So there are lessons that the world can learn from the Cold War… Incredible… now how should the world act on what it should have learned? 

Start Ending and Winning Conflicts With Insurgents:

To start, the United States must learn from its failures. The United States continues to lose, or more aptly fails to win, wars against insurgencies and non-state powers. The prime example of the inability to fight and win these wars was the war in Vietnam. The Cold War displayed that the US was too distracted and set in its rigid war plan of massive nuclear proliferation against the USSR and that they were incapable of adapting to the new 4th generation of warfare and defeating the insurgent targets in Vietnam. While the US has in recent years, with wars against Iraq and Afghanistan altered its style of combat to accommodate COIN strategies and the hearts and minds strategies necessary to win 4th generation conflicts, the increase in non-state actors has exploited the US ineptitude, continuing its history of unsuccessful campaigns against insurgents.

 The US must learn from their mistakes in these wars and commit more fully to upholding counter insurgency stage 4 warfare centered policies. The US must not solely focus on major power struggles and arms races only to leave themselves vulnerable to smaller nations and non state actor groups. The US must transition away from conventional military weapons technology development and focus more on developing insurgency counter measures that work effectively and precisely to quickly disarm an insurgent campaign. This of course does not mean A complete halt of military technology development, as military tech is essential to deterring major nation attacks, but simply cutting unnecessary projects and siphoning that funding and effort into measures of fighting non state actors that actually work. This is necessary to shore up US military supremacy on all fronts, not just in major conflicts, as the days of major conflict are largely over due to nuclear stalemates and mutually assured destruction. They must transition to a more flexible military strategy in which they can fight wars against insurgents and conventional militaries alike. 

The longer the war in Afghanistan continues the less likely the US is as a nation to win the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan and doubly the more likely it is to lose the hearts and minds of the US people. Because insurgents blend in with the population in which they originate, any violent attacks on insurgents look like a violent attack on the people of the nation. This prolongs the conflict as the people of the nation increasingly distrust the US. And as the conflict is prolonged less people in the homeland US will support the costly war. Thus more violence propagates a cycle of distrust, prolonging the war and putting victory further out of sight. This being said the US must learn to minimize violent troop attacks against embedded insurgent targets. The US must find ways to end these conflicts earlier while exerting less overt violence against insurgents who are embedded in the public.

Mitigate Our Social Media Security Weaknesses:

The US’s security is being threatened from inside the country as Russia wages war through social media in order to polarize the people and incite instability. Russia believes that if they can build distrust and immense untreatable polarization amongst the people of the US then policy will fail to be made, making the US unable to adapt – ultimately leading to the fail of democracy. The US must find a way to protect its people from fake news by creating active disclaimers and verifiers on all content to ensure that the content going out to the public is legitimate and not malicious. Additionally it is essential that the US works to educate people on how to differentiate fake news and real news on social media and find foreign bots and report them. This would allow for a grassroots protection as educated individuals could have some power in picking off some of the massive numbers of bots. Additionally the US must work with  social media companies in order to make deals with them to better vet accounts that impersonate with the goal to inflate disagreements and conflict. Some legwork has already been done in deals with the US and social media companies but much more needs to be done and regulations and laws need to be made if companies fail to commit to stopping this internal threat. 

View The Threat of Climate Change Like The Threat of Nuclear Apocalypse:

Historically,  it has been proven extremely difficult to promote cooperation on the international playing field due to the anarchic nature of the word stage that compels each country to act in their own best interest, even at the expense of other states. It is often disagreements in how countries act on their self interest that impedes international cooperation as each country holds different values, interests and capabilities. Despite the power struggle for often competing interests there is one common thread which is an interest to all countries: climate change. Climate change is a unique problem which threatens all countries, even if it is to varying degrees. All countries will be affected negatively in some major way by climate change and its myriad of negative ecological effects that do not respect national borders. Doubly it is a problem which can only be stopped if all countries commit equally to mitigating and stopping the development of climate change. Any commitment to collectively working to halt climate change has been largely in vain because each country is affected by climate change to a different degree and every country causes it at a different amount. This inability to cooperate cannot continue as it will lead to the destruction of our earth. This being said, treating climate change as a mutual destruction situation may bring countries closer to cooperation. Much like blocs in the Cold War, if countries commit a military like policy to fighting an existential threat that threatens all countries then much like the Cold War the world could make a bloc against climate change. The goal of this committee would be to establish some sort of enforcement measure that would hold countries accountable and make it easier to shulk the temptation to act independently in an anarchic world and place the responsibility on other states. The US could use its economic power to make a committee that is set to facilitate cooperation amongst all nations in which they threaten countries with trade embargos for those who do not join the committee and commit to their policies. If we can build cooperation through climate change then it could be a good stepping point to build international committees and cooperation on other issues that last long term. It could help states understand how to work together on a never-before-seen level.