Love this podcast.

Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.

It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.

Just click the link in the show description to support now.

But China is not the Soviet Union 2.0 and we were talking earlier about the the use or lack thereof of metaphors and analogies.

And I worry that the growing tendency to analogize China to an overarching sort of anoyed antagonist threatens to obscure more than clarify. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the

front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host Matthew Galt.

Producer Kevin Nodel is still in the Middle East, but we'll be hearing from him

soon.

Thinking about geopolitics is all about picking the right metaphor.

After World War II, America's elite conceived of a world engaged in a Cold War where the United States

and Soviet Union played a game of spies and skirmishes to spread political ideology

across the planet. In the 19th century the British and Russian empires engaged in the great game, political and diplomatic

Game of Shadows that played out in Afghanistan and its neighboring territories.

But the problem with metaphors is that the map is not the territory.

The menu is not the meal.

And if you get caught up in a great power competition, say,

it can be hard to see the way the world really works

or see the world any other way.

Here to help us sort through this and try to figure out what metaphors best fit our troubled times

is Lee Wine. He's a policy analyst at Rand, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Snowcroft Center on International Security,

...