Tom Rogan is making no sense:

We face a world that’s just as dangerous as that of the Cold War era, and perhaps more so. Where the Cold War was constrained by the mutual threat of thermonuclear destruction [bold mine-DL], the combination of nuclear proliferation, disparate interests, and fear has made this moment fraught with danger.

Put another way, there was a greater possibility of global nuclear war during the Cold War than there is today, but somehow the world is more dangerous now. The “constraint” of mutually assured destruction also depended on the reasonable fear that the rivalry between the U.S. and USSR would spiral out of control and destroy the entire planet. Leaving aside the fact that the danger of nuclear war has receded significantly since 1991, the Cold War era was marked by many internal and international wars, some of which were fueled by the same superpower rivalry. Contra Rogan, Russia is not “the Soviet Union with a better suit” for all the reasons that Mark Adomanis gives here and more, and there is no state that has even tried to fill the role that the USSR played during the Cold War. Rogan scoffs that “we assure ourselves that modern Russia is a shadow of its past strength,” as if this were the product of a delusional mind rather than a boilerplate statement of the obvious. The collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War represented a great advance towards a relatively more peaceful, less dangerous world. Try as some hawks might to pretend that the world has become more dangerous since then, it simply isn’t so.

There is similar confusion in Rogan’s treatment of “ideological fascists,” which is a category he uses to include everyone from jihadists in Yemen to the Iranian government. This suffers from the same flaw as the silly label “Islamofascist,” and manages to be just as inaccurate by ascribing fascist ideas to people and movements that have almost nothing in common with fascists except their recourse to violence. These are groups that Rogan acknowledges have “competing agendas,” but he insists on treating them as part of a united “philosophy.” Not only do they not subscribe to the ideology he identifies, but the fact that they are at odds with one another is far more relevant than their similar willingness to commit atrocities in the name of their respective causes. Even more significantly, these groups hold power in very few places, which makes it hard to accept the claim that they control their part of the globe.