The New Cold War E-Book

Gilbert Achcar

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 560

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

One of the world's most seasoned international relations experts updates and revises his far-sighted 1999 book arguing that the Cold War did not, in fact, end with the collapse of the USSR – and that the US, Russia and China today are locked anew in a spiral of hostilities.

Leseprobe

THE NEW COLD WAR

GILBERT ACHCAR is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His other publications include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (with Noam Chomsky); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives; and The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising.

Gilbert Achcar

THE NEW COLD WAR

The United States, Russia and Chinafrom Kosovo to Ukraine

THE WESTBOURNE PRESS

An Imprint of Saqi Books

26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

www.westbournepress.co.uk

www.saqibooks.com

First published 2023 by The Westbourne Press

Copyright © Gilbert Achcar 2023

Gilbert Achcar has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designsand Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 908 906 53 3

eISBN 978 1 908 906 54 0

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: ON COLD WARS AND THE NEW COLD WAR

PART IGENESIS OF THE NEW COLD WAR

CHAPTER ONE – THE STRATEGIC TRIAD: THE UNITED STATES, RUSSIA AND CHINA

CHAPTER TWO – RASPUTIN PLAYS CHESS: HOW THE WORLD STUMBLED INTO A NEW COLD WAR

PART IIHOW THE NEW COLD WAR GOT QUITE HOT

TRANSITION: MOVES AND COUNTERMOVES ON THE GRAND CHESSBOARD

CHAPTER THREE – VLADIMIR THE TERRIBLE: AN OPERA IN FIVE ACTS

CHAPTER FOUR – CHINA: END OF THE PEACEFUL RISE?

CONCLUSION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Notes

Index

List of Figures

Introduction

1: US Military Expenditure in Constant 2019 US$, 1950–1990

2: US Military Expenditure as a Share of GDP, 1950–1990

Chapter One

1: US Defense Spending in Constant 1995 US$, 1953–1997

2: World Defense Spending by Share

Chapter Three

1: The Russian Federation’s Military Expenditure as a Share of Government Expenditure, 2000–2020

2: The Russian Federation’s Military Expenditure in Current US$, 2000–2020

Chapter Four

1: China’s Military Expenditure in Current US$, 2000–2020

2: China and USA, Military Expenditure as a Share of GDP, 2000–2020

3: China’s Military Expenditure as a Share of Government Expenditure, 2000–2020

Conclusion

1: The United States, Russia and China:Military Expenditure as a Share of GDP, 1992–2020

2: The United States, Russia and China:Military Expenditure in Constant 2019 US$, 1992–2020

3: US Military Expenditure in Constant 2019 US$, 1950–2020

Preface

Unsurprisingly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a deluge of comments on the shape of international relations along the geopolitical East–West divide, which is still ongoing. The reference to a New Cold War has inevitably been dominant in these comments. At a time when animosity in relations between Russia and the geopolitical West has reached a peak matching the most worrying moments of the Cold War, it is a striking paradox that many commentators have heralded the beginning of a New Cold War. Others shied away from going so far, contenting themselves with warnings against the potential advent of a New Cold War—as if it was not already in full swing. Since the turn of this century, there have been myriad announcements of the start of a New Cold War, or warnings against its potential occurrence, intermittently surging after each period of East–West tension, like mushrooms after the rain.

The chaotic state of the debate about this seemingly elusive notion of a New Cold War points to a lack of clarity about what “cold war” means in the first place. This book’s introductory chapter is therefore dedicated to the exploration and clarification of that concept—a prerequisite for any meaningful discussion of its uses. My own understanding of it, combined with my assessment of the 1999 Kosovo War, led me to diagnose the beginning of what I have called a New Cold War since that tense end to the twentieth century. In the wake of the Kosovo War, I wrote in French a piece titled “Rasputin Plays Chess: How the World Stumbled into a New Cold War”, which I published—along with a previous article of mine titled “The Strategic Triad: The United States, Russia and China” written in 1997 and first published in English translation the year after, in the New Left Review—in a little book titled La Nouvelle Guerre froide : le monde après le Kosovo (The New Cold War: The World after Kosovo), which came out in 1999.1

This was probably the first post-1990 book whose title referred to the start of a New Cold War, a twenty-first-century variant that involved the two central players of the previous one—the United States and Russia (previously as the dominant nation of the Soviet Union)—along with a new major player inclined to team up with the latter: China. I had wished that little volume to come out in English as well, but Tariq Ali, then director of the NLR’s associated publishing house Verso Books, insisted on including the new piece along with the previous one as two chapters in a collection he was editing, which came out in 2000 under the title Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade.2

I have always regretted acquiescing in that decision, which buried my book and its original thesis in a compilation of contributions of over 400 pages. I have therefore been intending ever since to reissue my two pieces separately in English, in order to bring forward their thesis about the New Cold War—which I believed to be vindicated by subsequent events—and to seize this opportunity to update my analysis. Various circumstances have conspired to distract me from that project. However, I was finally convinced to put other projects on hold by the new crisis over Ukraine that started to unfold in the spring of 2021, which I saw as a culmination of the process that had gestated in the 1990s. The exponential increase in references to the New Cold War both in the media and in titles of books and journal articles since the previous crisis over Ukraine in 2014, and deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing, especially after Donald Trump became president in 2017, were an additional incentive.

