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tbh I like the idea of a multipolar world - a lot of our biggest achievements came as a result of the cold war.

it also forces some redundancy into the mechanisms of running a technological world - a disaster that affects one of the two or three polities may well leave enough stuff working that civilisation doesn't need to collapse completely.

a world where everything depends on everything else working correctly is a bit more fragile than I would like.

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I think it's not clear which way that effect goes -- the Cold War was also the closest humanity has ever come to destroying itself. If all nations depend on each other, there's less nuclear conflict risk and less risk of war in general.

now that we've allowed Ukraine to suffer the consequences of trusting us with their defence in exchange for their old nukes, I expect nuclear proliferation to be inevitable and thus a nuclear exchange within our lifetimes isn't off the table. the worse is ahead of us, cold war or not.

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