Vladimir Putin was determined, to the point of agonizing out loud, to explain his government’s policies to a group of visiting foreign scholars last Thursday [September 11]. We have “no ideological conflict” with the West, the Russian prime minister insisted, and “no desire or grounds” to reassemble the lost Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.
He admired President Bush “more than many Americans do,” Putin added. “Russia is not against anybody.”
Putin’s breast-beating was prompted by angry Western reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia in August. His plaintive words would have been unimaginable two decades ago, when Moscow was a superpower.
Invoked with numbing regularity, the phrase “new Cold War” has emerged as an all-purpose frame for East-West tensions in the wake of Georgia. Yet the remarkable thing about the crisis is not its distant echo of the frigid, four-decade worldwide confrontation between Moscow and Washington, which ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Far more striking are its reminders of how much the world has changed since then.
In a global arena that is now more thoroughly multi-polar than at any moment in the past century, violent tensions are inevitable. But a renewed Cold War is highly improbable.
THE COLD WAR WORLD
The absence of ideology, as Putin suggests, makes a critical difference.
The Cold War’s ideological standoff, between Western-style capitalist democracy and the Soviet one-party communist state, pitted two entire systems against each other. They encompassed almost every aspect of life and society, from economic structure and political organization to the nature of art and culture.
It’s easy to forget how sharply the world was divided into these two opposing camps from the late 1940s to the early 1990s.
The immense Soviet Union, incorporating what are now 15 separate nations, stood on one side, flanked by its Eastern European satellites, Cuba, North Korea and client states in Southeast Asia and Africa. Ideologically, Mao Zedong’s China acted an influential second capital of the Communist Bloc, despite its political hostility to Moscow.
On the other side were the United States, Canada and the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), steadfastly supported by Japan, South Korea and the Republic of China on Taiwan.
In principle, a “Non-Aligned Movement” of developing countries served as a buffer. In practice, all were identifiably either pro-Moscow or pro-Washington. The slightest deviation from those tacit positions often flung them into proxy wars between the two superpowers, whose direct collision would have menaced both blocs with nuclear annihilation.
Today that stark two-sided division seems almost attractively simple. By contrast, the new geopolitical map is a bewildering jigsaw puzzle of many parts, grouped in ever-shifting combinations that cannot even be described as alliances, much less blocs.
THE NEW GEOPOLITICAL MAP
Russia and the United States are principal features on the contemporary map, to be sure, but with Moscow shorn of most of the Soviet empire and all of its satellites. Washington, on its part, can no longer expect full allegiance from any of its Cold War allies, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom.
Since 2002, according to annual survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund, the percentage of Europeans who regard U.S. leadership in world affairs as “desirable” has declined from 64 percent to 36 percent.
The expanded 27-nation European Union is a leading economic force in its own right. But politically, it is caught squarely between high dependence on Russian energy supplies, and its growing uneasiness with both Russian and U.S. foreign policy aims.
China has emerged as a capitalist economic superpower, while remaining an authoritarian state under the sole direction of the Communist Party. Among its major trade partners, ranked just below its former number one enemy, the United States, are its main Cold War antagonists Japan, Taiwan and South Korea – all of whom now have extensive commercial dealings with such sworn U.S. enemies as Iran.
India, a second emerging economic giant, is a longtime Moscow favourite that has gradually but indecisively drifted toward Washington. Latin America has jumped from a wave of pro-American democratic renewal to the updated anti-American Marxism of Hugo Chavez in less than a decade. Africa is a vast resource battleground, with rival corporations from China, the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and the Middle East all competing against each other.
Finally, there is the giant, troubled Islamic world, stretching across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa from Indonesia to Morocco. Counting some of the globe’s richest nations and many of its poorest, it is united in only two ways: its Muslim faith and its perception as “problem” everywhere else.
NO LONGER ISOLATED
From early in the 1950s to well into the 1980s, virtually nothing crossed the ideological divide, apart from threats, espionage agents, propaganda radio broadcasts – and from East to West, occasional escapees, often under a hail of gunfire.
The Iron Curtain was just that: a nearly impenetrable barrier to all exchanges, including the passage of accurate information, as well as human beings, capital and goods. Enforced isolation was a defining hallmark of the Cold War.
Today, both Russia and China are as fully integrated into the whirlwind of global motion and exchange as any member of NATO.
At the height of the Cold War, tourists from China and the Soviet Union were all but unheard of in the United States. This year, U.S. consulates in Beijing and Moscow alone are expected to issue more than 600,000 non-immigrant visas to Chinese and Russians.
Prior to 1977, there were no students whatsoever from the People’s Republic of China on U.S. university campuses or vice- versa. In 2008, the number surpassed 50,000 – 80 percent of them Chinese pursuing educations in America.
China’s overall commercial exchanges with the non-Communist world were under $100 billion 20 years ago, and over $2.2 trillion by 2007. As recently as 1992, the value of Russia’s two-way trade with all countries outside the former Soviet Union was less than $80 billion. By 2007, it had reached nearly $500 billion.
Within days of the Georgia invasion, notes Business Week Moscow bureau chief Jason Bush, “the stock market and even the rouble plunged, and Russian banks found it harder to get credit lines abroad. This shows how far the new globalised Russia depends economically on the outside world.”
This week, there is no doubt that leaders in both Moscow and Beijing are watching events on fragile Wall Street as closely – and nervously – as their counterparts in London, Tokyo and Washington.
Isolation, of the sort necessary to set off a new Cold War, is no more in the former Communist Bloc’s interest than it is in the West’s. It would devastate the world economy, pitching Russia, China, the United States and Europe into the same perilous stew of financial depression and social instability.
Moreover, as the Chinese government and other would-be censors have learned, over and over, the very medium on which you are now reading this column makes real isolation very difficult to impose. There was no Internet during the Cold War.
The electronic ties that bind us across borders today, like it or not, are part of a larger globalised culture and communications system that has far-flung popular support, and shows no sign of faltering.
IMPOTENCE OF THE POWERFUL
If ideology was the Cold War’s chief theoretical justification, the joint Soviet-American monopoly on worldwide military domination was its daily, terrifying reality.
In terms of technology, troop strength and strategic deployment, Moscow and Washington were the whole shooting match, so to speak. Their respective allies were reduced to minor supporting roles or convenient sites for bases and missile launchers, with maverick China as a truculent sideline observer.
The East-West confrontation was a showdown between two acknowledged titans, universally viewed as invincible except by each other.
What North Vietnam began to demonstrate at war with America in the 1970s, Afghanistan proved against the Soviets in the 1980s: the term “superpower” has limited meaning. By 1991, despite its military might, the Soviet Union had vanished. Today, primitively armed terrorists in Iraq (and once more in Afghanistan) are reconfirming the impotence of the powerful in asymmetrical conflict.
Neither Washington, for all of the Bush Administration’s belligerent rhetoric, nor Moscow, for all of its “Russia is back” crowing, exercises anything like the the bilateral command it enjoyed in the Cold War.
For every effort to do so, even beyond the limiting circumstances of a terrorist war, the potential cost is likely to exceed any gain – in part because one difference between then and now trumps every other geopolitical calculation.
In 2008, nine nations have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Several more are waiting in the wings.
Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5