International
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North Korea is a petulant, if surprisingly resilient, Cold War baby. After three years of fighting and some 1.2 million deaths, a 1953 armistice committed North and South Korea to a cease-fire. But the Cold War technically never ended on the Korean peninsula; the two countries remain officially at war. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought a sudden halt in aid to the Hermit Kingdom, and without support from its erstwhile benefactor, North Korea’s food imports and grain production plummeted. By 1994, famine hit North Korea, killing somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million people over a four-year period. Pyongyang may have tested nuclear weapons in 2006 and again in 2009 and 2013, but fears of mass starvation continue today. While democratic South Korea burns brightly from space, nighttime satellite photographs reveal a country shrouded in darkness.
When Iran’s radical student leadership met in 1979 to discuss storming the U.S. embassy — an act which triggered the 444-day hostage crisis — among those who voted no to the idea was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who later became president of the Islamic Republic. Instead of the American embassy, Ahmadinejad advocated seizing the Soviet embassy, believing the most dangerous threat to the Islamic Revolution was Iran’s communists, and Iran’s emergence as a regional wild card coincided with the eclipse of U.S.-Soviet rivalry as an organizing principle in global conflicts.
That interstitial space is exemplified by an air force whose equipment includes U.S., Russian and French warplanes of various vintage. Seeking to “export” its revolution as the Soviet Union had done in its early years, Iran carved out regional influence on its own terms, challenging U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, but also offering cooperation with Washington against the Taliban and more recently, ISIL. Having survived a brutal eight-year war with Iraq that began in 1980, Iran subsequently came to personify the idea of new power centers emerging in the wake of the demise of Cold War global bipolarity.
Responding to Russia’s annexation of Crimea this year, then-NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a hawkish former prime minister of Denmark, called Putin’s action a “wake-up call” that should be “followed by increased European investment in defense.” That was a reminder that NATO, the stalwart U.S.-led Cold War military alliance created to coordinate the defense of Europe against any Soviet aggression has been an organization in search of a purpose ever since 1989. And in the ensuing 25 years, during which the alliance has taken on policing missions in the Balkans and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, military spending by NATO's European members has dried up: While its 28 members are officially committed to spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, only four of them – the United States, Britain, Estonia and Greece – actually met that target in 2013.
President Obama hopes that European partners would increase their share of the burden of collective security on the continent and beyond as the U.S. steps back, last year saw Washington providing 72 percent of the organization’s funding. With Western European nations seeing both their donations dwindle and their troops increasingly demobilized – and the alliance's consensus-based decision making allowing divided opinion among European members to prevent any decisive response to Russian actions in Ukraine – NATO looks increasingly like an organization of a different era.
Political ideology may not be entirely dead in the years since the fall of the Berlin wall, but nor is it fashionable among politicians across the world today. Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Holland, Xi, Putin, Erdogan... the list goes on and on. Today's world leaders won office by demonstrating their competency as efficient managers of the economy, and by promising security and stability – not fundamental change to the status quo. Rare is the politician today who promises to make a better world.
Whether they tack slightly more conservative or slightly more social democratic, most industrialized societies today are run by technocratic governments managing the mix of private and public sectors to promote capitalist development.
Political luminaries of the Cold War era, from Mandela to Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned radically new social or political arrangements, seem to have been eclipsed by a more managerial approach to democratic societies meant above all to stabilize conditions for middle class consumers. Whether this is a positive or a negative development is a political question. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” goes the famous line from a play by German Marxist dramatist Bertolt Brecht – although it could just as easily sound like a pitch for technocratic ethos of the current liberal democratic state.
The Economist magazine famously uses its “Big Mac Index” to measure the value (as distinct from the price) of currencies. The proposition is a simple one: Compare the price of McDonalds signature hamburger in different countries to assess whether their currencies are over- or under-valued. If a Big Mac cost $4 in the U.S. but only $2 in China by current currency conversion rates, that would mean the Chinese Yuan was 50% undervalued. But, of course, a Big Mac index is only made possible by the ubiquity of the Big Mac – when the Berlin Wall fell, McDonalds was available in 47 countries; today that number is 118. Ronald McDonald was one of the first through the breach in the old Cold War ramparts, raising the Golden Arches in the erstwhile Soviet empire in a signal of consumer capitalism's triumph.
McDonalds and other catering chains such as KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Starbucks are but one example of how the end of the Cold War dramatically accelerated the globalization of culture and consumption. American consumer brands – Apple computers, Nike sneakers, Levis jeans – are now market leaders in many countries around the world, and are generate more of their sales revenue overseas than in the U.S. as economic globalization has produced a rapidly growing middle class in developing countries. While the brands are American, most of their products are actually imported to the U.S. – having been manufactured in lower-wage economies in Asia. Thus the global economy that has taken shape in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but which would have been impossible during a Cold War that built walls between economies.
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