There are hot wars that have been less exhaustively dramatised than the cold one. Thirty years after the USSR fell, I walk into one of the District of Columbia’s reopened cinemas and see the Cuban missile crisis ensnare Benedict Cumberbatch in The Courier.
On screen, the cold war is fun: it offers momentous stakes without (much) bloodshed. It is when the US-Soviet clash becomes a model for our own times that the trouble starts. It has become normal to speak of “containing” China. US Republicans of some rank talk up the “free world”. If the cold war trope was just a bad historical fit, it would be a merely academic irritant. But the risk is that it is also self-fulfilling. The US might talk itself into a posture that ignores how much its own society has changed.
Enough is said of the structural difference between this superpower rift and the last one. To dispose of the obvious: as a goods trader, the owner of over $1tn of US debt and a source of both tourists and students, China is interwoven with America to an extent that Soviet Russia never was. Disentangling the pair would be the technical work of a whole era. After four years as US president, Donald Trump only got so far.