War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (21)

The nature of armed conflict has undergone a profound transformation since the mid-twentieth century. Whereas classical warfare was predominantly characterised by engagements between symmetrical state actors on defined battlefields, the contemporary security environment is defined by asymmetrical confrontations involving non-state actors, digitalised battlespaces, and contested legal and ethical frameworks. This essay examines three interrelated dimensions of modern warfare: the rise of terrorism and guerrilla tactics as instruments of asymmetrical conflict; the emergence of cyber warfare as a novel domain of hostilities; and the evolving moral and legal debates that these developments have provoked. Drawing on a range of scholarly, strategic, and legal sources, the essay argues that the persistence of asymmetrical conflict demands a fundamental re-evaluation of the doctrines, norms, and institutions that govern the use of force in international relations.

MODERN WARFARE AND ASYMMETRICAL CONFLICT

Terrorism, Cyber Warfare, and the Ethics of Contemporary Armed Conflict  

The conduct of war has always reflected the political, technological, and social conditions of its era. The industrialised mass conflicts of the twentieth century—epitomised by the two World Wars—gave way, in the latter half of the century, to a more fragmented and complex landscape of armed confrontation. Scholars such as Mary Kaldor (2012) have characterised this shift as the emergence of "new wars"—conflicts distinguished by the blurring of distinctions between soldiers and civilians, the proliferation of non-state armed groups, and the pursuit of identity-based political objectives rather than classical territorial conquest.

This transformation has been accelerated by globalisation, technological diffusion, and the declining capacity of certain states to monopolise legitimate violence within their territories. The result is a security environment in which asymmetrical conflict—the confrontation between actors of markedly unequal military capability who employ correspondingly different strategies and tactics—has become the dominant paradigm. Understanding the character of this environment, and the normative challenges it generates, is among the most pressing tasks confronting scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike.

Terrorism and Guerrilla Warfare

Conceptual Foundations

Terrorism and guerrilla warfare represent the two most prevalent modalities of asymmetrical armed conflict. Although the two are frequently conflated in public discourse, they are analytically distinct. Guerrilla warfare, derived from the Spanish diminutive of "guerra" (war), refers to a form of irregular military strategy in which relatively small and mobile forces harass, attrit, and ultimately compel the withdrawal of a stronger adversary through hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, and the exploitation of terrain and popular support (Mao Tse-tung, 1961). Terrorism, by contrast, is characterised primarily by the deliberate targeting of non-combatants to generate fear and to coerce political actors—whether governments, populations, or the international community—into making concessions (Schmid, 2011).

The distinction matters because it has both strategic and legal implications. Guerrilla fighters may, under certain conditions, qualify for combatant status and the protections afforded by international humanitarian law. Terrorists, by definition, forfeit such protections by targeting civilians. In practice, however, the two phenomena frequently overlap, and many non-state armed groups engage in both irregular military operations and acts of terrorism as part of a broader campaign.

 

Historical and Contemporary Manifestations

The history of asymmetrical conflict is extensive and predates the modern state system. However, the twentieth century witnessed the codification of guerrilla warfare as a coherent strategic doctrine, most influentially in the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara. Mao's theory of protracted popular war posited that a weaker force could defeat a stronger adversary by operating in three phases: strategic defence, strategic stalemate, and strategic offensive—a framework that proved devastatingly effective in the Chinese Civil War and in the Vietnamese resistance to French and American intervention (Fall, 2005).

The decolonisation struggles of the mid-twentieth century produced numerous successful guerrilla campaigns, from the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) to the Viet Cong's resistance to American military power in Vietnam. These conflicts demonstrated the limitations of conventional military superiority when confronting a determined insurgency embedded in a sympathetic population. As David Galula (1964), one of the foundational theorists of counter-insurgency, observed, in guerrilla warfare the political and military dimensions of conflict are inseparable, and victory requires not merely the defeat of the enemy's forces but the winning of popular legitimacy.

Contemporary terrorism, by contrast, has increasingly taken on a transnational character, exemplified most dramatically by the attacks of 11 September 2001 carried out by al-Qaeda. The attacks demonstrated that a non-state network, operating across multiple jurisdictions and exploiting the openness of globalised societies, could inflict catastrophic harm on a superpower and precipitate a fundamental reorientation of global security policy (Burke, 2004). The subsequent "Global War on Terror"—prosecuted through military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone strike campaigns in multiple countries, and expansive domestic surveillance programmes—illustrated both the reach of modern counter-terrorism capacity and its profound limitations and costs.

The emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a quasi-territorial entity between 2013 and 2019 represented a further mutation of jihadist terrorism, blending conventional military operations, territorial governance, sophisticated propaganda, and spectacular atrocities into a novel hybrid threat (McCants, 2015). Although the territorial caliphate was militarily destroyed by 2019, ISIS has persisted as a dispersed network capable of inspiring and directing attacks globally, illustrating the resilience of decentralised terrorist organisations.

 

Strategic and Political Implications

The persistence of terrorism and guerrilla warfare in the contemporary world reflects a fundamental strategic logic. The "calculus of violence" available to non-state actors has been dramatically expanded by access to cheap and readily available weapons, encrypted communications, and the global reach of the internet. At the same time, the political and reputational costs of disproportionate counter-insurgency operations have constrained the responses available to state actors, creating what Ivan Arreguín-Toft (2005) terms a "strategic interaction" in which the asymmetry of means does not necessarily translate into an asymmetry of outcomes.

The policy implications are significant. Effective responses to terrorism and guerrilla warfare require an integrated approach that combines the disruption of organisational networks, the reduction of recruitment and radicalisation pathways, the provision of legitimate governance and economic development in conflict-affected areas, and the building of international coalitions capable of addressing transnational threats (Byman, 2015). Neither military force alone nor purely developmental strategies are sufficient; the challenge is one of sustained, nuanced, and politically intelligent engagement.

Cyber Warfare and Technological Battlefields

The Emergence of Cyberspace as a Domain of Conflict

The second major dimension of modern asymmetrical conflict is the emergence of cyberspace as a domain of armed hostilities. The digital revolution has transformed virtually every aspect of modern societies—including their militaries, critical infrastructure, and governmental systems—creating new vectors of vulnerability that adversaries, both state and non-state, can exploit. Whilst cyber conflict has roots in the activities of hackers and state intelligence agencies dating to the 1980s and 1990s, it has evolved into a sophisticated instrument of strategic competition.

Thomas Rid (2013) has argued that, strictly speaking, most cyber operations fall short of constituting "war" in the Clausewitzian sense, because they lack the violence, instrumentality, and political character associated with conventional armed conflict. Instead, he characterises the majority of cyber operations as sabotage, espionage, or subversion—activities that, whilst potentially enormously consequential, do not in themselves constitute acts of war. This conceptual point is important, but it should not obscure the fact that cyber operations can cause substantial physical harm and can be integrated into broader military campaigns in ways that make the distinction between war and non-war difficult to sustain in practice.

 

Major Incidents and Evolving Capabilities

The most widely cited early example of offensive cyber operations was the Stuxnet worm, discovered in 2010, which is widely attributed to a joint United States–Israeli operation and was designed to sabotage Iran's uranium enrichment programme by causing centrifuges at the Natanz facility to self-destruct (Sanger, 2012). Stuxnet was remarkable not only for its technical sophistication but for its demonstration that cyber weapons could cause tangible physical damage to industrial infrastructure—effectively constituting an act of sabotage, if not an act of war.

