Why this new cold war is more dangerous than the one we survived
1. The political epicenter of the new Cold War is not in far-away Berlin, as it was from the late 1940s on, but directly on Russia’s borders, from the Baltic states and Ukraine to another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Each of these new Cold War fronts is fraught with the possibility of hot war. US-Russian military relations are especially tense today in the Baltic region, where a large-scale NATO buildup is underway, and in Ukraine, where a US-Russian proxy war is intensifying. The Soviet Bloc that once served as a buffer between NATO and Russia no longer exists. And many imaginable incidents on the West’s new Eastern Front, intentional or unintentional, could easily trigger actual war between the United States and Russia. What brought about this situation on Russia’s borders unprecedented at least since the Nazi German invasion in 1941 was, of course, Washington’s exceedingly unwise decision, in the late 1990s, to expand NATO eastward. Done in the name of security, it has made all the states involved only more insecure.
2. Proxy wars were a feature of the old Cold War, but usually small ones in what was called the Third World, in Africa, for example. They rarely involved many, if any, Soviet or American personnel, mostly only money and weapons. Today’s US-Russian proxy wars are different, located in the center of geopolitics and accompanied by too many American and Russian trainers, minders, and possibly fighters. Two have already erupted: in Georgia in 2008, where Russian forces fought a Georgian army financed, trained, and minded by American funds and personnel; and in Syria, where in February scores of Russians were killed by US-backed anti-Assad forces. Moscow did not retaliate, but it has pledged to do so if there is a next time, as there very well might be. If so, this would in effect be war directly between Russia and America. The risk of a direct conflict also continues to grow in Ukraine. The country’s US-backed but politically failing President Petro Poroshenko seems periodically tempted to launch another all-out military assault on rebel-controlled Donbass, which is backed by Moscow. If he does so, and the assault does not quickly fail as previous ones did, Russia will certainly intervene in eastern Ukraine with a truly tangible invasion. Washington will then have to make a fateful war-or-peace decision. Having already reneged on its commitments to the Minsk Accords, the best hope for ending the four-year Ukrainian crisis peacefully, Kiev seems to have an unrelenting impulse to be a tail wagging the dog of US-Russian war. Its capacity for provocations and disinformation seem second to none, as evidenced again recently by the faked assassination and resurrection of journalist Arkady Babchenko.
3. Years-long Western, especially American, demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, is also unprecedented. Too obvious to spell out again here, no Soviet Communist leader, at least since Stalin, was ever subjected to such prolonged, baseless, crudely derogatory personal vilification. Whereas Soviet leaders were regarded as acceptable negotiating partners for American presidents, including at major summits, Putin has been made to seem to be an illegitimate national leader at best a KGB thug or murderous mafia boss.
4. Still more, demonizing Putin has generated widespread Russophobic vilification of Russia itself, or what the New York Times and other mainstream-media outlets have taken to calling Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Yesterday’s enemy was Soviet Communism. Today it is increasingly Russia, thereby also delegitimizing Russia as a great power with legitimate national interests. The Parity Principle, as I termed it during the preceding Cold War the principle that both sides had legitimate interests at home and abroad, which was the basis for diplomacy and negotiations, and symbolized by leadership summits no longer exists, at least on the American side. Nor does the acknowledgment that both sides were to blame to some extent for the previous Cold War. Among influential American observers who even recognize the new Cold War, Putin’s Russia alone is to blame. When there is no recognized parity and shared responsibility, there is ever-shrinking space for diplomacy, but more and more for increasingly militarized relations, as we are witnessing today.
5. Meanwhile, most of the Cold War safeguards cooperative mechanisms and mutually observed rules of conduct that evolved over decades in order to prevent superpower hot war have been vaporized or badly frayed since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, as the UN General Secretary Antnio Guterres, almost alone, has recognized: The Cold War is back”with a vengeance but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present. Trump’s recent missile strike on Syria carefully avoided killing any Russians, but Moscow has vowed to retaliate against the US if there is a next time, as there may be. Even the decades-long process of arms control may, an expert warns, be coming to an end. It would mean an unfettered new nuclear-arms race as well as the termination of an ongoing diplomatic process that buffered US-Soviet relations during very bad political times. In short, if there actually are any new Cold War rules of conduct, they are yet to be formulated and mutually accepted. Nor does this semi-anarchy take into account the new warfare technology of cyber-attacks. What are its implications for the secure functioning of existential Russian and American nuclear command-and-control and early-warning systems that guard against an accidental launching of missiles still on high alert?
6. Russiagate allegations that the American president has been compromised by or is even an agent of the Kremlin are also without precedent. These allegations, as we have seen, have already had profoundly dangerous consequences. They include the nonsensical, mantra-like declaration that Russia attacked America during the 2016 presidential election; crippling assaults on President Trump every time he speaks with Putin in person or by phone; and making both Trump and Putin so toxic that most American politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who understand the present-day dangers are reluctant to speak out against US contributions to the new Cold War.
