The Cold War: Fears of an unfinished victory

[Lucas Corso]

The Cold War: Fears of an unfinished victory
By W Joseph Stroupe

"The Cold War is dead!" read the newspaper headlines of 1991, and ever since, confidence has been absolute that the victory of the West over the former bloc of the East was a complete one - until lately.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's Cold War-style speech in Munich in February and its combative follow-up, the State of the Nation speech in April, are being matched by Russia's stiffening,and its mounting assertiveness, in opposition to any bolstering or reconsolidating of ailing US-led unipolarity.

Around the globe, Russia is acting against unipolarity's accommodating ideologies and politics, against its recently resurgent manifestations and machinations, and against the instruments of its perpetuation, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Russia is actively and now more openly working to bring to an end what remains of the atmosphere of acquiescence to America's will, whether it be willing or unwilling acquiescence, that arose in the post-1991 period and that was absolutely crucial to the thriving of US-led unipolarity. The United States, it turns out, achieved and maintained its global hegemony largely by the consent of the globe's lesser powers who, fearful of standing up to or opposing "the last superpower" and distinctly insecure about the potency of their own leverage, permitted it to dominate without the considerable encumbrances and obstructions that are now arising.

Since US overreach after the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the subsequent decline of the US and the unrelenting rise of Russia, China and India, in concert with the globe's key resource-exporting regimes, have become ever more strident, even brazen, in opposition to US global hegemony. The US can no longer ride roughshod over, nor bully, nor simply ignore resurgent Russia, rising China, or the globe's regimes that supply the vital oil that fuels the US economy.

In the face of such developments, the US isn't finished in its attempt to stand unipolarity back on both its feet. It has by no means conceded the game. Instead, belatedly recognizing the damage done by its distraction in Iraq, a desperate and determined US is refocusing and getting started on the geopolitical project of restoring its lost global might.

Against the backdrop of a renewed US push to enlarge NATO membership eastward, expand its mission to take on a global range, establish anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) defenses in Europe and the Caucasus along Russia's western and southern flanks, instigate and re-energize the "colored" revolutions, and cut deeply into Russia's mounting global energy leverage, US-Russia relations are sharply and strategically deteriorating. So are US-China relations, as economic protectionism mounts on the part of the US and it builds up its military forces and proxies in Southeast Asia aimed at containing China's rise.

This worsening state of East-West relations is prompting rising fears that the loudly proclaimed Cold War victory of the West in 1991, contrary to appearances, may be turning out to have been an unfinished, incomplete victory after all. The death of the formal Cold War did not in itself automatically guarantee the death of all its virulent elemental components, nor of its style of thinking, nor of the enduring global forces that prompted its emergence in the first place shortly after World War II.

In one famous scene in the movie Terminator II, the frightening assassin is melted down and blasted into mercury-like droplets that are spattered over a wide area of pavement. Initially that appeared to be the complete and welcome end of the assassin. But then dread revisited our heroes as they watched each of the spattered droplets begin to reassemble again into the living terminator, but in a new and restyled form that bore little obvious resemblance to its previous form. That monster proved to be much more resilient than our heroes had ever imagined. Why? Because its component parts refused to die.

Is it possible that certain potent elements of the Cold War refused to die, but went instead into a long hibernation, only to reassemble and re-emerge now into a newly styled neo-cold war?

Heightened fears of a nuclear catastrophe
Today, the threat of nuclear catastrophe remains potent, and even though we generally aren't talking about a catastrophe resulting from an East-West confrontation, sharply rising US-Russia tensions over planned ABM complexes in Poland, the Czech Republic and the Caucasus are ratcheting up fears of a scrapping of arms treaties, a proliferation of missiles on both sides, heightened strategic tensions, and possible confrontation in which nuclear weapons could be employed, either purposefully or by accident.

In reaction to the US plans, Russia is building up its strategic nuclear arsenal by placing multiple independently targeting re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) in its advanced Topol-M missiles. Russia also threatens to scrap treaties and build up conventional missiles along the borders with states cooperating in the United States' ABM scheme, and it further asserts its right to attack and destroy the sites as they become operational. The former assumption, that virtually no US-Russia military confrontation is likely, is increasingly an unsafe one as a more desperate US pushes back against a much more assertive Russia.

