The new cold war: are we going back to the bad old days?
Tanks and troops invading a satellite state, tit-for-tat spy expulsions, high-risk military games of chicken involving nuclear bombers and interceptor jets, gas supply cut-offs, and angry diplomatic exchanges – if it sounds familiar, then it should. Newspaper headlines from Moscow to Washington and Sydney to Kiev all agree: the cold war is back.
Well, maybe. Escalating tensions between President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and western countries led by the US are certainly reminiscent of the bad old days in some significant respects. The cold war, a truly global stand-off of immense ideological, military and political import, began, roughly, in the late 1940s and continued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, an event later deplored by Putin as the biggest tragedy of the 20th century.
But this time around, the battleground is less extensive, the battle-lines less clear. The particular trigger for the resurgence of chronic cold war-itis was Russia’s sudden annexation in March of Crimea, a Black Sea region that Moscow, historically speaking, regards as its own. It is, in fact, part of the sovereign territory of independent Ukraine. Since then, the trouble has spread, with Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine fighting for independence, or at least autonomy, from the western-backed government in Kiev, and Russia implicitly threatening western energy supplies.
Last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, showed just how raw nerves have become – over Ukraine and, more broadly, over what the west has come to see as a pattern of expansionist, confrontational and often illegal behaviour by the Putin regime, including its not-forgotten 2008 military intervention in Georgia. On meeting Putin, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said: “Well, I guess I’ll shake your hand but I have only one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.” David Cameron and Barack Obama personally delivered similar messages, in slightly less hostile terms.
Putin left the summit early, in a huff, but showed no sign whatever of backing down. Later, in an interview on German television, he complained that western countries, not him, were pushing the world towards a new cold war.
Putin repeated his old grievance that the extension of Nato membership in central and eastern Europe since 1991 had been a “geopolitical game changer” to which Russia was forced to respond. That response included resumed long-range strategic bomber flights, to counter similar US activities around Russia’s periphery, he said.
“Nato and the United States have military bases scattered all over the globe, including in areas close to our borders, and their number is growing,” Putin said. “Moreover, just recently it was decided to deploy special operations forces, again in close proximity to our borders [a reference to Nato exercises in the Baltic states]. You have mentioned various [Russian] exercises, flights, ship movements and so on. Is all of this going on? Yes, it is indeed,” Putin said.
Putin was also referring to Russia’s recent tit-for-tat expulsion of Polish and German diplomats for alleged spying, another apparent throwback to the cold war era of furtive espionage, John le Carré’s Smiley thrillers, and the very real depredations of Philby, Burgess and Maclean.
Putin’s invocation of the cold war was nothing new. It may be that, like many Russians and more than a few western generals, he actually misses it. Earlier this month, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, reviled by the nationalist rightwing forces around Putin for presiding over the Soviet breakup, issued a similar warning. “We must make sure that we get the tensions that have arisen recently under control,” Gorbachev said. But to the dismay of his admirers in the west, he went on to claim that Ukraine was being used as an excuse by the US to victimise Russia and declared his backing for Putin. “I am absolutely convinced that Putin protects Russia’s interests better than anyone else,” he said.
Auguries of a rising confrontation between Russia and the west are not hard to find. A recent report by the European Leadership Network said close military encounters have jumped to cold war levels, with 40 dangerous or sensitive incidents recorded in the past eight months.
Sweden recently launched a full-scale naval operation to hunt down a mini-submarine, assumed to be Russian, trespassing inside its coastal waters. The hunt was eventually called off after nothing was found. Analysts suggested that was just as well, since the depth-charging of a Russian sub, if it had happened (and the Swedes were angry enough to do it), could have sparked a bigger crisis.
Other governments in the Baltic region have similar worries. In August, Finland scrambled US-made Hornet fighter jets when Russian aircraft illegally entered Finnish airspace on three separate occasions in one week. A Finnish research vessel was also harassed. In an interview with the Guardian, Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s president, added his voice to the chorus warning that the world was “at the gates of a new kind of cold war”.
But the similarities can be overdone, a senior government insider in Helsinki said, arguing that Russia is economically weak, deprived of foreign investment, beset by capital flight, and almost wholly dependent for cash on energy exports at a time when the international oil price is dropping. “Russia’s actions in Ukraine are more a show of weakness and fear. This is not expansionism, this is insecurity,” the insider said.
On the other hand, if backed into a corner, Putin might prove to be an unpredictable opponent. “Putin is no Gorbachev; he is not a guy who is going to give up. He will not go quietly. Remember, this is a global nuclear power we are talking about,” he continued.