Subsequent years have seen a proliferation of significant cyber incidents. The 2007 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Estonian government, media, and banking websites—widely attributed to Russian-linked actors in the context of a political dispute over a Soviet-era monument—were among the first instances of large-scale, politically motivated cyber attacks on a sovereign state (Herzog, 2011). The 2016 Russian interference in the United States presidential election, involving the hacking of Democratic Party email servers and a sophisticated social media disinformation campaign, illustrated the use of cyber tools not simply to degrade military capabilities but to undermine the democratic processes of an adversary (Mueller, 2019). The 2020 SolarWinds attack, attributed by the United States government to Russian intelligence services, demonstrated the vulnerability of even the most secure governmental and commercial networks to sophisticated supply-chain compromises (Sanger & Perlroth, 2021).

In the context of interstate conflict, the war in Ukraine, which intensified dramatically with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, has provided the most extensive contemporary example of the integration of cyber operations into conventional military campaigns. Russian cyber attacks on Ukrainian governmental systems, energy infrastructure, and communications networks have been a persistent feature of the conflict, although the anticipated "cyber blitzkrieg" did not materialise as decisively as many analysts had predicted, partly owing to Ukrainian resilience and the assistance of Western technology companies (Watling & Reynolds, 2022).

 

The Asymmetrical Dimensions of Cyber Conflict

Cyber warfare has pronounced asymmetrical characteristics that distinguish it from conventional armed conflict. The cost of entry is relatively low: sophisticated cyber capabilities can be developed or acquired for a fraction of the cost of conventional military systems, enabling smaller states, non-state actors, and criminal organisations to conduct operations against far more powerful adversaries. The attribution problem—the difficulty of definitively identifying the source of a cyber attack—further advantages the attacker, providing plausible deniability and complicating the formulation of proportionate responses (Rid & Buchanan, 2015).

At the same time, highly digitised and networked societies are disproportionately vulnerable to cyber attack. The critical infrastructure—power grids, water treatment facilities, financial systems, healthcare networks—of advanced industrial states presents an enormous attack surface. This creates an asymmetry of vulnerability as well as capability: actors with less digitalised infrastructure, paradoxically, may be less susceptible to certain forms of cyber attack, even if they are also less capable of conducting offensive cyber operations.

The implications for deterrence theory are significant. Classical nuclear deterrence relied upon the credible threat of mutually assured destruction to deter aggression. Cyber deterrence is far more complex: the attribution problem undermines the credibility of deterrent threats; the diversity of cyber capabilities and the variety of potential targets make the formulation of proportionate responses difficult; and the possibility of escalation from cyber attacks to conventional military conflict introduces risks that are difficult to manage (Libicki, 2009).

Moral and Legal Debates of Modern Warfare

International Humanitarian Law and Its Application

The regulation of armed conflict by international law has a long history, rooted in the customary practices of states and codified most comprehensively in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977. The fundamental principles of international humanitarian law (IHL)—distinction, proportionality, necessity, and precaution—were designed to limit the suffering caused by armed conflict and to protect those who do not or can no longer take part in hostilities. Their application in the context of modern asymmetrical conflict, however, raises profound challenges.

The principle of distinction requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to direct attacks only against the former. In asymmetrical conflicts, however, this distinction is frequently blurred. Guerrilla fighters and terrorists operate among civilian populations, using civilians as shields, wearing civilian clothing, and exploiting the protections afforded to civilians by IHL. This creates acute dilemmas for state forces, who must make targeting decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with the constant risk either of killing civilians through excessive caution or of committing violations through excessive force (Walzer, 2006).

The development of targeted killing programmes—in particular the extensive use of armed drones by the United States in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere—has generated intense legal and ethical debate. Proponents argue that targeted killing is a lawful and proportionate means of neutralising individuals who pose an imminent threat and who cannot be captured, conducted with precision that minimises civilian casualties relative to conventional military operations (Brennan, 2012). Critics contend that the legal framework governing such operations is opaque and inadequately scrutinised; that the empirical claims about precision and minimisation of civilian harm are contested; and that the political and strategic consequences—including the radicalisation of affected populations and the erosion of international legal norms—undermine the long-term objectives of counter-terrorism policy (Alston, 2010).

 

The Ethics of Asymmetrical Conflict

Beyond legal questions, modern warfare raises profound moral challenges. Just War theory, developed over centuries by theologians and philosophers including Augustine, Aquinas, and Grotius, and systematised in contemporary form by Michael Walzer (1977) and Jeff McMahan (2009), provides the most influential framework for moral evaluation of the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello). The application of just war criteria to asymmetrical conflicts—including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Gaza conflicts, and the Syrian civil war—has been deeply contested.

The doctrine of double effect, which permits actions that have both good and bad consequences provided that the bad consequences are foreseen but not intended and are proportionate to the good achieved, has been heavily deployed in debates about the killing of civilians in the course of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Critics such as McMahan (2009) have argued that the traditional framework, which evaluates the moral status of combatants solely by reference to their status rather than their individual culpability, is morally inadequate in the context of wars fought between state forces and non-state armed groups.

The use of autonomous weapons systems—sometimes described as "lethal autonomous weapons" or "killer robots"—represents perhaps the most acute moral frontier in contemporary debates about the ethics of warfare. The prospect of weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets without meaningful human control raises fundamental questions about moral responsibility, accountability, and the dignity of the individual in war (Arkin, 2009). The International Committee of the Red Cross (2021) has called for the establishment of legally binding limits on autonomous weapons systems, a position supported by many humanitarian organisations and a growing number of states, but resisted by major military powers—including the United States, Russia, and China—who regard autonomous systems as strategically important.

 

The Responsibility to Protect and Humanitarian Intervention

A further dimension of the legal and moral debates surrounding modern warfare is the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. R2P affirms that states bear a primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, and that the international community has a responsibility to intervene—including through coercive means—when states fail or refuse to fulfil this obligation (ICISS, 2001).

The application of R2P has been deeply controversial. The NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011, authorised by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 based on R2P, was initially welcomed as a test of the doctrine's operationalisation but became deeply divisive when the intervention was perceived by Russia, China, and others as going beyond the authorised mandate to protect civilians and effectively effecting regime change (Bellamy, 2011). The failure to invoke R2P effectively in Syria — where the Security Council was paralysed by great-power vetoes — illustrated the limits of the doctrine in the face of geopolitical competition. These experiences have generated a profound debate about the relationship between sovereignty, human rights, and the use of force in international relations.

Conclusion

Modern warfare and asymmetrical conflict pose extraordinary challenges to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. The persistence of terrorism and guerrilla warfare reflects the enduring logic of asymmetrical strategy: the capacity of weaker actors to impose disproportionate costs on stronger adversaries through the exploitation of political vulnerabilities, popular support, and the limits of conventional military power. The emergence of cyber warfare as a domain of hostilities has further complicated the strategic landscape, creating new forms of vulnerability, new instruments of coercion, and new puzzles for deterrence and arms control. And the application of existing legal and moral frameworks to these novel forms of conflict has revealed deep tensions between the principles and the realities of modern armed conflict.