The present book is the result. The two previous chapters of which my 1999 book is comprised are reproduced hereafter as Part I of the present book, without alteration except for copyediting homogenization and a few translation fixes. The purpose of this is not to deliver an “I told you so” but to demonstrate that it was possible to recognize two decades ago that the world had been put on a course that could lead to the present highly explosive situation. It is my firm belief that those two chapters have lost none of their relevance and that their detailed consideration of the events of the 1990s is crucial for the understanding of the present world situation, which is indeed why I decided to make them available to today’s readers and consequently submit them to their critical judgment. They are preceded by the introductory chapter already mentioned and followed by a longer section of this book (Part II), which comprises two new chapters: the first on Russia’s evolution under Vladimir Putin, and the second on China—both countries being primarily considered from the angle of their foreign policy and relations with the United States, including an assessment of the interaction of these policies with domestic factors in each country.3

London, 14 July 2022

Acknowledgements

Ilya Budratskis and Au Loong-yu have read and commented on Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Ashley Smith did likewise for the whole manuscript on behalf of Haymarket. Charles Peyton edited the book very thoroughly and usefully. Chapter 1 (1997) had benefited from comments by members of the CIRPES (Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches sur la paix et d’études stratégiques, École des hautes études en sciences sociales–EHESS, Paris), especially those of its director Alain Joxe and of Maurice Ronai. I extend my gratitude to all of them, while remaining solely responsible for the views and any errors included in this book.

I am also thankful to Presses Universitaires de France for their reversion of the rights to my 1999 work and to Verso Books for their permission to use the English translation that is reproduced in Part I of this book.

INTRODUCTION

On Cold Warsand the New Cold War

The designation New Cold War—along with Second Cold War— was used before 1990 to describe the flare-up of tensions between Washington and Moscow that followed Ronald Reagan’s accession to the US presidency in 1981. It was actually a misuse of the concept, for the rather obvious reason that the policy of détente initiated by Richard Nixon in 1969 had in no way brought the Cold War to an end. It was only a decrease in tension in a protracted confrontation, short of direct belligerence, between the two Cold War superpowers. Historians rightly refer today to the Cold War as a single period that goes from the aftermath of the Second World War to the sequence of events from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the unification of Germany in 1990 and the subsequent disintegration of the USSR by the end of the following year.

Early Warnings of a New Cold War

In the year 2000, in the wake of the Kosovo War, one of the towering figures of the study of international relations, Kenneth Waltz—the foremost advocate of “structural realism” or “neorealism”, essentially a version of “balance of power” theory—published an important article in the Harvard University journal International Security, in which I saw a confirmation of the views that I had expressed in my 1999 book. On the most fateful decision that precipitated the deterioration of international relations at the end of the twentieth century, namely the post-1990 decision to expand NATO eastward, Waltz commented:

The reasons for expanding NATO are weak. The reasons for opposing expansion are strong. It draws new lines of division in Europe, alienates those left out, and can find no logical stopping place west of Russia. It weakens those Russians most inclined toward liberal democracy and a market economy. It strengthens Russians of the opposite inclination. It reduces hope for further large reductions of nuclear weaponry. It pushes Russia toward China instead of drawing Russia toward Europe and America …

To alienate Russia by expanding NATO, and to alienate China by lecturing its leaders on how to rule their country, are policies that only an overwhelmingly powerful country could afford, and only a foolish one be tempted, to follow. The United States cannot prevent a new balance of power from forming. It can hasten its coming as it has been earnestly doing.1

By this time, apart from my 1999 book, the only assertion that the world did actually enter a New Cold War, leaving aside episodic warnings against its hypothetic advent2—the only such assertion that I am aware of in a Latin-script language (such claims may very well have existed in Russian, in particular)—was made in 1998 by none other than George Kennan, one of the best-known architects of the Cold War at its onset. Kennan, then ninety-four years old, declared to Thomas Friedman, the famous New York Times columnist, that the US decision to expand NATO constituted in his opinion “the beginning of a new cold war”.3

The next such categorical assertion I know of was made six years into the new century by the late Stephen Cohen, the well-known Russia specialist. Against the background of the palpable cooling of US–Russian relations under George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, Cohen published in the Nation in June 2006 an article titled ”The New American Cold War”, in which he convincingly argued that relations between Washington and Moscow had deteriorated to a level of hostility equal to that of the Cold War, and even more dangerous in some respects.4 He also noted in passing: “Moscow is forming a political, economic and military ‘strategic partnership’ with China”. In the same year, a seminar paper was issued as a booklet in German, heralding a New Cold War in its title.5 The author discussed the triangular relations between the United States, Russia and China as constituting a New Cold War, primarily in light of Waltz’s neorealism.

In 2007, Canadian journalist and former Moscow bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, Mark MacKinnon, published what was probably the second book to be titled The New Cold War after my own.6 MacKinnon provided a vivid description of the contest between Washington and Moscow over the former Soviet sphere:

Just a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington and Moscow were back at odds, again fighting tooth and nail in an undeclared battle …

Unlike the Cold War, which was fought on such far-flung battlefields as Angola and Vietnam, this one would be fought far closer to the Kremlin’s doorstep, reflecting the new reality of Russia as a re-emerging power. This battle would also have an ideological overtone, the US once again donning the cloak of defending “freedom” and individual liberties … But this modern struggle would be as much about competing commercial interests—and the control of the old USSR’s vast energy resources—as it would be about political systems or ideologies.7

While underestimating the extent to which this New Cold War would eventually resort to the same “weapons” as those of the previous one, MacKinnon aptly described the new features:

The weapons of this war would be different, too. Nuclear standoffs and proxy armies were gone, replaced by rigged elections, stage-managed revolutions and wrangling over pipeline routes. But it was still Washington versus Moscow. And the peoples of the old USSR—Ukrainians, Georgians, Russians, Belarusians and Central Asians—were the ones caught in the middle.8

In 2008, British journalist and senior editor at the Economist, Edward Lucas, published a further book titled The New Cold War.9 Focusing on US–Russian relations, Lucas misjudged the fundamentally triangular character of the new global confrontation. He mistakenly ruled out the prospect of Beijing’s alliance with Moscow.10 The year after, the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution organized a conference on East–West tensions that resulted in a publication in German under the title, On the Way to a New Cold War?11 Then, in 2010, Cohen’s above-mentioned article was reprinted as the opening salvo in a collection that included fifteen articles by various authors, expressing contradictory views under the title, Is There a New Cold War?12

Not long after, dramatic quakes in international relations generated two major waves of publications on the theme of the New Cold War: one focused on Russia’s relations with the West in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine crisis, and another on China’s relations with the West, boosted three years later by the bitter turn these relations underwent under Donald Trump, who aired rabidly anti-Chinese rhetoric from the White House. Each wave brought onto the market several books in various languages, focusing on US relations with either Russia or China, or both, as well as an abundance of articles of all types, both journalistic and academic.

