On March 7, Emma Ashford featured on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss the similarities between the current Ukraine crisis and the tensions of the Cold War.
“(A return to the Cold War) isn’t the perfect metaphor. No one should assume that we’re going back to something that looks exactly like the Cold War…but we’re all thinking about that period at the end of the Cold War, when arms control negotiations yielded a lot of progress and we actually saw this sort of flowering in US-Russian cooperation and relations. The more analogous period to what we’re seeing today is the late 1940’s, the early 1950’s, when we see this series of crises: the Berlin crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, each of which had a nuclear dimension and each of which could’ve gone very badly. These crises were the reason the superpowers started to engage in arms control over the following decades. So I’m worried the period we’re going into with Russia is going to be that unmanaged crisis, where we might see escalation.”
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