I think Condi is entirely correct when she says we're not in a new Cold War with Russia. A "Cold War" implies that a "Hot War" is the alternative, and I certainly hope we're not that far gone. With the Soviet Union, the Cold War was the alternative to mutual destruction; all of the global brinksmanship, proxy wars, espionage, etc., for all of its horror, was fundamentally more attractive than a shooting war between countries with thousands of nuclear weapons.*

Rather, I think the next Cold War could be with Iran. And, while the Communists weren't rational, they still wanted to live. We can't say the same about the religious.


*I'm not equating the Soviet Union and the United States here. The USSR was fundamentally evil, the United States was not. One deserved to survive, the other did not. But, the fact was, had things devolved to a hot war, I for one don't believe that things would have gone well.