The actual nature of the threat posed by Russia is being obscured or distorted by the talk of a new Cold War.
Will everyone please stop talking about a new Cold War?
However badly things work out between Russia and the United
States and the West, a new Cold War isn't in the cards because Russia
today isn't the Soviet Union. Sure, we are in a diplomatic and
geostrategic conflict with Russia, which was the heart of the old Soviet
Union. Also, Russia wants much of the real estate that belonged to the
Soviet Union before it collapsed. And Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel who now waxes nostalgic for the good old days. That's about it.
That's hardly nothing, but the Cold War was far more than a conflict
with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-communism
and anti-anti-communism divided Americans for decades, particularly
among academic and media elites. Right and left may still argue over the
merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the
topic of communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited
riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half
century.
Meanwhile, Putin's ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union.
With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it's hard to
find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even
those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to
criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a
"greater Russia" or a "Eurasian Union" simply does not put fire in the
minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global
socialist revolution once did. And that's a good thing.
What's less encouraging is that the actual nature of the threat posed
by Russia is being obscured or distorted by the talk of a new Cold War.
It's a bit like how for decades, every war was described as "another
Vietnam" — at least until the Iraq war,
which now seems to be the prism for every potential conflict. "We don't
want another Iraq" is the go-to phrase to justify doing nothing.
What is downright dismaying is how the West's surprising and
bloodless victory in the Cold War left us ill-equipped for the world
that has taken its place. For many, the understandable hope was that
once the Cold War was behind us, a new era would be ahead of us.
Neoconservatives envisioned a democratic pax Americana. Liberal
internationalists preferred a new democratic order led by something
called "the international community" that would meet over cheese plates
and bottled water at the United Nations or The Hague.
Many have called the decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11
a "holiday from history." The truth is closer to the opposite. The Cold
War years, while historic in a literal sense, were something of a great
parentheses, a sharp departure from historical norms. Communism was a
transnational ideology imposed on nationalist movements. That's why
every supposedly communist movement eventually became nationalist once
in power. Still, the rhetorical and psychological power of communist
ideology, combined with the fear of nuclear war, made international
relations seem like a sharp break with how foreign affairs worked before
1945 — or 1917.
It turns out, the Berlin Wall wasn't blocking us from a new world
order, it was holding back the tide of history. Western Europe was
especially slow to realize this. Its politicians and intellectuals
convinced themselves that they had created a continental "zone of peace"
through diplomacy, when in reality they were taking U.S. protection for
granted. They let their militaries atrophy to the point of being little
more than ceremonial.
The contrast with Russia and China (not to mention Iran and Saudi
Arabia) is amazing. In Moscow and Beijing, they still believe foreign
policy is about military and economic power, "spheres of influence" and
political control. In Western Europe (and much of this administration),
it's about moral authority, international norms and other kinds of "soft
power." Soft power is great, but it's useless against people who only
respect hard power. That lesson predates the Cold War by a few
millenniums.
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