Our Current Cold War

Noah Shachtman sees a "common thread emerging from WikiLeaks’ three major document dumps":

These diplomatic dispatches, along with war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, detail a globe-spanning Cold War between Iran and the United States. Each side has its proxies, each side provides weapons to those allies, and each side uses the game of global diplomacy to corral the other’s ambitions. “The metaphor most commonly deployed by Jordanian officials when discussing Iran is of an octopus whose tentacles reach out insidiously to manipulate, foment, and undermine the best laid plans of the West and regional moderates,” one WikiLeaked cable reports.