A shambolic stranger played by Peter Falk approaches and attempts to guess what Kermit’s story is, launching into a long monologue involving a dry cleaning business, competition and failure, a hapless brother-in-law who runs away to join the circus, and other ridiculous tangents. At the end, he tells Kermit, “That’s your story my friend! Not a happy one, is it?” Kermit looks perplexed and after a minute tells Falk, “You know, it’s amazing. You are 100 percent wrong. Not a single thing you’ve said has been right!” I had a similar reaction when reading John Mearsheimer’s article “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War.”
I’m exaggerating of course, and predicting the future is hard, especially in such a turbulent time in history. To be fair, who knew that NATO would outlive its Cold War purpose? But as a theorist, it’s astounding how wrong Mearsheimer could be when it comes to the fate of Europe after the Cold War. The big future development that he can’t fathom is the creation and rise …show more content…
The danger of hypernationalism that he predicts is still present in places, but the E.U. and NATO have largely prevented it from expanding outside of domestic politics. Instead of Mearsheimer’s multipolar system, Europe has become a new bipolar system: the E.U. and wannabes versus Russia and its hangers-on. The balance is an interdependence that relies on Russia’s dependence on Europe and vice versa. Instead of a “mutually assured destruction” neither Western Europe nor Russia could economically survive the destruction of the
In the film “The Great Muppet Caper,” Kermit the Frog sits on a park bench, holding a glass slipper a la “Cinderella” (it belongs to his missing paramour Miss Piggy). A shambolic stranger played by Peter Falk approaches and attempts to guess what Kermit’s story is, launching into a long monologue involving a dry cleaning business, competition and failure, a hapless brother-in-law who runs away to join the circus, and other ridiculous tangents. At the end, he tells Kermit, “That’s your story my friend! Not a happy one, is it?” Kermit looks perplexed and after a minute tells Falk, “You know, it’s amazing. You are 100 percent wrong. Not a single thing you’ve said has been right!” I had a similar reaction when reading John Mearsheimer’s article “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War.”
I’m exaggerating of course, and predicting the future is hard, especially in such a turbulent time in history. To be fair, who knew that NATO would outlive its Cold War purpose? But as a theorist, it’s astounding how wrong Mearsheimer could be when it comes to the fate of Europe after the Cold War. The big future development that he can’t fathom is the creation and rise …show more content…
The danger of hypernationalism that he predicts is still present in places, but the E.U. and NATO have largely prevented it from expanding outside of domestic politics. Instead of Mearsheimer’s multipolar system, Europe has become a new bipolar system: the E.U. and wannabes versus Russia and its hangers-on. The balance is an interdependence that relies on Russia’s dependence on Europe and vice versa. Instead of a “mutually assured destruction” neither Western Europe nor Russia could economically survive the destruction of the