For our private clients, we recently suggested a fairly detailed model of how the two sides in the new Cold War and the unoccupied ground between them were shaping up.  It is a war that may still go hot in Iran.  One conclusion was that China would remain a wild card for a while yet and nobody's fool.

In that analysis, we noted some key internal contradictions within the two camps.  First,the historic ['realist'] primacy of market economics over liberal democracy in managing international affairs created its own dissent within the Western camp.  Aggressive 'neo-conservative' liberalisers and traditional nationalists and Leftists were placing constant pressure on the pragmatic centre.  Radical liberals often drove policies that encouraged an often justifiably paranoid defensive resistance in their opponents.

The internal contradiction of the authoritarian-populist camp on the other hand was that authoritarian methods had negative economic and political impacts that permitted space for Western subversion through indigenous liberals - the so-called 'colour revolutions'.  These idealists can prove easy marks for political warfare specialists from the West, whether working directly or under cover from NGOs.  In other words, idealists and liberals are proving a major destabilising factor in state relations, playing the role that (say) liberal imperialists did in the late nineteenth century.

The existence of contradictory ideologies of dissent (human rights/liberal, Islamist, petty nationalist/regionalist, traditionalist, developmentalist and, just hanging on in there, socialist) is no longer a matter of domestic politics but of international affairs.  Famously, the Socialist International collapsed in 1914 as each national constituency backed its own tribe against the other, but there now seems to be an emergent internationalism - whether liberal or Caliphate - quite prepared to turn on its own governments if they fail to carry their beliefs into battle against others.  We certainly see this in the growing tension between the Soros network and the US Administration.  It may be a factor in the inability, even if they wished, of the Russian and Iranian Presidencies to control their siloviki and pasdarans respectively.

These many competing and contradictory cultures of resistance thus have highly ambiguous relationships with both authoritarian nationalism and with liberal Western culture.  They work against the pragmatic resolution of problems in favour of some ideal that derives from emotion and psychology as much as from rational thought. Osama bin Laden's attempt to appropriate Chomsky's critique of the American political system is an example of the fluidity that is now appearing in the battle of cultures and ideas.

The logic of this chaotic system is that the West and the resistance states have a common interest in suppressing the ‘wrong’ sort of wild card [such as Sunni insurgency from below] yet they have a competitive interest in encouraging the operation of those wild cards that undermine the other side. Thus, wild cards will be set off against one another and wild cards will be drawn to each other when they are abandoned by state sponsors. Each will be pawn in an increasingly bitter and anarchic game in which the manipulation of belief systems will prove a key part of the play. 

We are seeing a return to the politics of the late Cold War but shorn of the more obvious text-based ideological content, far more difficult to analyse and vastly more manipulatively and cynically conducted by the various participants.  The use of the terms 'game and 'play' are deliberate here.  While the main players represent various state interests and others are concerned with their beliefs and ideals, the entire performance will depend on mid-level performers whose sense of esteem will come from playing out World of Warcraft in real time and with real resources.  Now that is really scary.