7. Mainstream media outlets have, we know, played a woeful role in all of this. Unlike in the past, when pro-detente advocates had roughly equal access to influential media, today’s new Cold War media continue to enforce their orthodox narrative that Russia is solely to blame. They offer not diversity of opinion and reporting but confirmation bias. Alternative voices (with, yes, alternative or opposing facts) rarely appear any longer in the most influential newspapers or on national television or radio. One alarming result is that disinformation generated by or pleasing to Washington and its allies has consequences before it can be corrected. The Ukrainian fake Babchenko assassination (allegedly ordered by Putin, of course) was quickly exposed, but not the official version of the Skripal assassination attempt in the UK, which led to the largest US expulsion of Russian diplomats in history before London’s initial account could be thoroughly examined. This too - Cold War without debate is unprecedented, precluding the frequent rethinking and revising of US policy that characterized the preceding 40-year Cold War.
8. Equally lamentable, and very much unlike during the 40-year Cold War, there still is virtually no significant opposition in the American mainstream to the US role in the new Cold War not in the media, not in Congress, not in the two major political parties, not in think tanks, not in the universities, not at grassroots levels. This continues to be unprecedented, dangerous, and contrary to real democracy. Consider again the still thunderous silence of scores of large US corporations that have been doing profitable business in post-Soviet Russia for years, from fast-food chains and automobile manufacturers to pharmaceutical and energy giants. Contrast their behavior to that of CEOs of PepsiCo, Control Data, IBM, and other major American corporations seeking entry to the Soviet market in the 1970s and 1980s, when they publicly supported and even funded pro-detente organizations and politicians. How to explain the continuing silence of their counterparts today, who are usually so profit-motivated? Are they also fearful of being labeled pro-Putin or possibly pro-Trump?
9. And then there remains the widespread escalatory myth that today’s Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is too weak, its economy too small and fragile, its leader too isolated in international affairs to wage a sustained Cold War, and that eventually Putin, who is punching above his weight, as the cliche has it, will capitulate. This too is a dangerous delusion one that cannot be attributed to President Trump. It was, we saw earlier, President Obama who, in 2014, as approvingly reported by the New York Times, set out to make Putin’s Russia a pariah state. Washington and some of its allies certainly tried to isolate Russia. How else to interpret fully the political scandals and media campaigns that erupted on the eve of the Sochi Olympics and again on the eve of the World Cup championship in Russia? Or the tantrum-like, mostly ineffective, even counter-productive cascade of economic sanctions on Moscow? But Russia is hardly isolated in world affairs, not even in Europe, where five or more governments are tilting away from the anti-Russian line of Washington, London, and Brussels. Despite sanctions, Russia’s energy industry and agricultural exports are flourishing. Moreover, geopolitically, Moscow has many military and related advantages in regions where the new Cold War has unfolded. And no state with Russia’s modern nuclear and other weapons is punching above its weight. Contrary to Washington’s expectations, the great majority of Russians have rallied behind Putin because they believe their country is under attack by the US-led West. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Russia’s history understands it is highly unlikely to capitulate under any circumstances.
10. Finally (at least as of now), there is the growing warlike hysteria fueled both in Washington and Moscow. It is driven by various factors, but television talk news broadcasts, as common in Russia as in the United States, play a major role. Only an extensive quantitative study could discern which plays a more lamentable role in promoting this frenzy MSNBC and CNN or their Russian counterparts. The Russian dark witticism seems apt: Both are worst (Oba khuzhe). Again, some of this American broadcast extremism existed during the preceding Cold War, but almost always balanced, even offset, by informed, wiser opinions, which are now largely excluded. Is my analysis of the graver dangers inherent in the new Cold War itself extremist or alarmist? Some usually reticent specialists would seem to agree with my general assessment. As I reported earlier, experts gathered by a centrist Washington think tank thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, there is a 5 to 7 chance of actual war with Russia. There are other such opinions. A former head of British M16 is reported as saying that for the first time in living memory, there’s a realistic chance of a superpower conflict. And a respected retired Russian general tells the same Washington think tank that any military confrontation will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia. A single Trump-Putin summit cannot eliminate these new Cold War dangers. But US-Soviet summits traditionally served three corollary purposes. They created a kind of security partnership, not a conspiracy that involved each leader’s limited political capital at home, which the other should recognize and not heedlessly jeopardize. They sent a clear message to the two leaders’ respective national-security bureaucracies, which often did not favor detente-like cooperation, that the boss was determined and they must end their foot-dragging, even sabotage. And summits, with their exalted rituals and intense coverage, usually improved the media-political environment needed to enhance cooperation amid Cold War conflicts. If a Trump-Putin summit achieves even some of those purposes, it might pull us back from the precipice.
