There are hot wars that have been less exhaustively dramatised than the cold one. Thirty years after the USSR fell, I walk into one of the District of Columbia’s reopened cinemas and see the Cuban missile crisis ensnare Benedict Cumberbatch in The Courier.
On screen, the cold war is fun: it offers momentous stakes without (much) bloodshed. It is when the US-Soviet clash becomes a model for our own times that the trouble starts. It has become normal to speak of “containing” China. US Republicans of some rank talk up the “free world”. If the cold war trope was just a bad historical fit, it would be a merely academic irritant. But the ris