What is clear is that the existing frameworks—legal, strategic, and ethical—developed primarily in the context of conventional interstate conflict, are under severe strain. The Geneva Conventions, Just War theory, and the architecture of international security institutions were designed for a world of symmetrical state actors; their adaptation to the conditions of asymmetrical conflict, cyber hostilities, and autonomous weapons is incomplete and contested. Addressing these gaps requires sustained scholarly engagement, constructive diplomatic effort, and the political will to subordinate short-term strategic advantage to the longer-term imperatives of a rules-based international order. In the absence of such an effort, the costs—human, political, and civilisational—will continue to accumulate.

References

Alston, P. (2010). Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions: Study on targeted killings. United Nations Human Rights Council. A/HRC/14/24/Add.6.

Arkin, R. C. (2009). Governing lethal behavior in autonomous robots. CRC Press.

Arreguín-Toft, I. (2005). How the weak win wars: A theory of asymmetric conflict. Cambridge University Press.

Bellamy, A. J. (2011). Libya and the responsibility to protect: The exception and the norm. Ethics & International Affairs, 25(3), 263–269.

Brennan, J. O. (2012, April 30). The ethics and efficacy of the president's counterterrorism strategy. Speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC.

Burke, J. (2004). Al-Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam. Penguin Books.

Byman, D. (2015). Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the global jihadist movement: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press.

Fall, B. B. (2005). Street without joy: The French debacle in Indochina. Stackpole Books. (Original work published 1961)

Galula, D. (1964). Counterinsurgency warfare: Theory and practice. Praeger.

Herzog, S. (2011). Revisiting the Estonian cyber attacks: Digital threats and multinational responses. Journal of Strategic Security, 4(2), 49–60.

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). (2001). The responsibility to protect. International Development Research Centre.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). (2021). ICRC position on autonomous weapon systems. ICRC.

Kaldor, M. (2012). New and old wars: Organised violence in a global era (3rd ed.). Polity Press.

Libicki, M. C. (2009). Cyberdeterrence and cyberwar. RAND Corporation.

Mao Tse-tung. (1961). On guerrilla warfare (S. B. Griffith, Trans.). Praeger. (Original work published 1937)

McCants, W. (2015). The ISIS apocalypse: The history, strategy, and doomsday vision of the Islamic State. St Martin's Press.

McMahan, J. (2009). Killing in war. Oxford University Press.

Mueller, R. S. (2019). Report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (Vols. 1–2). United States Department of Justice.

Rid, T. (2013). Cyber war will not take place. Hurst & Company.

Rid, T., & Buchanan, B. (2015). Attributing cyber attacks. Journal of Strategic Studies, 38(1–2), 4–37.

Sanger, D. E. (2012). Confront and conceal: Obama's secret wars and surprising use of American power. Crown Publishers.

Sanger, D. E., & Perlroth, N. (2021, January 2). New details emerge about the breach of SolarWinds and the US government. The New York Times.

Schmid, A. P. (Ed.). (2011). The Routledge handbook of terrorism research. Routledge.

Walzer, M. (1977). Just and unjust wars: A moral argument with historical illustrations. Basic Books.

Walzer, M. (2006). Terrorism and just war. Philosophia, 34(1), 3–12.

Watling, J., & Reynolds, N. (2022). Ukraine through Russia's eyes. Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Special Report.

[Part 22]

[Part 20]

Bahasa

Reallocating Official Remuneration for Indonesian Social Resilience

The proposal to cut officials' salaries often surfaces as a gesture of national solidarity during times of economic distress. However, to evaluate its effectiveness in easing the burden on the State Budget, we must scrutinise the underlying fiscal realities. Let us examine this proportionally. It should be noted that the figures considered are estimates based on the components of Basic Salary and Fixed Allowances funded by the state.

Sectoral Analysis of Official Remuneration

If we apply a more aggressive fifty per cent reduction to the 580 Members of the House of Representatives, the annual savings would climb from ninety billion to approximately two hundred and twenty-five billion rupiah. This represents a more substantial figure, yet it remains a fraction of the total legislative budget. Within the executive branch, applying this half-salary cut to the 107 Ministers and Deputy Ministers would increase the savings to roughly eleven to twelve billion rupiah annually. While this is a symbolic milestone, it highlights that even a radical reduction at the cabinet level does not yield massive fiscal relief due to the relatively small number of personnel. The most significant shift occurs when targeting the thousands of Senior Civil Servants (Echelon I and II); a fifty per cent cut here could potentially save the Treasury upwards of six hundred and thirty billion rupiah per year, as the sheer volume of high-ranking bureaucrats creates a much larger cumulative base.

The State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Sector: Directors and Commissioners

The impact becomes far more pronounced within the SOE sector. Given that executive compensation in state firms—particularly in banking and energy—is considerably higher than in the civil service, a fifty per cent reduction in remuneration and bonuses for Directors and Commissioners would drastically improve corporate margins. Across the hundreds of state-owned entities and their subsidiaries, such a move could bolster the annual dividend contribution to the national treasury by an estimated two to three trillion rupiah. This confirms that the SOE sector remains the most effective "lever" for generating actual revenue through compensation reform, far outweighing the direct savings from the central government's payroll.

The Overall Calculation

Under this radical fifty per cent scenario, the total cumulative benefit—combining direct savings from the legislature and bureaucracy with increased dividends from SOEs—would reach an estimated three to four trillion rupiah per annum. Even at this heightened level, the fiscal reality remains sobering: three trillion rupiah covers less than one per cent of the annual energy subsidy requirements if oil prices remain volatile. Therefore, whilst a fifty per cent cut would provide a significantly stronger "sense of crisis" and perhaps satisfy public demand for austerity, it still fails to serve as a primary solution for balancing the State Budget. The true utility of the policy remains psychological and political; it functions as a prerequisite for social stability, ensuring that when the government eventually asks the public to endure higher costs, it does so with the moral authority of having first halved its own top-tier expenditure.

The issue of dual office-holding 

The issue of dual office-holding (commonly referred to as double dipping) represents one of the most contentious points in the debate over fiscal efficiency in Indonesia. Both ethically and fiscally, allowing an individual to draw full compensation from two or more state-funded sources during an economic crisis is widely seen as an affront to the principle of social justice.

To address the situation of Deputy Ministers or other high-ranking officials holding multiple positions (such as serving as a Deputy Minister while also acting as a State-Owned Enterprise Commissioner), the following policies could be implemented:

1. Implementation of a "Single Salary System"

The most radical yet arguably fairest policy would be to mandate that officials choose only one source of income.

Mechanism: The official would continue to perform both roles (e.g., Deputy Minister and Commissioner) but would only be permitted to receive the salary and allowances from the position with the higher nominal value.

Benefit: This eliminates the perception that public office is being utilised for the personal accumulation of wealth from multiple state coffers.

2. Elimination of Basic Salary for the Secondary Position

If the first policy is deemed too extreme given the increased workload, the government could enforce a rule whereby for the second position, the official is only entitled to a duty allowance or honorarium, without the basic salary or other fixed benefits.

Mechanism: The basic salary remains paid by the home ministry, whilst at the SOE, they would only receive attendance incentives or a small percentage of tantiem (profit-sharing bonuses).

3. Cumulative Income Ceiling

The government could establish a maximum threshold for the total income an official is permitted to receive from all concurrent roles.

Mechanism: For instance, the total combined income from a ministerial post and a commissionership must not exceed 150% of a minister's standard salary. Any excess beyond this cap would either remain unpaid or be returned to the national treasury. 