Halfway between these two genres stands Foreign Affairs, the venerable journal of US foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2018 it issued a voluminous selection of articles on US relations with Russia under the title, A New Cold War? Russia and America, Then and Now.13 In their introduction to this anthology, the editors, referring to “Westerners”, observed that “many of them contend we are entering a new Cold War”.14 This same contention had in fact been made more frequently and for a longer time in the two countries at the opposite end of that new confrontation: Russia and China—laying the blame on Western behavior, of course.

Thus, what is perhaps the earliest warning on record against a New Cold War was expressed in 1994, less than three years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, by Georgi Arbatov—formerly a member of both the USSR’s Supreme Soviet and its ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee—who is credited with having played a key role as advisor to Michael Gorbachev in devising the pro-peace policies of the last Soviet president.15 In an article titled “A New Cold War?”, published in Foreign Policy, Arbatov warned American readers in polite and friendly terms against the consequences of the “disastrous” economic reforms dictated to post-Soviet Russia by the United States, along with its G7 allies and the IMF and World Bank, combined with Washington’s vexing policy toward Russia relating to the latter’s “near abroad”. The economic policy that Arbatov referred to is discussed in Chapter 3, below. For now, here is his warning in the realm of foreign policy:

When America plays the game of “lone superpower”, Russians feel frustrated and start to be very critical of their own foreign policy; Russian nationalists take the offensive … One hears among [them], for instance, some emerging political ideas about Russia’s “special” or even exclusive rights and responsibilities to care about “law and order” in the former Soviet Union. That area, at times including some countries in Eastern Europe, is declared a zone of special interest for Russia. Proposed is a kind of a “Monroe doctrine” (or, as some joke, “Monrovski doctrine”) for Russia. Such a policy, were Russia to accept it, would open the way to new conflicts and maybe even civil war over the whole territory of the former Soviet Union. And that struggle in turn would revive the Cold War. Such a policy would bring an end to democratic reforms in Russia …

Though Russia is in a deep crisis today, it is difficult and counterproductive for America to ignore us even now. Sooner or later we will overcome our crises and our strength and influence will return. Meanwhile, it is important not to permit relations between our two countries to sour. We already have signs that this is beginning to happen … America must include us not out of pity but with clear understanding of Russia’s present and future role. The United States must do this also with an understanding of the fact that Russia is a great power with legitimate national interests.16

If a Western-friendly Russian such as Arbatov could sound so alarmist in the early 1990s—and rightly so, as the future proved— one can presume that by then many, if not most, Russians were perceiving relations between their country and the West as marked by a continuation of the Western aversion to Russia that characterized the Cold War era. Likewise, in the “unipolar moment” opened by the USSR’s death agony, there has been no lack of Chinese pronouncements against “hegemonism” that were no longer targeting Moscow, but instead Washington.17 The inexorable rise of China’s power and the partial recovery of Russia’s power in the twenty-first century were met with US animosity and a surge in attitudes belonging to the panoply of “containment” policies practiced against the USSR during the Cold War. In both countries, this inevitably nurtured a strong and widespread belief that the world’s hegemon wanted to clip their wings.

State of Denial

In Western countries, on the other hand—particularly in the United States—there has long been a widespread denial of the reality of the New Cold War, although this denial has considerably receded since the most recent round of confrontation over Ukraine. Kenneth Waltz’s 2000 essay was republished two years later, in an edited volume debating the future of post–Cold War international relations, titled America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power.18 In his introduction to the collection, G. John Ikenberry defined its topic in terms indicating how much he underestimated the developments described in the next two chapters of this book, originally published around the same time. “Why has the unprecedented concentration of American power today not triggered balancing responses from other major states?” asked Ikenberry.19

The range of responses to this question offered in the collection demonstrated the degree of self-delusion among think-tanks and in academic foreign policy circles. They included assertions of belief in the durability of the overwhelming US economic and military superiority—despite the fast rise in China’s economic power, as well as the limits and constraints on American military power that were revealed in Vietnam (and were soon confirmed in Iraq and Afghanistan). The collection also displayed belief in the Kantian postulate of peace based on political liberalism and trade, as well as in the global acceptance of US hegemony assumed to be benevolent and indeed desired by “other major states” to protect them from each other. This was, in other words, an expression of faith in the long-lasting success of the hub-and-spokes strategy, in which the United States is the hub and Europe, Japan, Russia and China are the spokes of the global wheel, each needing the United States more than they need each other—a strategy described at the end of this book’s next chapter.

By the end of the 1990s, the crucial decade of transition from the Cold War, Washington had blatantly failed to manage this hub-and-spokes strategy. That is because it included an inherent contradiction: Washington needed to emphasize a post-ideological threat still represented by Russia and China in order to incite its major established partners in Europe and East Asia to renew their allegiance to US overlordship. But doing so—revamping and upgrading Cold War alliances that had been formed against Russia and China, instead of discarding them in recognition of their obsolescence, as most of world public opinion, Western countries included, hoped for in the immediate aftermath of the USSR’s demise—made it impossible to convince either Moscow or Beijing to regard Washington as a guarantor of their own security, since none of them faced a threat remotely comparable to that represented by Washington itself.