Any new cold war-type confrontation would differ in scope and range from the worldwide frozen conflict that dominated the latter half of the 20th century. For a start, it would not be truly global. In the 1970s and 80s, countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Angola, Yemen and Indonesia were the setting for proxy wars fought between rival Soviet or Cuban-backed forces on the one hand, and western-backed, anti-communist militias on the other. These conflicts often centred on movements for post-colonial independence, or in South Africa, freedom from apartheid.
The second decade of the 21st century offers little scope for a repetition. Following the Soviet implosion, the Warsaw Pact (Russia’s Nato equivalent) was wound up. Moscow now has few friends in eastern and central Europe. In the wider world, Russia’s lack of overt allies is now even more evident. Developing countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Mexico have no need or wish for Moscow’s political or military backing. As the world’s largest democracy, India looks askance at Russia’s authoritarian system. For its part, China sees Russia primarily as a source of cheap energy and raw materials. As Beijing’s power and influence grows, Russia (like Japan) is more likely to be a future adversary than an ally in a global contest with the west.
Similar considerations apply on the western “side”. When the cold war finished, the US declared itself the victor, paid itself a peace dividend in the form of reduced military spending, and flattered itself that, with the end of superpower rivalry, a unipolar moment had arrived – meaning unchallenged US global hegemony. A quarter of a century later, that smug self-congratulation has disappeared, as has much international confidence in US leadership. As the G20 summit demonstrated, countries such as Brazil have no more interest in following the US lead on Russia than, for example, on national security and privacy laws, the subject of angry exchanges following the Snowden revelations about illegal NSA wire-taps in Latin America. In other words, if the US and Russia want a fight, they will each have far fewer supporters this time around. Indeed, China and the other 21st-century powers may well welcome the idea of the “old” superpowers wearing themselves out in a new slug-fest.
A new cold war would lack other key features that distinguished its forerunner. Ideologically speaking, the once definitive struggle between the monolithic rival systems of Marxist communism and free-market capitalism has largely evaporated for want of interest. It has been replaced by a contest of values, such as fair and open elections, respect for human rights, freedom of expression and movement, religious tolerance and the rule of law, as championed by the US and its west-European allies; and a system of managed democracy, oligarchic governance and limits on individual liberty in exchange for supposed economic benefits, as practised in Putin’s Russia, one-party China, and other emerging states.
Likewise, some the worst excesses of the cold war period, such as the multi-billion-dollar arms races in nuclear and conventional weaponry, are now largely absent. Putin has increased spending on Russia’s nuclear and other arsenals, and the US still maintains a powerful strategic nuclear force. But the strategic arms reduction treaties have significantly reduced warheads and missiles on both sides. The paranoid days typified by Dr Strangelove and the nightmare doctrines of MAD (mutual assured destruction) seem unlikely to return.
Looked at another way, it could be argued the cold war never went away, or at least, that there was merely a brief time-out in the 1990s that ended when Putin rose to power 15 years ago. Bilateral proxy contests for power and influence have continued, though in different forms. In Syria, Moscow’s strong support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which rents Russia a military base at Tartus on the Mediterranean, is one of the main reasons Assad has survived the civil war for as long as he has. In supporting Assad, Russia acts in deliberate, intransigent opposition to the US.
In Iran, similarly, Russia has worked to maintain close ties with the ruling clerical establishment, in open defiance of US and Israeli-led efforts to isolate the ayatollahs. Moscow is a party to the Vienna negotiations on Iran’s suspect nuclear programme, which are due to conclude next Monday. But at the same time, it has announced a new deal to build next-generation nuclear reactors at two sites in Iran, regardless of the outcome in Vienna.
Spying, information theft, economic espionage and assassination also remain an important part of the dysfunctional US-Russia relationship. To crude violence have now been added the new weapons of the information age, including identity theft, cyber-warfare, computer hacking and ever more sophisticated disinformation techniques. Russia may not have changed that much since the Soviet days, but in terms of propaganda, disseminated through slick, sanitised media outlets, it has raised its game significantly.
Yet, more than anything else perhaps, the stridently toxic personality of Vladimir Putin himself fits well in the “new cold war” scenario. Like the Soviet hardmen of old, such as Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Yuri Andropov, the diminutive Putin appears by turns ruthless, charming and ultimately reckless. His passionate, single-minded belief in his nation’s greatness, owing as much to the Tsarist as to the Soviet legacy, drives his mission to project Russian power. His ability to ignore moral considerations, legal norms, and basic human compassion makes him both a dangerous and resourceful foe.
Since he first unexpectedly came to power as prime minister in 1999, western politicians, diplomats and generals have been asking the question: who is Vladimir Putin? Now they may have the answer. He is the man who put the cold war back in vogue.
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