Former ambassador dismisses idea of modern Cold War

Comparisons of modern politics to those of the Cold War were dismissed in a lecture Thursday by a man with firsthand experience.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., a Greensboro native and former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, recounted the war’s end from his perspective — just over 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell.

The lecture, titled “From Gorbachev to Putin: Russia and the U.S. in the Post-Cold War World,” drew a full crowd and many questions from the audience, though few students attended. Matlock said comparing today’s political situation to the Cold War is inappropriate.

“There’s all sorts of talk today about Cold War II, about the confrontation particularly over in Ukraine as having echoes of the Cold War — and indeed the rhetoric sounds very similar,” Matlock said. “Let me say right up front that I think that is an exaggeration. It is probably not accurate to compare — at least the magnitude and its implications — of what is happening today and what happened during the Cold War.”

He said the Cold War was based on a different philosophy throughout the world than the issues that are rising up between the United States and Russia today.

“That doesn’t mean that what we are experiencing today is good or is trivial or isn’t dangerous, but it does, I think, exaggerate things a bit to compare it to the Cold War,” he said.

After the former ambassador’s lecture, there was a round-table discussion among Matlock and UNC history professors Klaus Larres and Donald Raleigh.

Larres opened up the floor for the audience to participate in a question-and-answer session with Matlock at the end.

Meredith College professor Stephanie Hurt, who was in the audience, said that her heritage was French and Polish and that she was curious why Matlock never mentioned Central and Western Europe at the conclusion of the Cold War.

“I found it very interesting, but what bothers me is that he keeps mentioning and mixing Central Europe and Eastern Europe, which for a non-introduced audience, does not mean anything, because we Western Europeans think in terms of Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Europe,” Hurt said. “By putting (them) in the same bag, he is just making two camps — the West with American and the East with Russian. The reality is a bit more complex.”

Larres said the lecture was a part of the Ambassadors Forum and had been in the works for two years. He said he thought it was a success.

“There must have been over 140 people,” he said. “People were interested, and they stayed almost to the end. The ambassador was very knowledgeable and spoke very eloquently about his own experiences and about the current problems with Russia.”

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