The post–Cold War world was not a return to the multipolar condition that preceded the First World War—not only because the United States was for many years much more powerful than the rest, a point well captured by the term “unipolar moment”, but also because the global power potential of either Russia or China, and even more so their combined potential, exceed by a considerable margin the potential of every other power but the United States. Unlike Japan and the European powers, which fundamentally accept their subordinate condition (even if the French are eager to enhance EU autonomy), both China and Russia aspire to the status of global peers of the United States, and know only too well that the paramount global power is striving to keep them down—which is precisely why they need to join forces in countering it.

Self-delusion reached its peak in the United States in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001 (“9/11”), when the American giant was crying out for revenge. Both Russia and China weathered the outburst of American rage that immediately followed 9/11, when US forces went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime. A key principle of judo, the Japanese martial art of whose mastery Vladimir Putin is so proud, is to offer no resistance to the assault of a powerful opponent, but instead use the energy of the assault to destabilize the assailant. In the wake of the huge shock of 9/11, at a time when Russia was only beginning to recover from the extreme asthenia that had struck it during the 1990s, while it remained mired in the Chechen war within its own federative borders, Putin, then president for less than two years, conspicuously followed his “judoka” instinct.

He put a brave face on the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and—far worse from Moscow’s perspective—on Washington’s securing of various military facilities, including the lease of Soviet-era bases, in all five former Soviet Republics of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. This historically unprecedented push by the United States in this part of the world was accomplished thanks to the opportunity offered by the “war on terror”. Putin nodded to all this. Happy to see his own purported “war on terror” in Chechnya thereby validated, and probably hoping that Afghanistan would turn into a quagmire for the United States as it had for the USSR, he deferred his opposition to US deployment in Central Asia until more propitious circumstances emerged.

So did China, which was in the midst of Jiang Zemin’s charm offensive toward Western countries—an approach that soon came to be known as the “peaceful rise” policy. China was no doubt worried by the deployment of US forces on its north-western flank, dangerously completing a vise around its landmass, along with the longstanding concentration of massive US and allied forces on its eastern flank. The only possible silver lining was that the Taliban had been a source of worries for China: it was thus on balance preferable from Beijing’s standpoint that Washington fight Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia rather than fan it, as it had done for many years in opposition to the Soviet Union, with spillover effects within China’s own territory—Xinjiang in particular.

The momentary mood of collaboration with Washington in Moscow and Beijing in the wake of 9/11 was shown in the remarkable unanimity displayed at the UN Security Council, which adopted a series of resolutions on the situation in Afghanistan that bestowed international legality on the US-led military presence in that country. Illusions about a lasting acceptance of US preeminence by Russia and China, and about the durability of this preeminence itself, reached a peak during this period of heightened US hubris. Such illusions were articulated in some of the contributions to the volume edited by Ikenberry, mentioned above. The gradual buildup of evidence to the contrary as this century’s first decade unfolded was met by widespread denial in the United States.

A striking instance was the keynote speech that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered on 23 January 2008 at the Word Economic Forum, held every year at Davos, Switzerland. Rice, whose career in US foreign policy was due to her expertise in Russian affairs, had read the day before in the Financial Times an interview with Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus. Pointing to aggressive gestures by Moscow toward the Baltic states, and alluding to the effect of sharply rising oil prices on the Russian economy, the Lithuanian president wondered if “a very strong financial recovery in Russia is a stimulus for the new Russian leadership to return to the cold war”.20

Rice’s rebuttal was quite stunning. Asserting that “perhaps nowhere is it clearer that we have no permanent enemies than in our relationship with Russia”, she continued: “Ladies and gentlemen, the recent talk about a new Cold War is hyperbolic nonsense”, before blatantly contradicting herself after only a couple of sentences:

Our relations today are fundamentally different than they were when all we shared was the desire to avoid mutual annihilation. The fact is that the United States and Russia are working constructively today on many issues of mutual interest—from counter-proliferation, to counter-terrorism, to the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. And we are determined to remember this, even when we hear unwise and irresponsible rhetoric from Russia itself that harkens back to an earlier time.21

Rice’s state of denial became even more manifest when, later in the same speech, she described NATO’s mutation in terms that, to Russian ears, could only sound like those of a Cold Warrior par excellence—a fact of which she could not possibly have been unaware:

I remember when NATO saw the world in two parts: There was Europe, and then there was “out of area”— which was pretty much everything else. So who could have imagined seven years ago that our alliance today would be training troops in Iraq, providing air lift in Darfur, and rooting out terrorists in places like Kandahar? These are increasingly the challenges of the 21st century, and I am optimistic that NATO will meet them, just as it met the challenges of last century … And who would have thought that NATO and the European Union would erase old divisions of East and West, that they would unite democratic nations across Europe, and that the Alliance would hold its 2006 Summit in Latvia? Once, that seemed impossible. Now, it too seems inevitable.22

The fact that the US government, at this moment, remained so vehement in its denial of the New Cold War with Russia—a reality regarded as rather obvious by the Russian side—could be seen as symptomatic of Washington’s responsibility in having brought about this situation. Culprits are naturally more inclined to deny their deeds than are their victims. Just a few months later, in August 2008, a war broke out in Georgia following a scenario very similar to that which would unfold in Ukraine six years later. Both wars were instances of a Russian fightback against further NATO expansion into former Soviet republics.

