ABSTRACT
A cold war is a war with no traditional combat (in contrast to a “hot war”) that emphasizes ideological conflict, brinksmanship, and consistently high international tension. This is not new. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the English social contract theorist so famous for observing that in a state of nature without a strong government, human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” also had much to say about war. In Leviathan (1651), he wrote: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.” Then he compared this “not in battle” war to bad weather. “For as the nature of foul weather, lyeth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together; so the nature of war, consists not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.”