In important ways the nuclear threat today is more insidious and worrisome than before as radical states acquire the technologies and non-state terrorist groups bent on the destruction of the West seek the technology. The credible case can be made that both sides, East and West, are massively contributing to the worsening state of nuclear fear. Aggressive, unilateralist US foreign policy provides compelling motivation for so-called "axis of evil" states to accelerate their pursuit of nuclear weapons to immunize themselves against US military strikes. And Russia, China and others are only too happy to sell nuclear technology to such states to further their own economic and geopolitical aims, failing to consider properly the global consequences.

The new arms race
A new kind of arms race is also increasingly in evidence. The US has pursued an aggressive policy in regions across the globe, while comparatively weaker powers such as Russia and China have taken asymmetric steps to level the playing field and undermine the ability of the US to project its military power effectively into their neighborhoods and into those of their partners and allies.

Wide proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies has been the direct result of the persistent yet sometimes hidden East-West rivalry over regional and global influence, a rivalry that only temporarily eased after 1991. The response of Russia and China to the NATO bombing of the sovereign state of Serbia in 1999 was to engage in determined efforts to form a Russia-China axis and to militarize it in response to the encroachment from the West. Since then the determination in the East to meet ever more deeply encroaching force with asymmetric force multipliers has been bolstered by aggressive Western policies, both military and political/ideological.

However, today's arms race is quite different from that of the Cold War. Russia and China are now pleased to let the US spend itself deeper and deeper into economic jeopardy while they, in turn, spend far less on potent asymmetric weapons and strategies that effectively exploit the vulnerabilities of large, unwieldy US weapons platforms.

As Putin stated recently, Russia's responses are "asymmetrical" and "potent", and Russia will not let the US goad it into a costly arms race. Likewise, China's response to US moves and intentions to weaponize space was a simple and relatively inexpensive demonstration of its satellite killer, which left thousands of chunks and particles of debris smack in the middle of the low-earth orbits of most US spy satellites - in effect, China has planted a very inexpensive time bomb there.

Therefore, the correct measure of the potential destructiveness of today's arms race is not the competing sums of money spent by both sides. Instead, it is the potency of Russian and Chinese asymmetric systems and strategies and their wide proliferation to US rivals.

These two elements of the Cold War, fears of nuclear catastrophe and the arms race, have refused to die. Instead, they have morphed into forms that are insidious and just as deadly as ever. Hence the Cold War victory of 1991 is proving to be an unfinished
one, with serious consequences today as a neo-cold war signals its ominous emergence on the global stage.

Putin has been vocal in roundly condemning US-led unipolarity and foreign policy. Whether or not Putin's Cold War-style criticism of the US genuinely signals the emergence of a new cold war depends on your definition of the term "cold war".

An examination of two more of the components of the old Cold War, (1) hot proxy wars and (2) "winner takes all" ideological warfare, prove instructive. The reader should be careful to resist the unfounded yet immensely popular notion that says only the rising of entirely familiar evils, such as an old-style cold war that employs the old principles and ideologies, is something to be concerned about.

Prudently, the reader should be alert for signs of equally destructive evils masquerading in a different, newly styled and only apparently less threatening veneer, a facade intentionally constructed to provide cover for both background and foreground machinations aimed at achieving precisely the same aim as those of the principal participants in the old Cold War - the seizing of irrevocable global control and dominance by one side.

A new kind of proxy war
Newly styled proxy "wars" between East and West are being sponsored - "wars" for increased leverage in strategically vital regions via willing proxies. Whereas in the old Cold War such proxy wars were "hot" conflicts, they are now, generally speaking, political "wars".

The East sponsors proxies in Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Venezuela, which obliges the West to engage and/or compromise and perhaps overreach in an effort to roll back the rising potency of those sponsored proxies. The recent North Korea nuclear deal is a potent example, a deal in which the US is undoubtedly compromising for apparently little or no tangible benefit in return. And its impotency and isolation are showcased, leading to a dilution of its leverage on the regional and global stages.

The West sponsors proxies such as Chechen separatists and "colored" revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and expands the European Union and NATO to include former Soviet states, all aimed at obliging Russia and the East to make concessions, cutting into the influence and control they exercise in energy-rich strategic regions, aimed at affording the West increased leverage in those same regions.