Confusion about the New Cold War

The confrontation over Ukraine that began in February 2014 was so serious that it made the persistence of denial very difficult. Indeed, in the voluminous anthology of articles, starting from 1947, that Foreign Affairs issued in 2018, the first piece that asserts the existence of a New Cold War was that penned by Robert Levgold, originally published in the summer of 2014. A prominent member of the large US academic–diplomatic community that had dealt with the USSR during the Cold War, and now continued to deal with its successor states, Levgold called upon his peers to acknowledge what had become too flagrant to be denied:

No one should casually label the current confrontation between Russia and the West a “new Cold War”. After all, the current crisis hardly matches the depth and scale of the contest that dominated the international system in the second half of the twentieth century. And accepting the premise that Russia and the West are locked in such a conflict could lead policymakers to pursue the wrong, even dangerous strategies. Using such a label is thus a serious matter. Yet it is important to call things by their names, and the collapse in relations between Russia and the West does indeed deserve to be called a new Cold War.23

As acknowledgement of the reality of a New Cold War proliferated in the United States, the blame for it tended more and more to be laid squarely at Russia’s door, as illustrated by the introduction to the Foreign Affairs collection. The editors described the process of this growing acknowledgement in their opening paragraph, partially quoted above. Here is the entire paragraph:

On March 18, 2018, Vladimir Putin was elected to his fourth term as Russia’s president, a position he can hold until 2024—and possibly beyond that, if he finds a way to circumvent the constitution. During the campaign, Putin stressed to Russians that he was just the kind of strong leader who could, as his supporters often put it, “raise Russia off its knees”, and he spent much of his time bashing his critics in the West, particularly in the United States. Putin’s hostility toward the West has been met in kind. In fact, so concerned have Westerners grown with his political meddling, regional aggression, and general efforts to play international spoiler that many of them contend that we are entering a new Cold War.24

While recognizing the obvious truth with regard to Russia, Levgold continued to turn a blind eye to the informal alliance between China and Russia in countering US global supremacy—an alliance that had been widely expected early on, whether from a “structural realist” perspective or through sheer common sense. “Unlike the original”, Levgold commented, the new Cold War “won’t encompass the entire global system … significant regions and key players, such as China and India, will avoid being drawn in.”25 What continued to be overlooked, mostly out of wishful thinking, was that Beijing had good reason to feel it was in the same boat with Moscow as a target of continued containment, and therefore tended to side and collaborate with Moscow on various issues. This was despite the fact that China’s government had to maintain a friendlier attitude than Putin’s toward the United States, for obvious economic reasons of greater export dependence and technological need.

Blindness to China’s rapprochement with Russia allowed some analysts to continue denying the reality of the New Cold War by pointing to the indisputable fact that present-day Russia is weaker than the former Soviet Union—a specious argument indeed. An example in the same Foreign Affairs collection is Stephen Kotkin’s 2016 article, in which the Princeton historian asserted: “In certain places and on certain issues, Russia has the ability to thwart US interests, but it does not even remotely approach the scale of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, so there is no need to respond to it with a new Cold War.”26 Kotkin had been making the same argument for years: his contribution to the 2010 anthology Is There a New Cold War? was an article published in the British magazine Prospect in April 2008 under the unambiguous title “Myth of the New Cold War”. Its argument is well summarized in the preamble to its republication in the book: “Russia is no new menace to the world, partly because its economy isn’t strong enough to support a new cold war and an accompanying arms race.”27

Levgold certainly came closer to the truth in giving proper weight to Russia’s impact and potential and in describing its relations with the United States as a new Cold War—even though he was late in doing so. If, on top of this, collaboration between the two major contenders for US supremacy, Russia and China, is properly taken into account, the continued downplaying of the challenge that those countries together represent to Washington’s hegemony, and to its Western alliance, in order to deny the reality of a New Cold War, verges on magical thinking for the sake of reassuring oneself.

What other argument could the deniers still invoke? Their last resort was to stress that neither Russia nor even China continued to wave the banner of “communism”, nor strove to expand its global reach. This argument is made by Yale University professor Odd Arne Westad, author of a book on the Cold War that emphasizes the role of ideology, and in which the Cold War is defined as “a confrontation between capitalism and socialism that peaked in the years between 1945 and 1989”, a confrontation whose antecedents are therefore to be found in the history of Marxism, of which Westad’s book provides an overview.28 In the closing article of the Foreign Affairs anthology, written in 2018, the year when the collection was published, Westad argued again, rather simplistically: “Ideology is no longer the main determinant. China, Europe, India, Russia, and the United States disagree on many things, but not on the value of capitalism and markets. China and Russia are both authoritarian states that pretend to have representative governments. But neither is out to peddle their systems to faraway places, as they did during the Cold War.”29

Here the debate comes full circle. The emphasis on ideology as the key aspect of the Cold War was a central argument of the Cold Warriors of yesteryear, including George Kennan, whom we encountered at the beginning of this chapter. Kennan authored what is arguably the best-known document of the onset of the Cold War, the famous “X Article”, published anonymously in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs and reproduced as the opening piece in the journal’s 2018 anthology.30 Walter Lippmann had vigorously refuted this argument in his critique of the “X Article”—a series of newspaper articles published in the late summer of 1947, and reprinted in that same year in a little book that popularized more than any other the term Cold War, since it was the first to include it in its title: The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy.31

Lippman’s refutation of the ideologization of the Cold War is worth quoting at some length here, as it sheds a light on the underlying continuity in the pattern of Russian state’s behavior from the time of the czars to that of Stalin—and, by extension, to the Putin era:

[W]hat has to be explained by a planner of American foreign policy is why in 1945 the Soviet government expanded its frontiers and its orbit, and what was the plan and pattern of its expansion. That can be done only by remembering that the Soviet government is a Russian government and that this Russian government has emerged victorious over Germany and Japan.

