Hello, Cold War II!

I’m a child of the 1980s, which means that I grew up during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was always a specter in my life. My mother told me stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Living in her native Puerto Rico at the time, she talked about how scary it was to feel that we were stumbling towards a nuclear conflict. Luckily the worst was averted.

The Soviet Union was that boogyman that loomed in our collective psyche. It seeped into every part of our culture, including sports. We cheered when the Americans beat the Soviet hockey team at the Lake Placid Olympics of 1980. I remember feeling sad when the American Olympic team boycotted the 1980 Summer Games which were held in Moscow. The boycott was in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviets responded by boycotting the 1984 Summer Games held in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, as I got older, I started to have that very same fear of nuclear war. Most kids of my generation were fearful as well. Everyone lived in under this shadow of a world-ending conflict and there were some that were sure they wouldn’t make it to adulthood. The culture of the early 80s was filled with movies on war with the Soviets that could go hot. Of course, there were the disaster films that simulated what a nuclear attack would look like such as The Day After and Threads. War Games and the first Terminator movies showed us how computers could put all of humanity at risk.

My husband is a native of North Dakota, a state that if it seceded back in the 80s it would have become a nuclear power in its own right. With two Air Force bases stocked with B-52s at the ready and missile silos not far from where he grew up, he lived with the knowledge that if the worst were to happen, then he and his family would be vaporized since North Dakota would be a target.

But then something happened. A new leader of the Soviet Union came to power. Mikhail Gorbachev was someone in the words of the late UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that “we could do business with.” Here was a man that seemed to have an eternal smile on his face, which was so different than the stern leaders that had led the Soviet Union in the past. Paired with the avuncular Ronald Reagan they came together as some kind of odd couple. I can remember seeing that image from November 1985 in Geneva. Ronald Reagan bounded down the stairs with a smile on his face and extended his hand. Thank handshake was the beginning of a changed relationship between the East and West. Gorbachev visited the United States and Americans connected with him and his fashionable wife Raisa.

Then came 1989. Changes started happening in the Warsaw Pact nations. Poland. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. Democracy seemed to flower in nations that had not known of freedom for decades. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When Germany was reunited in 1990, it marked an ending of the Cold War. It really ended on Christmas Day 1991, as we saw the flag of the Soviet Union come down replaced by the Russian flag. Each of the Republics of the USSR, were now free to chart their own course.

We entered the 1990s into a different world. The US and Russia reduced the amount of nukes. New nations were taking their first steps as independent entities from Moscow’s rule. Eastern Europe was now free and democratic. We now started to see Russia not as an enemy, but as a friend. NASA sent astronauts to the Russian space station Mir. Together with other nations we created the International Space Station.It seemed like after decades of dealing with the Russians as soulless totallitarians, we were able to see each other as true friends. My fears of nuclear war faded into the background. Movies like The Day After now seemed anachronistic to an age where we were at peace with our sworn enemy.

But things changed once Vladimir Putin became President. None of us knew it at first. I think we were still basking in the post Cold War glow. But Putin started to amass more and more power and taking away more from the public. Journalists seemed to be prone to fall out of windows for some reason. Opposition parties and civil society groups slowly disappeared. He was dismantling Russia’s nascent democracy.

By the late aughts, it was becoming clear Putin was not someone in favor of democracy, but just a modern version of the stern Soviet leaders I grew up with. He went to war with former Soviet Republics like Georgia in 2008. Just as the games wrapped up in Sochi, Russia, put sent in troops to annex Crimea in Ukraine and later took two regions in Eastern Ukraine. Russian hackers were able to get involved in the 2016 Presidential election. Putin was slowly killing the post-Cold War order, but I think many of us thought it was still possible.

But in the early morning hours of February 24, as bombs started raining down on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa in Ukraine, the final nail was hammered into the post-Cold War’s coffin. Vladimir Putin stuck a knife into the back of the international order and left it for dead. That 30-year era where democracy seemed on the march, where Russia joined the rest of the world, where the fear of nuclear war shrunk, is all gone.

Welcome to the Cold War II.

What this means for my Generation Z cohorts is that you will start to see Russia not just as another nation, but a dark force in the world. You will start to worry about nuclear war. Putin’s even mentioned having a second Cuban Missile Crisis. We might even see a new version of The Day After. Get used to learning words and phrases like First Strike. DEFCON. Containment. Iron Curtain. Mutually assured destruction. Arms race. Get used to wondering if you will ever see adulthood. Get used to living in a changed world.

Some will say the world changed long ago and they might be right. But at least until yesterday, we could pretend that the world was safe, that there were no wolves ready to wreak havoc in the world. We could pretend that mushroom clouds and authoritarian rule were just a thing of the past.

But on February 24, 2022, the world changed. It is a more dangerous place than it was yesterday. It’s a place where madmen rule and freedom hang in the balance.

It’s a whole new world and yet to me, it’s an old world. I just hope the world won’t end in fire.