The "Sputnik Moment" rhetoric highlights the Cold War paranoia of the United States

The Washington Post website published an article titled "This is not a 'Sputnik moment', nor should we promote Cold War paranoia" on October 28, written by Faried Zakaria. The full text is excerpted below:

Have we witnessed yet another "Sputnik moment"? The Financial Times reported that China had test-fired a "hypersonic missile" this summer, which China denied. Admiral Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened the test to that turning point during the Cold War.

Millikin should review his history books. China's test has nothing in common with the Soviet Union's launch of sputnik, and making such an assertion would in fact fuel a paranoia that is currently intensifying in Washington.

The Sputnik incident was a revolution in the space race, and hypersonic missiles are old news. Hypersonic missiles fly at 5 times the speed of sound or even faster. Since 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union have deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles that are faster than 20 times the speed of sound. Even Germany's V-2 rockets, which were first used to attack London in the final stages of World War II, flew at nearly hypersonic speeds. Cameron Tracy, an expert at Stanford University on the subject, points out that hypersonic weapons have neither faster speeds nor better stealth characteristics than intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Writer and journalist Fred Kaplan points out that the U.S. massive missile defense system is a huge burden, and the U.S. military has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on it so far, but three of its last six tests have failed. Perhaps that's why the Pentagon hasn't tested the system since March 2019.

Don't expect science and facts to have much of an impact in this discussion. That's because there's now a bipartisan consensus in Washington that we're dangerously approaching a new Cold War. For the Pentagon, it's an opportunity: Sparking fear of a vast, tech-savvy enemy is a sure way to secure new budgets that can be used to counter every move of that enemy, whether true or imagined.

This sentiment spread beyond Washington. Diplomacy magazine published an article by scholar and prominent pragmatist John Millsheimer, who harshly accused U.S. policymakers of engaging with China over the past 40 years. He predicted that our active encouragement of a rival of equal strength would lead to a new Cold War that could turn into a hot or even nuclear war.

But Mearsheimer considered only one of the great forces that drive the nations in the international system — power politics. However, there are other forces, such as economic interdependence.

The world today is deep in a complex global economic system in which war does not only harm its victims, but also its aggressors. There have been few territorial raids since 1945. This is almost unprecedented declaration of respect for boundaries. Moreover, nuclear deterrence raises the cost of rash moves, leading States to adopt a far more cautious approach to waging major-power wars.

Source: Reference News Network