4. Absolute Prohibition of Dual Office-Holding in the Commercial Sector

This approach is more structural than a mere salary cut. The government could strictly prohibit active public officials (Deputy Ministers or Senior Bureaucrats) from serving as commissioners in SOEs.

Argument: Beyond saving the budget, this aims to eliminate conflicts of interest and ensure the official is 100% focused on their bureaucratic duties within the ministry.

5. Transparency and Voluntary Reversion

In the short term, the government could issue a moral appeal for those holding multiple positions to voluntarily return a portion of their earnings to the state as a gesture of empathy. This should be accompanied by public transparency regarding who has made such contributions.

The problem of dual office-holding is not merely a matter of figures on a ledger; it is a question of public ethics. Cutting a minister's salary loses all credibility if, at the same time, deputy ministers or senior officials continue to receive "double pay" that may be several times higher than the minister's own basic salary.

A policy of "Single Salary" or a Prohibition of Dual Office-Holding is the most effective way to demonstrate that the government truly possesses a sense of crisis.

To provide an even more comprehensive fiscal outlook, let us incorporate the Ministerial Operational Funds (Dana Operasional) into the analysis. Unlike the basic salary, these funds are significantly larger and intended for the execution of duties, yet they represent a substantial area for potential austerity.

It should be noted that the figures considered are estimates based on the components of Basic Salary, Fixed Allowances, and, for the executive branch, a significant reduction in discretionary operational budgets.

Sectoral Analysis of Official Remuneration and Operational Funds

When we look beyond the 580 Members of the House of Representatives—whose fifty per cent salary cut yields two hundred and twenty-five billion rupiah—the focus shifts dramatically toward the executive's operational expenditure. For the 107 Ministers and Deputy Ministers, the basic salary is merely the "tip of the iceberg." Ministerial Operational Funds can reach upwards of one hundred to one hundred and fifty million rupiah per month. If we were to slash these operational budgets by half, alongside the fifty per cent salary cut, the savings from the Cabinet alone would leap from a mere twelve billion to approximately one hundred billion rupiah per annum. Extending this logic to the thousands of Senior Civil Servants (Echelon I and II), who also command significant official travel and meeting budgets, a fifty per cent reduction in both their take-home pay and their departmental "activity" budgets could realistically save the Treasury in excess of two trillion rupiah annually. 

The State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Sector: Directors and Commissioners

The SOE sector remains the most potent source of fiscal recovery in this scenario. By halving the remuneration, bonuses, and "representation allowances" of Directors and Commissioners across the vast network of state firms, the resulting reduction in corporate overheads would be immense. Given the commercial scale of these entities, such a radical austerity measure could bolster the national treasury through increased dividend payments by an estimated three to five trillion rupiah. This confirms that the most significant fiscal gains are found where state-owned commercial interests and high-level bureaucratic activity budgets intersect, rather than in the basic payroll of elected officials alone.

The Overall Calculation

Under this expanded and radical fifty per cent austerity scenario—which now includes both salaries and a portion of operational/activity funds—the total cumulative benefit to the state could reach an estimated five to seven trillion rupiah per annum. Whilst seven trillion rupiah is a formidable sum, it must be viewed against the backdrop of the energy subsidy burden, which can fluctuate by tens of trillions based on a minor shift in oil prices or the exchange rate. Therefore, even this maximalist approach covers only a small fraction of the fiscal gap created by global economic volatility. Nevertheless, the inclusion of "Operational Funds" in the cuts transforms the policy from a merely symbolic gesture into a more credible fiscal strategy. It signals that the leadership is not only sacrificing personal income but is also committed to streamlining the very machinery of government, thereby strengthening the moral authority required to navigate a national economic crisis.

To provide a definitive perspective on the impact of these measures, let us reallocate the projected seven trillion rupiah in maximalist savings toward specific social welfare programmes. This demonstrates how "official sacrifice" can be transformed into a tangible public benefit.

It should be noted that the figures considered are estimates based on a fifty per cent reduction in Basic Salary, Fixed Allowances, and for the executive branch, a significant reduction in discretionary Operational Funds.

Strategic Reallocation of Savings

If the state successfully recoups seven trillion rupiah through these radical austerity measures, the impact on the National Budget (APBN) remains fiscally modest but socially transformative. For instance, seven trillion rupiah could fund the National Health Insurance (JKN/BPJS) premiums for approximately fifteen million low-income citizens for an entire year. Alternatively, these funds could be redirected to the Education Sector, providing full annual scholarships for roughly seven hundred thousand underprivileged university students, effectively securing the human capital of the next generation. In the context of infrastructure, this sum is sufficient to construct or rehabilitate thousands of kilometres of rural roads, directly lowering logistics costs for small-scale farmers who are hardest hit by rising fuel prices.

The Socio-Economic Trade-off

While the seven trillion rupiah saved does not solve the macro-economic challenge of a five-hundred-trillion-rupiah energy subsidy, it bridges the gap in "micro-protection." By shifting funds from the upper echelons of the bureaucracy—specifically the high-yield SOE Sector and Ministerial Operational Funds—to grassroots welfare, the government creates a powerful narrative of redistribution. This prevents the "sense of crisis" from becoming a "crisis of trust." The primary benefit of this reallocation is not the stabilisation of the exchange rate or the global oil price, but the mitigation of poverty and the preservation of purchasing power for the most vulnerable segments of society.

The Overall Calculation

In final summary, the cumulative benefit of a fifty per cent cut across the legislature, cabinet, senior civil service, and SOE leadership—when coupled with operational fund reductions—yields a fiscal "war chest" of five to seven trillion rupiah. Although this represents only about one to two per cent of the total deficit caused by currency and commodity volatility, its targeted application can provide a safety net for millions. Therefore, the policy serves as a vital bridge: it does not fix the macro-economy, but it provides the moral and financial capital required to protect the micro-economy. It ensures that while the state navigates global turbulence, the burden is shared from the top down, rather than from the bottom up.

In conclusion, while a radical fifty per cent reduction in the salaries and operational funds of Indonesia's political and bureaucratic elite offers limited fiscal relief against the gargantuan scale of global commodity volatility, its true value lies in its profound socio-political resonance. Generating an estimated five to seven trillion rupiah, such measures would cover less than two per cent of the national energy subsidy burden. Nevertheless, the strategic reallocation of these funds—potentially securing healthcare for fifteen million citizens or providing scholarships for seven hundred thousand students—transforms a symbolic gesture into a tangible lifeline for the most vulnerable. It is a policy that prioritises moral authority over mere accounting, ensuring that the state does not ask the public to endure hardship without first demonstrating a profound sacrifice from the top down.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of this proposal must be measured not by its ability to balance the national ledger, but by its capacity to preserve social cohesion. By streamlining the high-yield SOE sector and curtailing discretionary ministerial spending, the government signals a genuine "sense of crisis" that bridges the gap between the governing and the governed. In an era of economic turbulence, this redistribution of resources serves as a vital safeguard for the micro-economy, fostering the collective trust necessary to navigate systemic challenges. It is a testament to the principle that in times of national trial, the burden of leadership is best demonstrated through shared austerity and redistributive justice.

[Bahasa]

War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (20)

In the years following World War II, the international system entered a prolonged period of tension and transformation, during which warfare did not disappear but instead changed in form and scale. Rather than another single global conflict, the world witnessed a series of regional wars, proxy confrontations, and ideological struggles, particularly shaped by the rivalry known as the Cold War. This period saw the emergence of conflicts such as the Korean War, in which the division of the Korean Peninsula became a violent battleground for competing political systems, as well as the Vietnam War, where the struggle between communism and anti-communism drew in major global powers and resulted in profound human and political consequences.