Obviously, these actions by both the East and West can sometimes end up in a hot war, as Iraq did, and as Iran seems likely to, but generally this is a newly styled version of the "hot proxy wars" component of the old Cold War. As such, it aptly illustrates the principle mentioned earlier of evils as equally destructive as those inherent in the old Cold War masquerading under a new and updated facade. In a world where the energy-dependent industrialized economy is the norm and where such wars are almost always engaged in over the issue of control of strategic resources, everyone knows the enormous stakes.

The new ideological war
Consequently, there arises the matter of the "winner takes all" ideological warfare component one expects to find in a cold war. In the old Cold War it was democratic capitalism vs communism, and when the West won the Cold War in 1991 it did take virtually all the spoils.

Yet today it is also true that Russia and China have, in effect, co-opted certain democratic and capitalistic principles, amalgamated these with facets of totalitarianism and communism, to form so-called "managed democracies" or "sovereign democracies" to make a profoundly effective economic assault on the global center of economic might - the liberal democratic-capitalistic West.

So effective is that assault that it is now widely recognized that the global economic compass irrevocably points to Eurasia - the global center of economic might is shifting to the East, led by China. In reality, nearly all the spoils of the West's Cold War victory are being incrementally handed back to the East as authoritarian democracy credibly threatens to become economically and geopolitically ascendant over liberal democracy.
That present, newly styled ideological war between the liberal democracy of the West and the authoritarian democracy of the East plays directly into the race to achieve control of global strategic resources. In the old Cold War the ideological rivalry gave thick cover to the quest on each side for control over oil - the industrialized West's Achilles' heel. Today, just as in the past, ideology is used on both sides to justify and to implement geopolitical moves that are really aimed at achieving control of strategic global resources.

The West instigates "colored" liberal-democratic revolutions in certain strategically vital regions, promotes liberal-democratic reform in other strategically vital regions, and invades to bring democracy at the point of a gun in yet other places, all in an effort to achieve "regime changes" that will underwrite a consolidation of the West's control of strategic resources - for such moves are only tried where strategic resources are abundant or where their transit to markets in the West is at stake.

Conversely, the East bolsters autocratic regimes while simultaneously helping such regimes to proliferate around the globe, encourages state takeovers of resources industries, and assists such regimes to form authoritarian democracies and authoritarian resources-based and exports-based corporate states similar to the ones found in Russia and China, respectively. All the while, the potent ideological justification of the inequitability and destructiveness of US-led unipolarity, and the desirability of the more democratic "multipolar" world order, is employed to justify and implement all such moves.

In today's East-West rivalry, the vital ideological component provides only a thin veneer for the geopolitical moves in the Great Game over control of strategic global resources, and the side that wins that game will absolutely take all the spoils of war.

The war no longer in the shadows
Clearly, all the fundamental Cold War components are present today in a newly styled but potent form. Additionally, just as was the case in the old Cold War, the aims and the stakes are identical - the seizing of irrevocable global control by one side and the loss of political, economic and even military autonomy and might by the losing side.

Consequently, we do not have now a reviving of the old Cold War, but rather the ongoing emergence from the shadows of an entirely new style and type of cold war, the neo-cold war, as an expression of the irreversible, fundamental and ongoing competition and rivalry between an unrelenting rising East and a West that insists, at almost any cost, on recapturing and retaining all the spoils of its old Cold War "win"; spoils that are already slipping through its fingers as the global momentum in almost every sphere shifts in the favor of Russia, China, India and the East.

Increasingly, East and West are polarized along the closely braided twin dividing lines of (1) the issue of unipolarity vs so-called multipolarity and the intimately intertwined issue of (2) who shall control strategic global resources - the West or the East? Any neutral ground between East and West is rapidly disappearing as states are being pressured by both sides to declare their true positions by their actions.

Events signifying deepening global polarization into two de facto geopolitical blocs opposed to each other and the resulting mounting East-West rivalry and divide are the signal that the neo-cold war does already exist and is emerging from the shadows.

W Joseph Stroupe is author of the books Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and Grand Reversal: Russian Global Ascendancy and is editor of Global Events Magazine, online at www.GlobalEventsMagazine.com.

(Copyright 2007 by W Joseph Stroupe.)

Source: Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News - The Cold War: Fears of an unfinished victory