The Cold War appears in these episodes chiefly as a reference point whose meaning is disputed. Guests and host invoke it to explain the origins of the post-1989 order, to describe the context of Latin American liberation movements, to illustrate the exaggeration of national security threats, and to argue about whether economic pressure can win a conflict. The excerpts do not offer a single narrative of the Cold War; they offer competing uses of it.
The Cold War and the “New World Order”
In a December 2018 episode, Bob Zadek framed the idea of a “New World Order” as a dichotomy between “one-worlders” and those who resist them, borrowing the label from George H.W. Bush. He asked whether it was accurate to describe one-worldism as the belief that the difference between the Third World and the First World is that the latter has not learned how the former does business. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Yoram Hazony agreed that the comparison was accurate. He recalled hearing Bush speak of the New World Order in 1991 and feeling a chill, because he had understood the point of the Cold War to be that the free nations were struggling against the imposition of one world order by the Marxists. If the free nations won, he thought, there would be many different orders and many different countries, each an experiment in what it means to be human. He said he was shocked, and that a whole generation of American presidents of both parties, along with European parties of the right and left, had pursued the New World Order. He described the virtue of nationalism as beginning with humility: a nation may think its way of life best, but the idea that it must be imposed by force, with world law, world courts and a world policeman, is a completely different idea. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
National Liberation in Latin America
In a February 2019 episode, Zadek asked Clifton Ross what Latin American liberation movements were liberating from and to. Ross described a 20th-century problem in Latin America and a natural inclination toward empire building. He said the United States, an ex-colony of the United Kingdom, began looking south with the idea of building its own empire in the Western Hemisphere, and that the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century essentially set that up. He cited the Spanish-Cuban War, which he placed in 1898, in which the US came in at the very end, occupied the country and “liberated” it, quote-unquote. Utopia Unmasked (2019)
Ross said that as the Cold War progressed, especially in 1954 with the Arbenz government, the US overthrew a moderately left government because it saw communist guerrilla movements everywhere. He said the Soviet Union, especially starting in 1960, funneled arms through Cuba to guerrilla insurgencies across the continent. The liberation, he said, was national liberation from colonial governments allied with the US in a Cold War context, just as the Soviet Union had its colonies in the Eastern Bloc. Most of these movements were backed by the Soviet Union, and what they wanted to liberate into was a socialist revolution. Utopia Unmasked (2019)
Zadek asked whether the US’s perceived imperialism pushed Latin America away from market economies and property rights, with Russia as the countermeasure. Ross said that was pretty accurate, and described people left behind by markets and by what Schumpeter called creative destruction. He said the US frequently helped into power governments that gave favorable trade terms on natural resources, and that Honduras was viewed by Dole Banana as a banana plantation, as was Guatemala. Arbenz’s crime, he said, was nationalizing Dole Banana’s plantations and doing land redistribution. He said the solidarity movement was largely inspired by Leninist ideas, and that activists looked to national liberation movements and their vanguards—Fidel Castro in Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Utopia Unmasked (2019)
Threat Inflation and the Military-Industrial Complex
In a February 2022 episode, Zadek asked John Mueller for examples of how the exaggeration of threats had been used to justify military buildups and the diversion of resources. Mueller said that although threats are exaggerated, the exaggerators are not always successful, citing efforts to exaggerate the threat about Russia and Ukraine that were not selling well. But every threat successfully sold, he said, has then been exaggerated. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
Mueller called the Cold War probably the most impressive area of this, with a whole chapter in his book. The argument was that because the Soviet Union had allowed North Korea to attack South Korea, it was hell-bent on conquest throughout the world and would soon attack Western Europe, which is why NATO, previously a thing on paper, suddenly escalated massively. He said it was pretty obvious during the Cold War, and that a few people such as George Kennan and Bernard Brodie said so, that the Soviets never had the slightest interest in anything resembling World War II again, much less one with nuclear weapons, and were not likely to attack Western Europe, though they were interested in supporting revolutionary movements and civil wars. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
Mueller said the idea that the Soviets were a major threat was sold and that trillions of dollars were spent on it. One calculation, he said, was that money spent on nuclear weapons and delivery systems during the Cold War was about enough to buy everything in the United States except the land. Information from Soviet archives after the Cold War indicated they had no plans whatever to attack Western Europe; they planned to defend themselves if attacked. He said you would need to find somebody in the Soviet Union, from a top commissar to a drunk on a park bench, who said World War II was wonderful and ought to be done again, and quoted Khrushchev saying he would like to see the bloody fool who is not afraid of war, that he lost his son in that war, and that every Russian family lost somebody. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
Mueller said Dwight Eisenhower agreed with his position. The traumatic experience for Eisenhower was flying to Moscow in 1945 to talk with Stalin and, on the way back, looking down and seeing destruction from one end to the other, concluding they would never want to do that again. Eisenhower believed that through his whole presidency, but when he left the presidency he argued that the reason for high defense spending was the machinations of the military-industrial complex, which succeeded because its members believed the Soviet Union was going to attack Western Europe or the United States—something Eisenhower did not believe. Mueller called Eisenhower a political coward in that case, afraid even going out of office to say what he truly believed. China & the Stupidity of War (2022)
The Cold War as an Economic Contest
In a March 2022 episode on Russian sanctions, Zadek said in passing that the Cold War was won economically, that the USSR packed it in and was split up to some degree, and that from all he had tried to learn this was driven by economics: the USSR was bankrupt, like an international Chapter 11 or Chapter 7. He asked whether the Cold War showed that wars can be won economically, with short-term detriment but long-term benefit. The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)
Jonathan Bydlak said Zadek’s assessment was accurate, noting that in the mid-’80s the vast majority of academics and experts in Eastern Europe did not believe the Soviet Union was anywhere near collapse and many believed it was stronger than the United States. But he added that not all economic measures are the same, and that the West did not win the Cold War because of its adversarial economic relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc any more than it had won in Cuba through the Cuban embargo. The way the Cold War was won economically, he said, was by out-producing and out-innovating the command and control economies of the East, producing too much wealth and too much of what citizens needed. He cited Boris Yeltsin coming to the United States and seeing American supermarkets. The lesson, he said, is not to retard trade or disengage economically, because engagement is how the Cold War was won. The Economic Consequences of Russian Sanctions (2022)
Across episodes
The excerpts show no single developing argument about the Cold War but several distinct treatments. Hazony (December 2018) treats it as a struggle of free nations against imposed one-world order; Ross (February 2019) treats it as the context for US empire and Soviet-backed national liberation in Latin America; Mueller (February 2022) treats it as the paradigmatic case of exaggerated threat; and Zadek and Bydlak (March 2022) treat it as an economic contest won by out-production. The later episodes do not revise the earlier ones; they use the Cold War for different arguments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the origins, chronology or ending of the Cold War beyond the specific claims quoted, and do not name treaties, doctrines beyond the Monroe Doctrine, or dates beyond those the speakers give. They do not state the outcome of any case, the text of any statute, or the titles and fields of most participants beyond what the labels and remarks supply. Several sections break off mid-sentence, and nothing is offered about the period between the events described and the episodes’ own time.