Having omitted from his analysis the fact that we are dealing with a victorious Russia—having become exclusively preoccupied with the Marxian ideology, and with the communist revolution—it is no wonder that the outcome of Mr. X’s analysis is nothing more definite, concrete and practical than that the Soviets will encroach and expand “at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” …

The westward expansion of the Russian frontier and of the Russian sphere of influence, though always a Russian aim, was accomplished when, as, and because the Red Army defeated the German army and advanced to the center of Europe. It was the mighty power of the Red Army, not the ideology of Karl Marx, which enabled the Russian government to expand its frontiers.32

Lippmann was thus criticizing the interpretation of Soviet behavior as determined by ideology, from a standpoint asserting that it was in fact much more determined by the tangible interests of the Russian state and by factual historical circumstances—in other words, by rather ordinary Machtpolitik (power politics). Such methodological refutation of the “idealist” view of international relations is common to both the “realist” school and Marxist historical materialism, the latter emphasizing ruling-class interests as key determinants. The same methodological objection applies to China as well, although it is run by a party that still retains the label “Communist”. Only the crudest expressions of hostility to Beijing might earnestly describe its behavior in foreign policy, including global trade, as being determined by “communism” rather than by Machtpolitik.

Term and Concept of Cold War

The best indication that the ideological opposition between the USSR and the United States did not constitute the bottom line in the post-1945 Cold War is that the concept of “cold war” existed before the Soviet Union was born—though not too long before, as in the account of those who trace the designation back to the fourteenth century.33 At that time, Don Juan Manuel, son of the Infante Manuel of Castile, did use the expression “tepid war”— mistakenly transcribed as “cold war” by a nineteenth-century editor.34 But he was only pointing to a low frequency and intensity of engagement in an ongoing war between Christians and Muslims in Spain, a quite unexceptional situation.

The first recorded use of the term “cold war” in its contemporary meaning was made by the German socialist leader and Marxist “revisionist” Eduard Bernstein. His coining of the concept is rarely acknowledged, however.35 In fact, the term appears twice in print under Bernstein’s name. The first time was in 1893, in an article in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical review of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Bernstein was living in exile in London at that time, in close political contact with Friedrich Engels, Marx’s closest friend and co-thinker. Remarkably, Engels had foreseen the march toward world war and the horrendous shape that it would acquire.36 In that same year, he published in Vorwärts, the SPD’s central organ, a series of pro-disarmament articles, reprinted soon after as a pamphlet.37 Bernstein’s article, for its part, included a sharp critique of German militarism in a similar vein, and used the formulation “cold warfare” (kalte Kriegsführung) to describe Germany’s pursuit of massive armament:

Germany is considered to be the country of militarism above all, and with this or because of it as the real permanent threat to peace. It is easy to say that Germany is arming itself only to maintain peace. First of all, this continued armament, which forces the others to imitate Germany, is itself a kind of warfare, so to speak—I don’t know if the term has already been used, but one could say it is cold warfare. There is no shooting, but there is bloodsucking. Then, however, everyone actually knows that this bloodsucking—which, like the Japanese hara-kiri, takes place in such a way that each nation attaches the blood pump to itself and thereby causes the other to imitate it—leads by virtue of its inner logic to prey, at a favorable moment, on the opponent who is less favorably situated.38

The next recorded occasion on which Bernstein used the term “cold war” (kalte Krieg this time, as in the modern expression) was at the Reichstag, the German parliament, of which he was a member for several years between 1902 and 1928. The term appears in the Reichstag’s minutes, in the verbatim report of a speech that the Social Democratic leader delivered to the house on 14 May 1914, barely a month and a half before the outbreak of the First World War: “[T]he peace that we have in the German Reich is only a nonwar, but it is not yet a true peace. All invitations that the German Reich has received from other quarters, if not officially then at least from an official source, to pursue a policy of disarmament, of slowing down armament—all of these were simply rejected by the German side. We keep this silent war going, this cold war, as it has been called, the war of armament, of outdoing in armament.”39

This is indeed a much more useful and appropriate definition of the concept of “cold war” than its equating with the ideologically motivated “confrontation between capitalism and socialism”. The cold war is a concept of the age of industry and total war, when military technology developed in parallel with increasingly rapid general technological progress leading to an ever-increasing cost of the “arms race”—a concomitant concept belonging to the same historical age. In that specific meaning, “cold war” designates the active preparation for a real war, with the economic implication of maintaining war readiness with a constant effort either to secure potential superiority over the adversary or to preserve an equilibrium of military force.

The reason why the term became dominant after 1945 resides not in the ideological confrontation between Moscow and Washington—the ideological hostility between the Soviet Union, on one hand, and Nazi Germany and its Axis allies, on the other, and between each of those parties and the liberal powers, was certainly no less acute before the Second World War, if not in fact more so—but in an utterly different factor: the atomic bomb. Indeed, it is a truism that a paradoxical effect of the nuclear weapon was to make highly unlikely the prospect of a real war between states possessing it, for the obvious reason that such a war would entail “mutual assured destruction”—an expression whose acronym, MAD, summarizes very well the state of mind that it would take to initiate a war of that kind.

The “balance of terror” that prevailed between the two rival postwar superpowers after the USSR carried out its first atomic test in 1949, four years after the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is the main, if not the only reason why the zero-sum global Great Game between the two superpowers lasted four decades without escaping the confines of a “cold war”. In Raymond Aron’s 1951 definition, the latter is “a limited war, whose limitation is not about what is at stake, but about the means used by the belligerents”.40 The famous French theorist of war in the nuclear age formulated that same year the hypothesis that this “limited war” would translate in “the clash of two attrition strategies” that could lead to “a show of strength extending over a generation”.41

After the Second World War, the first known use of “cold war” was in a 1945 article by George Orwell in which the famous writer gave the term a meaning conforming with Bernstein’s notion of a situation whereby a state would be “at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours” due to its possession of the atomic bomb, since the latter is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’”.42 However, Orwell did not mention the arms race that would prevail under such conditions other than indirectly, by pointing to the cost of fabricating the nuclear weapon.

