Courtesy TomDispatch

Yes, it’s hard even to remember (if you aren’t of a certain advanced age), but I grew up in a world where the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, both increasingly armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and so unable to fight each other directly without the possibility of the planet going up in flames, engaged in what came to be known as a Cold War. Meanwhile, we kids found ourselves in our own school-time version of the possibility that the Cold War might turn all too hot — with regular duck and cover” drills (while sirens wailed outside) and, not having shells like Bert the Turtle, we had to dive under our desks to protect ourselves from the Russian nukes theoretically heading our way.

But that was then… this is… hmmm… Could it be possible that, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy suggests today, without a duck-and-cover drill in sight, we’re nonetheless in a new Cold War with a rising power (all too well-armed with nukes), this time in Asia, a war” that the island of Taiwan threatens to turn hot any day now? And yet, isn’t it strange — among all the horrors on this planet from Ukraine to Gaza and (endlessly) beyond — that this new Cold War gets remarkably little attention, even as both sides in it grow ever more edgy and even aggressive?

So let McCoy, author of a classic book on the rise and potential fall of the first of those powers, the United States, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, lay out for us how the two great powers on this planet at present (Russia now being a great warring mess) are facing off ever more dangerously. Just what we need now, right? Tom