At the same time, the decline of European empires gave rise to numerous wars of independence, as colonised peoples sought sovereignty and self-determination. One of the most notable examples was the Algerian War, which illustrated the brutality and complexity of decolonisation. In the Middle East, the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians led to repeated conflicts, beginning with the Arab–Israeli War and continuing through subsequent confrontations such as the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, all of which entrenched long-term instability in the region.

As the Cold War progressed into its later decades, conflicts increasingly took the form of proxy wars in which the superpowers supported opposing sides without engaging each other directly. The Soviet–Afghan War stands as a striking example, where Soviet intervention met fierce resistance from local fighters backed by foreign powers, ultimately contributing to the weakening of the Soviet Union itself. Similarly, the Iran–Iraq War demonstrated how regional rivalries could escalate into prolonged and devastating warfare, causing immense loss of life without decisive resolution.

Following the end of the Cold War, marked by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the nature of conflict shifted once again, with ethnic, nationalist, and regional tensions coming to the forefront. The Gulf War revealed the continued importance of strategic resources and international coalitions, while the Yugoslav Wars exposed the dangers of ethnic fragmentation and the collapse of multi-ethnic states, often accompanied by atrocities and humanitarian crises.

Entering the twenty-first century, warfare became increasingly characterised by asymmetrical engagements and the involvement of non-state actors, particularly in the context of the global response to terrorism. The War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War exemplify this shift, as conventional military superiority did not necessarily translate into long-term stability, and insurgencies played a decisive role in shaping outcomes. Meanwhile, ongoing conflicts such as the Syrian Civil War and the Yemeni Civil War illustrate the complexity of modern warfare, where local grievances, regional rivalries, and international interventions intertwine.

In the present day, conflict continues to evolve in both form and intensity, as seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, which has reintroduced large-scale conventional warfare to Europe, and the Israel–Hamas War, which reflects the persistence of unresolved historical tensions. These contemporary wars are often accompanied by cyber operations, information warfare, and economic sanctions, indicating that the boundaries of warfare have expanded beyond the traditional battlefield.

Thus, in the decades since World War II, the world has not experienced another global war of the same magnitude, yet it has remained deeply shaped by continuous and varied conflicts. The transformation of warfare from total war to fragmented, multi-layered struggles suggests that while the scale may have changed, the fundamental drivers of conflict—power, ideology, territory, and identity—remain as potent as ever.

In the decades following World War II, the persistence of conflict across continents reveals that peace, in its fullest sense, was never truly secured, but rather reconfigured into new and subtler forms of confrontation. The succession of wars—from Korea and Vietnam to the Middle East and beyond—was not merely a series of isolated घटनाओं, but part of a broader pattern shaped by deeper ideological divisions and geopolitical anxieties. Beneath these regional struggles lay an overarching tension that did not always erupt into direct warfare, yet influenced nearly every major conflict of the second half of the twentieth century.

It is within this wider historical landscape that the Cold War must be understood, not simply as a rivalry between two superpowers, but as the defining framework through which global politics, military strategy, and ideological allegiance were organised. The Cold War did not always manifest itself through open battlefields; rather, it permeated diplomacy, economics, culture, and proxy wars, shaping the very logic of international relations. To grasp the nature of post-war conflicts, one must therefore turn to the Cold War itself, for it is here that the underlying currents of fear, ambition, and ideological competition are most clearly revealed.

There are two conflicts that are important and often missed in general summaries.

The Gulf War was a major conflict that arose when Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in 1990. Its origins lay not merely in territorial ambition, but also in Iraq’s substantial debts following its war with Iran, as well as accusations that Kuwait was overproducing oil, thereby depressing global oil prices.

The invasion prompted a swift and far-reaching international response. A coalition led by the United States, operating with the legitimacy of the United Nations, launched a military campaign to liberate Kuwait. This campaign, known as Operation Desert Storm, demonstrated the dominance of modern military technology, including the use of precision-guided weaponry and large-scale aerial bombardment.

Although the war was relatively brief, its consequences were considerable. Iraq was successfully expelled from Kuwait, yet Saddam Hussein’s regime remained in power. At the same time, the conflict marked the emergence of a new era in modern warfare, in which Western military forces displayed significant technological superiority, while also laying the groundwork for continued tensions in the Middle East that would eventually culminate in subsequent conflicts, including the Iraq War.

The Falklands War, known in Argentina as Guerra de las Malvinas, was a conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982 over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) in the South Atlantic.

The war began when the Argentine military junta, led by Leopoldo Galtieri, invaded the islands in an attempt to bolster domestic support amidst political and economic crisis. However, this move provoked a decisive response from the British government under Margaret Thatcher, which dispatched a naval task force in a complex long-range military operation.

The conflict lasted approximately ten weeks and concluded with a British victory, as the United Kingdom successfully regained control of the islands. Although smaller in scale compared to other wars, the Falklands War had significant political repercussions: the defeat hastened the collapse of Argentina’s military regime, whilst the victory strengthened Thatcher’s political standing at home.

These two wars illustrate contrasting facets of post-World War II conflict. The Falklands War reflects a classical sovereignty dispute between two nation-states, whereas the Gulf War exemplifies a new era of international intervention and the dominance of global coalitions. Together, they are essential for understanding how the nature of warfare has continued to evolve, both politically and militarily.

Now, imagine two giants standing face to face in an arena. Both are fully armed and possess a destructive capacity sufficient to annihilate the world, yet neither dares to take the first step to attack the other directly. This is perhaps the most precise image of what history records as the Cold War—the longest, most expensive, and most harrowing confrontation humanity has ever endured, yet one in which, curiously, not a single bullet was fired directly between its two principal protagonists.

The Cold War lasted from approximately 1947 to 1991, spanning nearly half a century of fierce rivalry between two superpowers: the United States, under the banner of capitalism and liberal democracy, and the Soviet Union, guided by the ideology of communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The two sides never engaged one another directly on the same battlefield, yet their influence pervaded every corner of the globe—from the dense jungles of Vietnam and the barren plains of Korea to the deserts of Angola and the frost-bitten town squares of Eastern Europe beneath the shadow of the Iron Curtain.

This essay traces three principal dimensions of the Cold War: proxy wars and the ideological confrontation that convulsed the developing world; nuclear deterrence and the balance of terror that held the planet in collective dread; and the psychological warfare and propaganda that shaped the minds of millions. Taken together, these three dimensions constitute the full anatomy of a 'war' that was never formally declared yet was felt every day by all of humanity.

The Cold War

War Without Direct Battle

I. Proxy Wars and Ideological Confrontation

Two Worlds, Two Visions

Even before the rubble of the Second World War had been properly cleared, the seeds of ideological conflict had already begun to take root. Shattered Europe became the first stage upon which this contest was played out. The United States viewed the world as a place that had to be saved from the danger of communism—an ideology they regarded as fundamentally incompatible with individual liberty, the right to private property, and the democratic way of life. The Soviet Union, for its part, under Joseph Stalin, viewed Western capitalism as an exploitative and imperialist system that would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

This antagonism was not merely a dispute over economic systems or forms of governance. It was a contest over the very meaning of civilisation itself—a struggle to determine what ought to be the supreme purpose of collective human life. Each side was convinced that history would vindicate it, and each was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that history sided in its favour.