The first full elaboration of the “cold war” concept in the postwar context was by Bernard Baruch, the Wall Street broker who played a key role in the organization of the US war industry during the two world wars of the twentieth century. In a book of memoirs published in 1960, he asserts that he was the first to use the phrase, in a speech he delivered in April 1947—while acknowledging his debt to his speechwriter, the publicist Herbert Swope, who had suggested the term to him the year before. Interestingly, Baruch claims that he did not use it at first because he was “anxious not to excite Russia’s almost pathological suspicion and fear of us”.43

Bernard Baruch is certainly—at least on the Western side of the Iron Curtain—the main theoretician of the “cold war” in the sense of an arms race seeking to maintain a state of readiness to wage a full-scale war. His master-word was “preparedness”.44 His views on this issue long preceded the post-1945 Cold War. During the First World War, Baruch had headed the War Industries Board (WIB), which spectacularly redirected US industrial potential toward serving war needs, displaying in the process a level of centralistic efficiency that impressed all other belligerents. In a letter he wrote to US President Woodrow Wilson in 1919—which he reproduced in the final report that he submitted to the President on behalf of the disbanded WIB in 1921, on the penultimate day of Wilson’s presidency—Baruch stressed that the impressive war machine built up in the United States had been crucial in dissuading Germany from continuing the war. He therefore emphasized the need to maintain an organizational and material readiness for a new major war.45 His advice was not heeded at that time, in the context of the post-1918 “isolationist” backlash that prevailed in the United States.

The First World War experience of industrial organization was repeated in the Second World War with the War Production Board, created in 1942, which was subordinated the year after to the Office of War Mobilization, headed by one of Baruch’s close friends, James Byrnes. Meanwhile, Baruch himself played a key role in advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He felt again that his advice was not heeded after that second global war ended, when Cold War tensions were beginning to emerge under Harry Truman’s presidency. As Jordan Schwarz puts it, “The cold war should have been that surrogate for war Baruch envisioned as a justification for organizing industry for the real thing.”46 But the American government estimated that the massive amount of armaments accumulated during the war would suffice for a while. Baruch complained about this in his 1960 book:

[A]s the ice jams of the cold war piled up, for the third time in my life America was faced with a threat to her peace and security. And once again, for the third time, I took up the banner of preparedness … This call for preparedness was heeded no more in 1947 than it had been in 1937. And in 1947, as earlier, it was our weakness which invited aggression. Not until we were caught in the Korean War, in 1950, did we begin to rebuild our armed strength.47

Baruch’s complaint that his advice was not heeded in 1947 was in fact exaggerated. Prompted by another friend and fellow of Baruch’s, Ferdinand Eberstadt, who had been vice-chairman of the War Production Board and was to play a key role in the postwar creation of both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, in 1947 Congress set up a National Security Resources Board, whose mission was to monitor the country’s preparedness for a major war. But it is true that the “rearmament” that Baruch had been calling for since 1947 was not launched until the Korean War (1950–53). Only after that war had begun did US military expenditure pick up again from its sharp post-1945 drop. Thereafter it remained, for the long haul, at levels far exceeding those of the interwar years of the twentieth century (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1: US Military Expenditure in Constant 2019 US$, 1950–1990

Source: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database

Permanent War Economy and Military–Industrial Complex

This high-level plateauing of military expenditure became a feature that has characterized the US economy ever since, constituting what the first economist who theorized it, in 1944, Edward Sard—a Marxist who at that time worked for the War Production Board—called a “permanent war economy”.48 The phrase appeared in an article Sard published—under a pseudonym, of course— in Dwight Macdonald’s journal Politics.49 The permanent war economy became the basis upon which thrived what President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a top army commander himself until he ran for the presidency in 1952, famously called the “military–industrial complex” (MIC). This was in his farewell address to the nation on 17 January 1961, three days before leaving office.

In 1990, at the very end of the Cold War, Robert Higgs provided a good overview of the importance of the nexus between the permanent war economy and the MIC in the United States, in a book published that year under his editorship:

Over the entire period 1948–86, real military purchases of currently produced goods and services cumulated to a total of $6,316 billion (1982 dollars), averaging about $162 billion per year or 7.6 percent of GNP. While real military outlays increased over the long run, the GNP increased somewhat faster, so the trend of the military share was downward. Substantial fluctuations occurred in military spending, as major buildups took place during 1950–53, 1965–68, and 1978–87. Cumulative military spending during 1987– 89 alone came to more than $1 trillion (1982 dollars).

Such immense spending generated considerable employment, a matter of great concern for generations whose attitudes had been shaped by the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. Total Defense employment (uniformed military personnel plus Department of Defense [DOD] civilian jobs plus defense-related jobs in industry) stood at about 3 million during the postwar through the late 1940s. The Korean War buildup pushed the total to 9.5 million, of which more than 4 million were in industry. Defense employment declined after the Korean War but remained in the range of about 6–8 million during 1954–71, with 2–3 million of the total in industry. Defense jobs hit their post-Korean War low during the 1970s, when they remained fairly steady at about 5 million total, with somewhat fewer than 2 million in industry. The defense buildup after 1978 pushed total employment to some 6.6 million in 1986, divided about equally between DOD (uniformed personnel and civilians) and defense-related industry.50

Sixteen years later, Higgs summarized the major mutation that the “Cold War Economy” represented in the historical evolution of US capitalism in the following terms:

