The Cold War Reversed

The Cold War Reversed

William Pfaff

Paris, September 8, 2008 – There is much current talk about a new cold war, or a new configuration of nations, a new power balance (or imbalance). There is something in this; it's a consequence of the crisis produced by Georgia's foolhardy and tragic attack on South Ossetia and upon the Russian soldiers stationed there. This upset standard thinking about the U.S. and about Putin's Russia

(Parenthetically, there is no longer dispute as to Mikheil Saakashvili's responsibility for launching the attack, presumably in the mistaken belief that Georgia's pending NATO candidature would either deter Russian retaliation, or force the United States and NATO to support his adventure. He was wrong on both counts. See the devastating report by C.J. Chivers and Thom Shanker in the September 3 New York Times.)

What is being ignored in discussion of new power balances and revived cold war is the reason why international relations have fundamentally changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The cold war was ideological struggle. It obviously involved power confrontations, the Warsaw Pact versus NATO, the presumed Soviet military threat to Western Europe, the Korean war – and of course the nuclear threat.

But what was behind it was Marxist-Leninist, and later Maoist, ideology.
These were doctrinally expansionist. They said that capitalism was in its final stages, the class war between workers and industrial-capitalism and imperialism approaching its culminating crisis, and Communism on the march towards inevitable victory.

You can question to what extent leaders in Moscow and Beijing really believed this. They had to act as if they believed it. Millions of Communists in the West and an unknowable number in the U.S.S.R. and China really did believe it. The ideology was the only source of legitimacy and power for the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties and governments.

They had to seem ever on the march, expanding – or seeming to expand – because they had to make people believe that they were revolutionary regimes which sooner or later, by the scientifically determined dialectical progression of history, were guaranteed to produce victory, a New Dawn, the Great Day, The Victory of the East, and millenarian rule by workers and peasants, and the "progressive intellectuals" allied with them.

The United States and its allies were in the struggle for classical geopolitical and strategic reasons. They had interests to defend. They were defending the new democratic postwar order in Western Europe. Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, George Kennan, and the leading American and Allied diplomatic figures of the time, were not ideologues. They were all in the classical sense of the term, conservatives, defending the democratic order.


It is true that during the period when John Foster Dulles was American secretary of state, the United States itself caught a bad case of the ideological fevers. Dulles was a prominent churchman, a Presbyterian Elder, as well as an international lawyer, and as John Lukacs writes in his history of the Cold War, brought "the distressingly puritanical and at times even pharisaic inclination to see in the world struggle a national personification of good versus evil." The fever unfortunately became a chronic condition, with as yet no cure.

Thus today the situation is the reverse of 1948-1950. Russia is not an ideological power. It has no doctrine to sell. Its preoccupations are prosperity and power. Vladimir Putin has no wish to subvert and rule the United States or Europe. He just doesn't want NATO's candidates biting his ankles. He wants level-headed governments on his borders who don't make trouble for Russia. But that is perfectly, if regrettably, normal.

The United States has been invading troublesome Caribbean and
Central American neighbors since the mid-19th century. It was what the U.S. Marine Corps did for a living – Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Ronald Reagan absurdly invaded Granada, officially to save American students from dangerous Cuban airport laborers. The senior George Bush invaded Panama to seize President Manuel Noriega, a former employee of the CIA. It has never been explained what those two invasions were really about. There were (widely publicized) clandestine operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All this has been taken for granted as the Monroe Doctrine at work.

China is no longer an ideological power. Chinese Communism has been intellectually dead for two decades. The Party is kept going with all its congresses and assemblies because that furnishes the only justification China's leaders have for why they are in power. China's actual politics function through Party co-option, favoritism and power struggle. This one day will probably end in a major crisis, as I have said before in this space.

China is not an expanding power. It wants Taiwan, various "lost" islands in the China Seas; it demands recognition that Tibet is Chinese. But all this is traditional. It certainly is not promoting Communism abroad.

Today the world's only expansionist ideological power is the United States, aggressively pushing everywhere, persuading, promoting, and even invading countries for "democracy." It wants to make everyone democratic "like us," which in the end means to do as we want them to do. The ideology is meant to be generous, but it is a generosity devoted to the control of energy resources, raw materials, trade, and finance.

This makes the U.S. the expanding and aggressive nation in the world today, the one with a "global ideology," with military power to back it up. This frightens people. When the power doesn't work as intended, as in the Caucasus, it makes other people frightened, the ones who have bet on the U.S. to advance their own agendas. That is what is changing the geopolitical map.

© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
This article comes from William PFAFF
http://www.williampfaff.com

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