"The Cold War was a struggle between two superpowers, each convinced that its way of life represented the only viable future for humanity, and each willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prove it." 

— John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005)

It was within this framework that proxy wars were born. A proxy war, in its plainest sense, is an armed conflict in which two major powers compete by using a third party as their instrument. Rather than confronting one another directly and risking an escalation that might end in nuclear annihilation, the United States and the Soviet Union chose instead to sponsor, train, arm, and finance groups or nations that represented their respective interests.

Wars Fought on Other People's Land

Korea provided the first test of the containment doctrine formulated by American diplomat George Kennan. When Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States led a United Nations coalition to repel the assault. The Korean War (1950–1953) claimed more than two million lives—among them civilians, North Korean and South Korean soldiers, and American and Chinese troops—yet it ended without any meaningful shift in the border, finishing almost precisely where it had begun.

Vietnam inflicted a deeper and more enduring wound. What had begun as an anticolonial independence struggle against France transformed into an ideological proxy conflict that drew the United States into the most traumatic war in its modern history. For more than two decades (1955–1975), America poured billions of dollars and more than fifty-eight thousand of its soldiers' lives into a conflict it ultimately could not win. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China quietly supplied North Vietnam with weapons, logistics, and military advisers.

Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan—these names form a long and sobering roster of countries that became victims of the proxy war's logic. The people who suffered were ordinary men and women in developing nations, caught between two superpowers who neither knew them personally nor cared for them particularly, yet who used their lands as squares on a geopolitical chessboard.

"Proxy wars allowed the superpowers to contest influence without the unacceptable cost of direct confrontation, yet the human toll on the peoples of the developing world was staggering and largely forgotten in the Cold War narrative." 

— Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (2005)

The most dramatic of all these proxy conflicts was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The United States, through a CIA covert programme known as Operation Cyclone, backed the Afghan mujahideen with weapons, funds, and training—including the anti-tank weapons and Stinger missiles that eventually broke Soviet air superiority. The conflict lasted nearly a decade, claimed more than a million Afghan lives, and left geopolitical wounds that remain raw to this day, including the seeds of the movement that would eventually become al-Qaeda.

The Truman Doctrine and Containment

In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman appeared before the United States Congress and announced a doctrine that would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades. The Truman Doctrine declared that the United States must stand ready to assist any nation threatened by communism—whether from within or without. This was at once an ideological declaration and a geopolitical strategy, lending legitimacy to any form of American intervention abroad, provided it could be framed as resistance to communist expansion.

The concept of containment developed by Kennan—though Kennan himself would later grow dismayed by its militaristic application—became the intellectual foundation of American strategy. The idea was straightforward: communism need not be actively destroyed, but must be prevented from spreading. If communism could be confined to territories already under Soviet influence, the system would, in time, collapse from within under the pressure of its own internal contradictions.

"The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." 

— George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (University of Chicago Press, 1951)

Whilst the United States wrestled with its containment doctrine, the Soviet Union did not remain idle. The Brezhnev Doctrine—formulated in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—asserted that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in any socialist state that threatened the 'common interests of the socialist bloc'. This was a mirror image of the Truman Doctrine: two interventionist doctrines reflecting one another across the Iron Curtain, and the peoples of countries caught between them who bore the consequences.

II. Nuclear Deterrence and the Balance of Terror

The Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud

On the 6th of August 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. In an instant, approximately eighty thousand people perished. Three days later, Nagasaki followed. The world had witnessed a destructive power unlike anything that had come before. And the world was changed irrevocably. Humanity now possessed the capacity to annihilate itself—not in any metaphorical or hyperbolic sense, but literally and completely.

When the Soviet Union successfully detonated its own atomic bomb in August 1949—far sooner than American scientists had anticipated—the world entered a new and uncharted era: the age of nuclear deterrence. An age in which peace was maintained not by human virtue, not by international law, not by diplomacy, but by the threat of mutual destruction so catastrophic that no party dared initiate a nuclear war, knowing full well that it would be annihilated alongside its enemy.

MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction

Military strategists and policy analysts in Washington and Moscow developed what was perhaps the most absurd yet most rational concept in Cold War logic: Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD—a fitting acronym. The principle was simple: if both sides possessed sufficient nuclear capability to destroy the other even after absorbing a nuclear first strike—a so-called 'second strike capability'—then no rational actor would have any incentive to initiate nuclear war.

To guarantee this second-strike capability, the United States and the Soviet Union each developed what strategists called a 'nuclear triad'—three complementary delivery systems for nuclear weapons: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) housed in hardened underground silos; submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) aboard submarines prowling the depths of the world's oceans; and strategic bomber aircraft maintained on constant alert. Even if an adversary's entire landmass were destroyed in a first strike, submarines dispersed across the oceans could still retaliate with equally devastating force.

"The balance of terror rested on the frightening logic that each side's security depended on its capacity to inflict unacceptable destruction on the other—a stability built on mutual vulnerability rather than mutual trust." 

— Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (2003)

Here lay the greatest paradox of nuclear deterrence: the more vulnerable a nation was to nuclear attack, the more stable the peace. A country that constructed a perfect anti-missile defence system would, paradoxically, become more dangerous—for it could then strike first without fear of retaliation. This logic drove the United States and the Soviet Union to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, limiting the development of missile defence systems—an agreement that, in a supreme irony, preserved stability by ensuring that both sides remained mutually exposed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis: The World at the Brink

For thirteen days in October 1962, the world stood in genuine peril of nuclear annihilation. When American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft returned with photographs that could not be misread — Soviet missile launch sites under construction in Cuba, barely one hundred and sixty kilometres from the coast of Florida—President John F. Kennedy and his cabinet faced the gravest dilemma ever confronted by any leader in modern history.

Throughout those thirteen days, American military commanders pressed Kennedy to launch immediate air strikes and a ground invasion of Cuba. Kennedy refused, opting instead for a naval blockade. Meanwhile, Soviet ships were sailing towards Cuba with cargo believed to contain further weaponry. Simultaneously, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, a Soviet submarine designated B-59 had lost contact with Moscow. Its commander, Valentin Savitsky, believed that nuclear war may already have broken out on the surface. He ordered preparations for the launch of a nuclear torpedo. Only one man prevented him: Vasili Arkhipov, who insisted that a decision of such magnitude required unanimous agreement from the three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov withheld his consent. The world was spared—thanks to a single man who chose not to press the button.

"We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." 

— Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as Soviet ships turned back (quoted in: Ernest R. May & Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, 1997)

The Cuban Missile Crisis yielded the most costly and most valuable lesson of the entire Cold War. It demonstrated that even within a deterrence system carefully designed and rationally constructed, accidents, misunderstandings, and misjudgements could still drive the world to the very edge of catastrophe. In response, a direct communications hotline between the White House and the Kremlin — widely referred to in the press as the 'red telephone'—was established in 1963 to ensure that the leaders of both nations could speak directly in any future crisis.

From the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963) to SALT I (1972), SALT II (1979), and START I (1991), the Cold War was punctuated by a succession of arms control agreements aimed at managing—if not eliminating—the danger posed by ever-accumulating nuclear arsenals. At their peak, the United States and the Soviet Union together held more than sixty thousand nuclear warheads between them—enough to extinguish all life on Earth many times over.