The Cold War era witnessed a new relation of military activity to the political economy of the United States. Before World War II, the allocation of resources to military purposes remained at token levels, typically no more than 1 percent of GNP, except during actual warfare, which occurred infrequently. Wartime and peacetime were distinct, and during peacetime—that is, nearly all the time—the societal opportunity cost of “guns” was nearly nil. The old regime ended in 1940. The massive mobilization of the early 1940s drove the military share of GNP to more than 41 percent at its peak in 1943–44. Despite an enormous demobilization after the war ended, in 1947, at the postwar trough, the military sector still accounted for 4.3 percent of GNP, three times the 1939 share. Following the Korean War, military purchases reached an unprecedented level for “peacetime” and, while fluctuating, remained at or above this elevated level ever afterward. During the period 1948–89, military purchases cumulated to more than $7 trillion (1982 dollars), averaging about $168 billion annually, or 7.5 percent of GNP. The trend tilted slightly upward for absolute real spending and slightly downward for spending as a share of GNP …

The high base level of defense spending during the Cold War resulted from the dominant ideology of global anti-communism, which called forth various foreign policy doctrines (e.g., the Truman Doctrine, massive retaliation, the Reagan Doctrine) and military commitments (e.g., NATO, bilateral defense treaties, US military “advisers” in Latin America). The ideology alone, however, was an insufficient prop, and episodic crises played an essential part in maintaining public support for vast military expenditures.51

Figure 2: US Military Expenditure as a Share of GDP, 1950–1990

Source: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.

Since the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States has become addicted to the permanent war economy as a key feature of its overall economy, and a crucial tool for what has been dubbed “military Keynesianism”—a designation often attributed to left-wing Keynesian (post-Keynesian) Cambridge economist, Joan Robinson, with reference to a lecture she gave for the American Economic Association in 1971.52 However, if Robinson did indeed sharply criticize those Keynesians who favored military expenditure, she did not use that term in the written version of her lecture, but instead blamed “so-called Keynesians” for betraying what John Maynard Keynes had advocated:

When there is unemployment and low profits the government must spend on something or other—it does not matter what. As we know, for twenty-five years serious recessions were avoided by following this policy. The most convenient thing for a government to spend on is armaments. The military–industrial complex took charge. I do not think it plausible to suppose that the cold war and several hot wars were invented just to solve the employment problem. But certainly they have had that effect. The system had the support not only of the corporations who made profits under it and the workers who got jobs, but also of the economists who advocated government loanexpenditure as a prophylactic against stagnation … It was the so-called Keynesians who persuaded successive presidents that there is no harm in a budget deficit and left the military–industrial complex to take advantage of it. So it has come about that Keynes’ pleasant daydream was turned into a nightmare of terror.53

This policy should have been named after Bernard Baruch, who is its first major proponent, instead of Keynes who expressly repudiated it.54 The author of the General Theory emphasized that the economic policy he advocated would help reduce militarism and avoid wars, as he reiterated at the end of his magnum opus:

War has several causes. Dictators and others such, to whom war offers, in expectation at least, a pleasurable excitement, find it easy to work on the natural bellicosity of their peoples. But, over and above this, facilitating their task of fanning the popular flame, are the economic causes of war, namely, the pressure of population and the competitive struggle for markets … But if nations can learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy (and, we must add, if they can also attain equilibrium in the trend of their population), there need be no important economic forces calculated to set the interest of one country against that of its neighbours.55

In the postwar United States, the use of public military expenditure in keeping the economy buoyant became a major tool for the very visible state intervention in the quintessential homeland of the mythical “invisible hand” and “free market”. American addiction to the permanent war economy, and its main beneficiary—the MIC—were to weigh heavily in determining the US power elite’s post–Cold War choices, assessed in the following chapters.

The USSR’s MIC was even more important compared to the country’s economy, since it was forced to compete in war readiness with its much richer adversary. The MIC soon emerged from the initial post–Cold War chaos in Russia as the main, if not only, manufacturing sector inherited from the defunct Soviet Union for which there were readily available buyers and a captive export market. The MIC’s centrality grew yet larger in the post-Soviet Russian economy than it had been in the USSR—not only because the former is considerably smaller than the latter, but also because military power became the principal vector of Russia’s political influence abroad, and in particular of its opposition to overbearing US dominance. By contrast, the USSR, like China today, had also made intensive use of its economic power, as well as of the ideological appeal (“soft power”) that it enjoyed until its final decade.

A latecomer in the race, China was inevitably motivated to build up its own MIC by the legitimate sentiment that US supremacy stood in the way of its rise to the first rank of global powers—manifested, for example, in its being kept out of the G7 despite the size of its economy, while Russia had been included in the group from 1997 until the 2014 Ukraine crisis, when it was called the G8. Although it has taken place under economic conditions very different from those of the fully state-owned and state-led industrialization of the USSR, China’s accelerated development has come to offer a further illustration of the pattern that Alexander Gerschenkron associated in 1951 with the Soviet Union:

If all the forces of the population can be kept engaged in the processes of industrialization and if this industrialization can be justified by the promise of happiness and abundance for future generations and—much more importantly—by the menace of military aggression from beyond the borders, the dictatorial government will find its power broadly unchallenged. And the vindication of a threatening war is easily produced, as is shown by the history of the cold-war years.56

Here, in a nutshell, are the basic ingredients of the dynamic that produced a new global cold war just a few years after the end of the old one. The elements of the New Cold War fell into place during the first decade after the first Cold War. As the following chapters should make clear—and as was obviously determined by the huge gap that existed during that fateful “unipolar moment” between the power and wealth of the United States and those of its two potential contenders at the global level, China and Russia—the chief responsibility, by far, for the sorry state of international relations that was to develop thereafter in the twenty-first century lay with the only remaining superpower at the Cold War’s end, the one that retained sole power to “shape the international security environment”, as its strategic documents boasted at the time.57 This book explores the transition from Cold War to New Cold War, and the latter’s evolution up to the 2022 Ukraine war.

PART I

GENESIS OF THE NEWCOLD WAR

CHAPTER ONE

The Strategic Triad: The UnitedStates, Russia and China*