Is it the Cold War all over again?
It's not clear that America's ready to lead the Western bloc in a renewed battle with Russia
TUE, APR 19, 2022
LEON HADAR
Biden's decision to resist Russia's attack on Ukraine recalls President Truman's move against China's invasion of Korea in 1950
AGAINST the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, and growing tensions between the United States and Russia (as well as with China), American political leaders and pundits tend to employ apocalyptic terms, along the lines of “this is one of ‘the most dangerous’ periods in world history”.
In that context, this analysis underscores the “momentous” challenges that President Joe Biden is facing on the global front as he tries to mobilise public support and bring together America’s allies to confront what are seen as existential threats.
But if indeed, as some suggest, the international system would soon be dominated by a global struggle between the leading nuclear powers, it would mark a return to the long era of the Cold War which was dominated by the fear that a war between the US and its geo-strategic and ideological rival would end with the destruction of most of the human race, like it almost did during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
In a way, if one would want to reach back to an appropriate historical analogy, Biden is perhaps in the same place that former President Harry Truman found himself in when he was thrust into office in April 1945 after the death of President Franklin D Roosevelt, when he had to deal with the threat that the Soviet Union and its communist allies were posing to the West before the term “Cold War” was coined.
The Soviets were asserting their control over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and trying to fill the geo-political vacuum in Greece, Turkey, Iran and the Middle East while Great Britain, devastated economically and militarily by the world war, was unable to continue defending Western interests there.
President Truman and his foreign policy aides ended up laying the foundations of US strategy during the Cold War, by providing economic assistance to rebuild Western Europe and Japan, and creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to defend Western European countries from potential Soviet attacks.
Indeed, President Truman, as his legendary Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, was “present at the creation” of the key institutions that would remain in place during the Cold War, initiating the so-called “containment” strategy to confront the Soviet threat,
Expressed in 1947 by him in a speech to Congress seeking aid for Greece and Turkey, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine – which was seen by the Soviet Union as an open declaration of the Cold War – a move that enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress.
President Truman’s most significant and controversial decision as president was to enter and fight a long and bloody war in Korea, after Communist China, supported by the Soviet Union, had violated the agreement that divided the peninsula into a pro-Western section in the south and pro-Communist in the north, and invaded the south.
The rest, as they say, was history which many assumed ended when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed, the former members of the Communist bloc, including Russia, became part of a Western-led international system, and even Communist China was integrated into the global capitalist economy.
While it’s true that the post-Cold War global system did face challenges from international terrorism and “rogue” states like Iran and North Korea, and there has been a lot of talk recently about the renewal of great power competition, in particularly between the China and the US, the notion of returning to an old Cold War system, especially when it came to the Russians, sounded ludicrous.
If some foreign policy experts were reaching for the Cold War analogy and raising the possibility of a new Cold War (or a Cold War 2.0), they were thinking about China and America, the world’s two dominant global military and economic powers.
But America and Russia? Hey, give me a break. Italy has a larger GNP than Russia, and while President Vladimir Putin is a pain in the neck, he didn’t pose an existential threat to the West. In fact, the general consensus in Washington was that the US needed to reduce its military presence across the Atlantic and start “pivoting” strategically to the Indo-Pacific, and assume that cooperation and co-existence with Russia became the norm of US foreign policy.
That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until February 24 this year, the day when Russia attacked Ukraine, and in the process may have taken the first step in the direction of a new Cold War.
Or to employ Acheson’s adage, is it possible that we are now “present at the creation” of a new international system that would require the US to adjust to that reality and lay the foundations for a new grand strategy, a la containment? Is President Biden up to the challenge and ready to transform into our era’s President Truman?
On one level, there are indications that that is indeed the case. In the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon there is a clear recognition that the era of cooperation with Russia is over. The West’s stand vis-à-vis Moscow that was based on international diplomacy and on advancing finance and trade and a posture of defence, would have to be replaced with a new offensive strategy that seeks to isolate and weaken Russia.
Recall that a while ago former President Donald Trump and other political figures were seriously discussing the idea of getting rid of the 73-year-old NATO, while others were trying (and to no avail) to convince Germany and other NATO members to increase their defence spending and reduce their dependence on energy imports from Russia.
All of that changed dramatically after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Under US leadership the Germans and the European governments are raising their defence spending, and NATO would soon unveil a strategy that would state that “meaningful dialogue, as we strived for before, is not an option for Russia”.
At the same time, the European Union (EU) has announced plans to cut its members’ heavy dependency on Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of the year, and end fossil-fuel imports from Russia before 2030.
President Putin may have assumed that his invasion of Ukraine would divide the West and weaken NATO. Instead, the military alliance that was founded by former President Truman to protect the West against Soviet aggression, has been reinvigorated by the Russian belligerence, with even neutral Finland and Sweden, concerned over Russian aggression, expected to apply for NATO membership.
And very much like the bipartisan consensus that evolved in Washington in support of the containment strategy in the late 1940s, Republicans and Democrats have rallied behind President Biden’s tough posture, passing legislation to end normal trade relations with Russia and codify the US ban on Russian oil imports.
In some respects, President Biden’s decision to resist Russia’s attack on Ukraine recalls former President Truman’s move against China’s invasion of Korea. With one major difference: the US military was deployed in the Korean Peninsula to fight the Chinese forces there. President Biden, on the other hand, has pledged not to militarily intervene in the Ukraine war.
Moreover, it had taken Washington several years to foster its containment strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and before the Cold War would become declared American policy, and a very expensive endeavour that had enormous effects on the American economy and society and which led to costly and controversial US military interventions around the world, including in Vietnam.
While the clear majority of Americans and Europeans have expressed support for the Ukrainian people and their courage in their war with Russia and probably agree with President Biden’s description of President Putin as a “dictator” who is “committing genocide”, it’s not clear that they would be willing to pay the costs of a long Cold War with Russia.
In the US most Americans oppose direct US military intervention in the war while the Europeans have yet to demonstrate their ability to end their dependence on Russian energy imports.
Moreover, the consensus that China is America’s major global challenge continues to dominate strategic thinking in Washington, and a long-term military confrontation with both China and Russia would require major increases in US defence spending, especially since even under the best-case-scenario the European allies, like during the old Cold War, wouldn’t be able to protect themselves against potential Russian threats without US backing.
Fighting a new Cold War would require US leadership, and whether Americans are ready to assume that role remains an open question.