1. The political epicenter of the new Cold War is not in far-away Berlin, as it was from the late 1940s on, but directly on Russia’s borders, from the Baltic states and Ukraine to another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Each of these new Cold War fronts is fraught with the possibility of hot war. US-Russian military relations are especially tense today in the Baltic region, where a large-scale NATO buildup is underway, and in Ukraine, where a US-Russian proxy war is intensifying. The Soviet Bloc that once served as a buffer between NATO and Russia no longer exists. And many imaginable incidents on the West’s new Eastern Front, intentional or unintentional, could easily trigger actual war between the United States and Russia. What brought about this situation on Russia’s borders unprecedented at least since the Nazi German invasion in 1941 was, of course, Washington’s exceedingly unwise decision, in the late 1990s, to expand NATO eastward. Done in the name of security, it has made all the states involved only more insecure.
2. Proxy wars were a feature of the old Cold War, but usually small ones in what was called the Third World, in Africa, for example. They rarely involved many, if any, Soviet or American personnel, mostly only money and weapons. Today’s US-Russian proxy wars are different, located in the center of geopolitics and accompanied by too many American and Russian trainers, minders, and possibly fighters. Two have already erupted: in Georgia in 2008, where Russian forces fought a Georgian army financed, trained, and minded by American funds and personnel; and in Syria, where in February scores of Russians were killed by US-backed anti-Assad forces. Moscow did not retaliate, but it has pledged to do so if there is a next time, as there very well might be. If so, this would in effect be war directly between Russia and America. The risk of a direct conflict also continues to grow in Ukraine. The country’s US-backed but politically failing President Petro Poroshenko seems periodically tempted to launch another all-out military assault on rebel-controlled Donbass, which is backed by Moscow. If he does so, and the assault does not quickly fail as previous ones did, Russia will certainly intervene in eastern Ukraine with a truly tangible invasion. Washington will then have to make a fateful war-or-peace decision. Having already reneged on its commitments to the Minsk Accords, the best hope for ending the four-year Ukrainian crisis peacefully, Kiev seems to have an unrelenting impulse to be a tail wagging the dog of US-Russian war. Its capacity for provocations and disinformation seem second to none, as evidenced again recently by the faked assassination and resurrection of journalist Arkady Babchenko.
3. Years-long Western, especially American, demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, is also unprecedented. Too obvious to spell out again here, no Soviet Communist leader, at least since Stalin, was ever subjected to such prolonged, baseless, crudely derogatory personal vilification. Whereas Soviet leaders were regarded as acceptable negotiating partners for American presidents, including at major summits, Putin has been made to seem to be an illegitimate national leader at best a KGB thug or murderous mafia boss.
4. Still more, demonizing Putin has generated widespread Russophobic vilification of Russia itself, or what the New York Times and other mainstream-media outlets have taken to calling Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Yesterday’s enemy was Soviet Communism. Today it is increasingly Russia, thereby also delegitimizing Russia as a great power with legitimate national interests. The Parity Principle, as I termed it during the preceding Cold War the principle that both sides had legitimate interests at home and abroad, which was the basis for diplomacy and negotiations, and symbolized by leadership summits no longer exists, at least on the American side. Nor does the acknowledgment that both sides were to blame to some extent for the previous Cold War. Among influential American observers who even recognize the new Cold War, Putin’s Russia alone is to blame. When there is no recognized parity and shared responsibility, there is ever-shrinking space for diplomacy, but more and more for increasingly militarized relations, as we are witnessing today.
5. Meanwhile, most of the Cold War safeguards cooperative mechanisms and mutually observed rules of conduct that evolved over decades in order to prevent superpower hot war have been vaporized or badly frayed since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, as the UN General Secretary Antnio Guterres, almost alone, has recognized: The Cold War is back”with a vengeance but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present. Trump’s recent missile strike on Syria carefully avoided killing any Russians, but Moscow has vowed to retaliate against the US if there is a next time, as there may be. Even the decades-long process of arms control may, an expert warns, be coming to an end. It would mean an unfettered new nuclear-arms race as well as the termination of an ongoing diplomatic process that buffered US-Soviet relations during very bad political times. In short, if there actually are any new Cold War rules of conduct, they are yet to be formulated and mutually accepted. Nor does this semi-anarchy take into account the new warfare technology of cyber-attacks. What are its implications for the secure functioning of existential Russian and American nuclear command-and-control and early-warning systems that guard against an accidental launching of missiles still on high alert?
6. Russiagate allegations that the American president has been compromised by or is even an agent of the Kremlin are also without precedent. These allegations, as we have seen, have already had profoundly dangerous consequences. They include the nonsensical, mantra-like declaration that Russia attacked America during the 2016 presidential election; crippling assaults on President Trump every time he speaks with Putin in person or by phone; and making both Trump and Putin so toxic that most American politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who understand the present-day dangers are reluctant to speak out against US contributions to the new Cold War.
