Please feel free to post your own question or topic for discussion here.

Review one or two campaign commercials at the Living Room Candidate site for 2016.  How does the Trump and/or Clinton campaign draw on themes that were prevalent during the Cold War?

Throughout the semester, we have often considered how various cultural forms such as film, television, and consumer culture mediates Cold War anxieties.  Arguably, we have now entered a “second Cold War.”  Can you think of any popular cultural forms that are working to mediate the United States’ unstable and perilous relationships with foreign powers, such as Russia, North Korea, or ISIS?

Which do you think is more threatening, the “cyber cold war,” which Russia currently appears to be winning, or the prospect of “hot war” with North Korea or another hostile power?   

Please use this space to post your own topic or question for discussion on the broad theme of the “new Cold War.”

David E. Sanger discusses whether the Cold War strategy of nuclear deterrence is a viable option for dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea in the present moment.  What do you think?  Are you concerned about the possibility that the United States will pursue a military response to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program?

For today’s class, you had the opportunity to read and/or watch President Donald Trump’s speech before the United Nations in September 2017.  Previously, we examined presidential addresses by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, both of whom were speaking in the context of the Cold War.  In your view, which aspects of Trump”s rhetoric are consistent with Cold War American ideals?  Which are not?  

Osnos, Remnick, and Yaffa point out that Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election could not have been effective if pre-existing conflicts and tensions were not already in place.  They write:  

Even with the rise of new technologies, the underlying truth about such operations hasn’t changed. They are less a way to conjure up something out of nothing than to stir a pot that is already bubbling. In the U.S., a strategy like the alleged hacking of the Democrats was merely an effort to deepen an existing state of disarray and distrust. “For something to happen, many factors have to come together at once,” said Alexander Sharavin, the head of a military research institute and a member of the Academy of Military Sciences, in Moscow, where Gerasimov often speaks. “If you go to Great Britain, for example, and tell them the Queen is bad, nothing will happen, there will be no revolution, because the necessary conditions are absent—there is no existing background for this operation.” But, Sharavin said, “in America those preconditions existed.”

What do you think?  

Osnos, Remnick, and Yaffa write:

Just as Putin no longer fills prison camps with countless “enemies of the people,” as Stalin did, but, rather, makes a chilling example of a famous few . . . his propagandists have taken their cue from foreign forms: magazine shows, shout-fests, game shows, and reality shows. There are many figures in public life who are not permitted to appear on any talk show or news program. Russians can still find independent information on Facebook and various Web sites; critical books and magazines are available in stores and online; Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station, hangs on. But, even in the Internet era, more than eighty per cent of Russians get their news from television. Manipulation of TV coverage is a crucial factor in Putin’s extraordinarily high popularity ratings, typically in excess of eighty per cent—ratings that Donald Trump both admires and envies.

If, as some journalists and policy experts argue, we are now in a “new Cold War,” what role might “manipulation of TV coverage” play in shaping both Americans’ and Russians’ understanding of that war?  

In “Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War,” Osnos, Remnick, and Yaffa assert that Putin seeks “to damage American confidence and to undermine the Western alliances” through cyberattacks and other measures.  The authors include the perspective of Sergey Rogov, academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow:  “Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep . . . ‘I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,’ Rogov said. ‘We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.’”  Having read Osnos, Remnick, and Yaffa’s analysis, do you think Rogov’s fear is warranted?  Is he right to say that “We are back to 1983”?  Why or why not?