III. Psychological Warfare and Propaganda

 

The Battle for the Human Mind

Long before the era of social media, long before 'disinformation' entered everyday political vocabulary, the Cold War was already practising information warfare at a level of sophistication and on a scale that had never previously existed. Both sides understood that the true victory in the Cold War would not be determined by who possessed more missiles or tanks, but by who succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of people—both their own citizens and those in countries that had not yet chosen a side.

Cold War psychological warfare operated on many levels simultaneously: international radio broadcasts that penetrated the Iron Curtain; scholarship and cultural exchange programmes designed to introduce particular values; and covert operations that funded artists, intellectuals, and publishers — often without their knowledge or consent.

Radio, Film, and the Weapons of Culture

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty—established with CIA funding, though presented to the world as independent organisations—broadcast news, analysis, and entertainment into countries behind the Iron Curtain in more than twenty languages. For millions of Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians living under communist regimes that exercised rigid control over all domestic media, these broadcasts were the sole window onto a freer world of information. The Soviet Union responded with jamming—blocking the broadcast frequencies with electronic interference—which only further persuaded listeners that the content must be sufficiently dangerous to be suppressed.

Hollywood, too, became a battleground for propaganda, albeit in a subtler register. Films of the Red Scare era in the 1950s, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964)—which mercilessly satirised the absurdity of nuclear logic—and Rambo's depiction of American heroism in Vietnam all served, in varying degrees, to shape public perception of the Cold War. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Soviet cinema produced films that portrayed America as a rapacious imperialist power whilst depicting Soviet workers as heroes in the struggle for justice.

"The Cold War was fought not just with armies but with images, narratives, and the carefully managed projection of rival visions of modernity. Culture was a weapon, and both sides knew it." 

— Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000)

The CIA, the KGB, and Covert Operations

Behind the scenes, the psychological warfare of the Cold War took far darker and more clandestine forms. The CIA established the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950—an organisation that funded intellectual journals, arts festivals, and academic conferences across Europe, all to promote liberal Western values and demonstrate that artists and intellectuals could work in freedom under capitalism—in sharp contrast to their Soviet counterparts, who were confined by the rigid constraints of socialist realism.

The KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, ran operations of no less ambition. Active measures—the Soviet technical term for active influence operations—encompassed the dissemination of disinformation, the forgery of documents, the funding of communist parties around the world, and the infiltration of peace organisations. Among the most startling revelations to emerge after the Cold War was that a portion of the anti-nuclear peace movement in Western Europe during the 1980s—though supported by millions of sincere and well-meaning citizens—had been infiltrated and partly financed by Soviet intelligence operations.

"The KGB ran active measures on a grand scale—forgeries, disinformation, front organisations—exploiting genuine public anxieties in the West about nuclear war to serve Soviet strategic objectives."

— Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive (1999)

The Space Race as a Theatre of Propaganda

No arena of Cold War competition was more dramatic or more captivating to the global imagination than the space race. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik—the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth—in October 1957, the reaction in the United States was not merely one of military anxiety but of profound existential shock. If the Soviets could place a satellite in orbit, their missiles could reach any city in America. Sputnik was not simply a metal sphere circling the Earth; it was the loudest geopolitical statement ever made without the utterance of a single word.

America responded by establishing NASA in 1958 and pouring billions of dollars into its space programme. When Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the Earth in April 1961, the Soviet Union celebrated it as proof of the superiority of the socialist system. Eight years later, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon and declared that it was 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', the United States replied with a symbolic statement even more powerful—and ensured that the entire world witnessed it through live television broadcast.

"The space race was ultimately a battle for prestige, a competition to demonstrate which social system could best harness human ingenuity for the benefit of mankind." 

—Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985)

At its deepest level, the psychological warfare of the Cold War was a contest over moral authority. Each side strove to demonstrate that its system was the most humane, the most progressive, and the most deserving of serving as a model for the world. The United States confronted a painful contradiction: how could it promote democracy and freedom to the world, whilst at home Black Americans still faced systematic racial segregation and discrimination? The Soviet Union faced its own contradictions: how could it promote a classless society and equality whilst the nomenklatura—the ruling party elite—enjoyed privileges utterly inconceivable to ordinary citizens?

These contradictions ultimately weakened both systems from within. The civil rights movement in America, though it caused acute diplomatic embarrassment for Washington, ultimately strengthened America's moral legitimacy by demonstrating that democracy possessed a capacity for self-correction. In the Soviet Union, no such mechanism existed — official lie was piled upon official lie, and when Mikhail Gorbachev finally attempted to open the system through glasnost and perestroika in the mid-1980s, the entire rotted edifice collapsed far more swiftly than anyone had imagined possible.

The Legacy of a War That Never Quite Happened

On Christmas Day 1991, the red flag bearing the hammer and sickle was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced by the Russian tricolour. The Soviet Union had formally ceased to exist. The Cold War—a conflict that had endured for nearly half a century, consumed trillions of dollars, claimed millions of lives across innumerable proxy conflicts, and held the world in the paralysing grip of nuclear dread—ended not with an explosion, but with a whisper.

Yet its legacy did not end with it. Proxy wars left behind shattered states, frozen conflicts, and armed groups that had lost their sponsors but not their weapons. Afghanistan, which the United States had used to bleed the Soviets dry, later became the base of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Angola, exploited as a proxy arena by both sides for two decades, did not achieve peace until 2002. The logic of the proxy war, regrettably, did not die with the Cold War—it merely changed its name and its players.

The nuclear deterrence that kept the peace between the two superpowers for four decades now faces fresh challenges: the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states not bound by the same logic of MAD; the threat of nuclear terrorism; and the gradual erosion of the arms control agreements so painfully built during the Cold War years. The psychological warfare and propaganda that flourished during that era have taken forms far more difficult to detect and counter in the digital age—from disinformation spread through social media to influence operations exploiting algorithmic amplification.

The Cold War teaches us that conflict between great powers need not assume the form of direct armed combat in order to be profoundly destructive. It can operate through proxies, through threats, and through the manipulation of thought. And it is precisely because it operates in ways that are not always visible that it can endure so long, take root so deeply, and leave marks so durable upon the history of the human race.

The Cold War II: Sequel or Spectre?

The question of whether the conflicts and rivalries of the twenty-first century constitute a continuation of the Cold War—or whether they merit the designation of a second Cold War altogether—is one of the most vigorously contested debates amongst contemporary geopolitical analysts and historians. It is a question that resists a simple yes or no answer, for the honest response lies somewhere in the productive tension between compelling resemblance and fundamental difference.

There is no shortage of evidence to support the view that the world has indeed slipped back into a Cold War pattern. The rivalry between the United States and Russia that intensified sharply following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and erupted into something far more explicit with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, bears a striking family resemblance to the confrontations of the Cold War era. Proxy warfare has returned with a vengeance—Ukraine, Syria, and the Sahel region of Africa all serve, in varying degrees, as theatres in which great powers contest influence without directly engaging one another on the battlefield. Nuclear arsenals are being modernised rather than reduced. Diplomatic expulsions, asset freezes, and sanctions regimes have become routine instruments of statecraft. The historian Niall Ferguson was amongst the first prominent scholars to use the term "Cold War II" explicitly, arguing as early as 2019 that the structural dynamics of superpower rivalry had reasserted themselves with unmistakable clarity.