7. Mainstream media outlets have, we know, played a woeful role in all of this. Unlike in the past, when pro-detente advocates had roughly equal access to influential media, today’s new Cold War media continue to enforce their orthodox narrative that Russia is solely to blame. They offer not diversity of opinion and reporting but confirmation bias. Alternative voices (with, yes, alternative or opposing facts) rarely appear any longer in the most influential newspapers or on national television or radio. One alarming result is that disinformation generated by or pleasing to Washington and its allies has consequences before it can be corrected. The Ukrainian fake Babchenko assassination (allegedly ordered by Putin, of course) was quickly exposed, but not the official version of the Skripal assassination attempt in the UK, which led to the largest US expulsion of Russian diplomats in history before London’s initial account could be thoroughly examined. This too - Cold War without debate is unprecedented, precluding the frequent rethinking and revising of US policy that characterized the preceding 40-year Cold War.
8. Equally lamentable, and very much unlike during the 40-year Cold War, there still is virtually no significant opposition in the American mainstream to the US role in the new Cold War not in the media, not in Congress, not in the two major political parties, not in think tanks, not in the universities, not at grassroots levels. This continues to be unprecedented, dangerous, and contrary to real democracy. Consider again the still thunderous silence of scores of large US corporations that have been doing profitable business in post-Soviet Russia for years, from fast-food chains and automobile manufacturers to pharmaceutical and energy giants. Contrast their behavior to that of CEOs of PepsiCo, Control Data, IBM, and other major American corporations seeking entry to the Soviet market in the 1970s and 1980s, when they publicly supported and even funded pro-detente organizations and politicians. How to explain the continuing silence of their counterparts today, who are usually so profit-motivated? Are they also fearful of being labeled pro-Putin or possibly pro-Trump?
9. And then there remains the widespread escalatory myth that today’s Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is too weak, its economy too small and fragile, its leader too isolated in international affairs to wage a sustained Cold War, and that eventually Putin, who is punching above his weight, as the cliche has it, will capitulate. This too is a dangerous delusion one that cannot be attributed to President Trump. It was, we saw earlier, President Obama who, in 2014, as approvingly reported by the New York Times, set out to make Putin’s Russia a pariah state. Washington and some of its allies certainly tried to isolate Russia. How else to interpret fully the political scandals and media campaigns that erupted on the eve of the Sochi Olympics and again on the eve of the World Cup championship in Russia? Or the tantrum-like, mostly ineffective, even counter-productive cascade of economic sanctions on Moscow? But Russia is hardly isolated in world affairs, not even in Europe, where five or more governments are tilting away from the anti-Russian line of Washington, London, and Brussels. Despite sanctions, Russia’s energy industry and agricultural exports are flourishing. Moreover, geopolitically, Moscow has many military and related advantages in regions where the new Cold War has unfolded. And no state with Russia’s modern nuclear and other weapons is punching above its weight. Contrary to Washington’s expectations, the great majority of Russians have rallied behind Putin because they believe their country is under attack by the US-led West. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Russia’s history understands it is highly unlikely to capitulate under any circumstances.
10. Finally (at least as of now), there is the growing warlike hysteria fueled both in Washington and Moscow. It is driven by various factors, but television talk news broadcasts, as common in Russia as in the United States, play a major role. Only an extensive quantitative study could discern which plays a more lamentable role in promoting this frenzy MSNBC and CNN or their Russian counterparts. The Russian dark witticism seems apt: Both are worst (Oba khuzhe). Again, some of this American broadcast extremism existed during the preceding Cold War, but almost always balanced, even offset, by informed, wiser opinions, which are now largely excluded. Is my analysis of the graver dangers inherent in the new Cold War itself extremist or alarmist? Some usually reticent specialists would seem to agree with my general assessment. As I reported earlier, experts gathered by a centrist Washington think tank thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, there is a 5 to 7 chance of actual war with Russia. There are other such opinions. A former head of British M16 is reported as saying that for the first time in living memory, there’s a realistic chance of a superpower conflict. And a respected retired Russian general tells the same Washington think tank that any military confrontation will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia. A single Trump-Putin summit cannot eliminate these new Cold War dangers. But US-Soviet summits traditionally served three corollary purposes. They created a kind of security partnership, not a conspiracy that involved each leader’s limited political capital at home, which the other should recognize and not heedlessly jeopardize. They sent a clear message to the two leaders’ respective national-security bureaucracies, which often did not favor detente-like cooperation, that the boss was determined and they must end their foot-dragging, even sabotage. And summits, with their exalted rituals and intense coverage, usually improved the media-political environment needed to enhance cooperation amid Cold War conflicts. If a Trump-Putin summit achieves even some of those purposes, it might pull us back from the precipice.