Stock your bunkers, America, we’re back in the Cold War. Or many Cold Wars, it seems. Pundits and politicians alike declaim that we’re locked in a “new Cold War” with China, that we’re in the throes of a “cyber arms race” with the rest of the world, and that Russia’s election interference is, of course, today’s 1960s contestation over political ideology.
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Justin Sherman (@jshermcyber) is a Cybersecurity Policy Fellow at New America.
These tempting, easy-to-understand Cold War metaphors pervade policy discourse around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Peter Thiel notably deployed such metaphors in his recent (quite flawed) New York Times op-ed about AI and national security. Despite asserting that a Cold War mentality “stopped making sense” years ago, Thiel goes on to describe US–China AI development as if it’s a zero-sum military arms race much like the one between 20th century America and the Soviet Union.
While seemingly innocuous, these kinds of faulty Cold War analogies have led to some plainly wrong thinking about tech policy. To be clear, there’s obvious instructive value in recognizing similarities ..
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