Yet if the Russia dimension of this argument is compelling, it is the rivalry between the United States and China that many analysts regard as the more consequential and more defining contest of the age. If the original Cold War pitted American capitalism against Soviet communism, then what is unfolding today between Washington and Beijing extends across an even broader range of domains: the race to dominate semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and fifth-generation telecommunications infrastructure; the contest between China's Belt and Road Initiative and the American-led Indo-Pacific Strategy; the military confrontation simmering in the South China Sea and across the Taiwan Strait; and the deeper narrative struggle over which model of development — liberal democracy or authoritarian state capitalism — ought to serve as the template for the developing world. The logic, in other words, feels familiar even if the players and the terrain have shifted.

The propaganda and disinformation dimension of this new rivalry also carries unmistakable echoes of its Cold War predecessor, though the methods have grown considerably more sophisticated and considerably more difficult to counter. Russian interference in the American presidential election of 2016, Chinese information operations surrounding the origins of COVID-19, and the deployment of state-sponsored cyber attacks against critical national infrastructure — all of these represent the direct descendants of the KGB's active measures, now turbocharged by social media algorithms and the architecture of the global internet. Meanwhile, the world has once again begun to harden into recognisable blocs: the Western alliance of NATO members and Indo-Pacific partners on one side, and the emerging axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea on the other. The abstentions of many Global South nations in United Nations votes on the Ukraine war are strongly reminiscent of the Non-Aligned Movement's studied neutrality during the original Cold War.

And yet, for all these structural parallels, there are equally powerful reasons to resist the label of "Cold War II" as a precise analytical description rather than a suggestive metaphor. The most fundamental of these is the question of economic interdependence. The original Cold War was characterised by an almost total separation of the two rival economic systems—the capitalist West and the communist East operated in largely sealed worlds, trading minimally with one another and developing parallel institutions. No such separation exists today. The United States and China are simultaneously each other's most formidable strategic rivals and each other's largest trading partners, a paradoxical condition that economists have variously termed "Chimerica" or "strategic interdependence." Even the decoupling that both Washington and Beijing have spoken of so insistently in recent years has proved agonisingly slow and incomplete in practice, precisely because the two economies are so deeply entangled. This is not a condition that the Cold War ever knew.

Equally important is the question of ideology. The original Cold War was, at its deepest level, a struggle between two competing universal visions—communism and capitalism, each claimed to represent not merely a national interest but the authentic path of human liberation for all peoples everywhere. Contemporary China, by contrast, does not seriously offer communism as an export ideology or a universal gospel. What Beijing promotes is rather a pragmatic model of state-led development that explicitly declines to prescribe its political system to others. This is a competition for power and influence, to be certain, but it lacks the messianic ideological fervour that gave the original Cold War so much of its peculiar intensity and moral urgency.

Furthermore, the multipolar complexity of the contemporary world sits uneasily within the bipolar framework that the Cold War label implies. The original Cold War was, for all its complications, a relatively structured system organised around two dominant poles. Today's world is far messier. India plays all sides with remarkable dexterity, pursuing its own strategic interests irrespective of bloc alignment. Turkey remains a NATO member whilst purchasing Russian air defence systems and brokering grain agreements between Moscow and Kyiv. Saudi Arabia negotiates simultaneously with Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. The Global South as a whole refuses to be conscripted into either camp with anything like the regularity that Cold War logic would predict. This is a world too fluid, too multipolar, and too transactional to be contained within the binary architecture of a second Cold War.

There is also a category of shared threats that has no real equivalent in the Cold War experience. Climate change, global pandemics, and transnational terrorism demand a degree of cooperation between rival powers that the Cold War rarely required or produced. The Paris Agreement on climate was negotiated and signed by countries that simultaneously regard one another as strategic competitors—an arrangement that would have been virtually inconceivable in the era of near-total superpower hostility.

The most judicious conclusion, then, is that the term "Cold War II" functions more usefully as a metaphor than as a precise historical description. It is a valuable metaphor because it alerts us to the fact that the patterns of great power rivalry—proxy conflict, arms competition, propaganda warfare, and the struggle for global influence—did not quietly retire in 1991. They merely lay dormant for a season before reasserting themselves in new forms. But the metaphor becomes misleading if pressed too literally, for the world of the twenty-first century possesses a degree of economic interdependence, ideological ambiguity, and multipolar complexity that the Cold War never had to navigate.

Perhaps the most accurate formulation—and one that an increasing number of scholars and strategists have adopted—is the notion of Great Power Competition: an era in which the structural logic of Cold War rivalry has demonstrably returned, but operates within and upon a world that has been irrevocably transformed by globalisation, digitalisation, and the diffusion of power to new actors. The Cold War, in this reading, is not a chapter of history that was cleanly closed in December 1991. It is better understood as a recurring pattern in the behaviour of powerful states—a template to which human political life appears disturbingly prone to return, so long as ambition, ideology, and the hunger for hegemony remain constants of the international order.

"Russians" by Sting (1985) stands as the most explicit statement the artist ever made about the Cold War. Drawing upon the music of Sergei Prokofiev as its melodic foundation, the song poses a question that is at once disarmingly simple and devastatingly pointed: Do the Russians love their children, too? In doing so, it attacks the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction from the most profoundly human of angles — the quiet insistence that behind all the grandstanding rhetoric of rival ideologies, the two nations holding each other at nuclear gunpoint were composed, at their core, of ordinary men and women who shared the same capacity for love and the same depth of fear.

The Meaning and Substance of "Russians"—Sting (1985)

The song opens with a melody borrowed from the work of Sergei Prokofiev—a Soviet composer—in a gesture that is itself deeply symbolic: music, Sting implies, is capable of transcending the ideological boundaries that divide human beings from one another. In reaching across the Iron Curtain for his opening notes, he quietly announces the moral argument that the rest of the song will make explicit.

Taken as a whole, the song expresses Sting's profound weariness and barely concealed contempt for the bellicose rhetoric emanating from both sides of the Cold War divide. He reserves particular scorn for the declarations of American and Soviet leaders who spoke with alarming casualness about the possibility of "winning" a nuclear war—as though total annihilation were a rational and acceptable outcome of statecraft. Sting challenges with quiet ferocity the very notion that victory retains any meaning whatsoever in a conflict that would leave no one standing to claim it.

The emotional heart of the song, however, is a question of breathtaking simplicity: do ordinary Russian people—not generals, not politicians, not ideologues, but mothers and fathers going about their daily lives—love their children in the same way that ordinary Americans do? Sting answers his own question with complete conviction: of course they do. And from so simple an observation, he constructs his most powerful moral argument—that no ideology, no military doctrine, and no geopolitical calculation is worth the life of a single child.

At its deepest level, the song is a plea for human beings to resist the dehumanising logic of Cold War thinking, which reduced entire populations to abstractions—pawns in a strategic game played by distant and unaccountable powers. By insisting on the shared humanity of those on both sides of the nuclear stand-off, Sting cuts through decades of propaganda with a single, unanswerable question. It is precisely this quality that allows "Russians" to transcend their historical moment and speak with undiminished force to any age in which the world finds itself once again fractured by suspicion, ideology, and the dangerous habit of treating the other side as something less than fully human.

Bibliography

The following works provided the principal scholarly foundations for the arguments advanced in this essay:

Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Allen Lane, 1999.

Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Kennan, George F. American Diplomacy, 1900–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

Leffler, Melvyn P., and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cambridge History of the Cold War. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 2000.

Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

[Part 21]

[Part 19]

Bahasa