Return to Cold War

Robert Legvold

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509501922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russian relationship over a cliff - a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties, and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War period.

In this incisive new analysis, leading expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Robert Legvold, explores in detail this qualitatively new phase in a relationship that has alternated between hope and disappointment for much of the past two decades. Tracing the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture, he contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to cold war with great and lasting consequences. In drawing out the commonalities between the original cold war and the current confrontation, Return to Cold War brings a fresh perspective to what is happening between the two countries, its broader significance beyond the immediate issues of the day, and how political leaders in both countries might adjust their approaches in order, as the author urges, to make this new cold war "as short and shallow as possible."

1
Dueling Concepts

On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin strode through the high golden doors in St George’s Hall to a chalk-white podium and, before nearly a thousand parliamentarians, regional officials, and other dignitaries, denounced the United States as no Russian or Soviet leader had in many decades: It and its allies, he said, “prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun” (Putin, 2014a). “They act as they please,” believing that “they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right,” using force however they choose and manipulating or simply ignoring the United Nations and its Security Council when it stands in the way. He was not done. Amid his grandiose, emotion-filled justification for Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, he continued to excoriate the United States. If you press “a spring to its limits,” he said, “it will snap back hard.” That was what the United States had done: plotting “color revolution” against Russia, “lying to us,” making decisions “behind our back,” such as with NATO enlargement and missile defense in Europe, and “trying to sweep us into a corner” for having an independent foreign policy. It was, he concluded in a soaring, but historically dubious charge, still pursuing the “infamous containment policy” that the West had directed against Russia since the eighteenth century.

Two weeks before, with Russia deeply implicated in the Crimean events, President Obama had accused the Russians not only of “violating” Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity but of “stealing the assets of the Ukrainian people,” as he announced travel bans on an unspecified number of Russians and Ukrainians said to be responsible for the aggression (Obama, 2014). This was soon followed by the first wave of sanctions against individuals and a bank thought to be close to Putin and his inner circle. The administration also worked hard to bring along its EU allies, knowing that US sanctions would not have much impact if not matched by countries whose trade with Russia was fifteen times larger than that of the United States. Eventually this first wave would be followed in July and September by two more ever widening waves of sanctions, freezing the assets and denying visas to dozens of Putin’s closest confidants, closing credit markets to all of Russia’s major banks other than for very short-term loans, and sharply curtailing US and European business with four more key sectors of the Russian economy: defense and high technology, energy, engineering, and metals and mining.

The economic punishment went hand in hand with a vigorous effort to isolate Putin’s government, banishing it from the G-8 in March, shutting down negotiations over Russia’s entry into the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the club of industrialized market economies, suspending bilateral trade and investment talks, ending various initiatives in the area of military cooperation as well as negotiations on missile defense, and calling a halt to most of the twenty working groups under the US–Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. The latter had been the background warp and woof of the Obama administration’s effort to “reset” US–Russian relations – collaborations on everything from counter-terrorism to legal and military reform, from dealing with civil emergencies to cooperation on energy, the environment, and health.

Never, even during the original Cold War, had the United States and its European allies attempted to blacklist and punish as many senior Russian figures or target such a wide range of economic entities. Compared with Putin’s visit to President Bush’s Crawford ranch in November 2001, two months after the attack on New York’s trade towers, when the two men shared a barbecue dinner, practiced dancing the Cotton-Eyed Joe, showed up at the local high school, and traded jokes over exercising in the Texas heat or Siberian cold, by any measure the relationship had badly deteriorated (Sanger, 2001).

Not, however, for the first time. Since the middle of the 1990s US–Russian ties had seesawed between relative comity and rising tensions, plunging to an icy low after Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. On the heels of that war, the Obama administration’s effort to mend relations and move forward was the fourth attempt to put the relationship on a more durable and productive basis. Three times before the attempt had failed: first, with Moscow’s sour reaction to NATO enlargement in 1997, then after the 1999 Kosovo War, and, again, from the Iraq War in 2003 to the Georgian War in 2008. So, the natural question was whether this simply represented the latest failure, and the real task was to explain why the two countries could not break this boom and bust cycle, why periods of raised hopes and accomplishment gained no lasting traction.

The alternative possibility was that the plummet this time was qualitatively different. Propelled by the Ukrainian crisis, the two sides had sailed over the cliff, and there would be no climbing back to sturdier ground allowing a fifth run at cooperation – at least, not any time soon. If so, the task changed. Policymakers and publics on both sides needed a framework allowing them to comprehend the depth, essence, and, most important, consequences of the confrontation their two countries were now in. What way of thinking would make sense of these events or provide enough perspective to allow sound guidance for future US and Russian foreign policy?

Not surprisingly the answer did not come easy. More surprising, however, the answers that did come stirred not merely disagreement but passion. In no instance was this truer than when the notion of cold war entered the analytical competition. Given the speed and scale of the collapse in Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe, the natural instinct was to reach for a familiar label, not least because, over the years, cold war had become the handy way to characterize any relationship – personal, corporate, or national – that had grown bitter but stopped short of violence. Others, however, paused, convinced that this reflexive and relatively unthinking comparison missed the mark and did potential harm.

Some balked because they did not want to believe that relations, though severely damaged, had sunk to this point, and still hoped the worst could be avoided (Voigt, 2014). Others thought the comparison flawed in the extreme. As Oxford’s Alex Pravda argued, the relationship does “not revolve around a global nuclear arms contest” as in the original Cold War, nor are the sides locked in “a universal and existential struggle between social systems” (Pravda, 2014). Worse, he said, echoing the thoughts of many, the “new Cold War narrative” strengthens those in Europe and the United States urging the isolation of Russia and calling for a renewed policy of containment, a course likely to harden Russian policy and lead to greater aggression on Russia’s part. Thomas Graham, George W. Bush’s former senior Russian advisor, agreed, and added that it was arch-folly to think that the United States could isolate or contain a country that had one of the world’s ten largest economies, was the world’s largest exporter of hydrocarbons, and could count for relief on the BRICS, none of whom had any intention of isolating or containing Russia.

The “new Cold War narrative” that they attacked was, in fact, not all that new. A few observers had been arguing for years that the West was, again, in a Cold War with Russia, only Western leaders did not know it. Edward Lucas, The Economist’s senior writer on Russia, in his book The New Cold War, warned of a Russia not only under a despotic hand, hostile to democratic values and institutions, but also a menace to its neighbors, whose independence it meant to destroy, and no less to Europe and the United States, since the whole thrust of its policy aimed to do “harm” to the West, to “frustrate us, and weaken us” (Lucas, 2007). Stop the wishful thinking, he pleaded, and focus on “winning” this “new Cold War.” Blunt the money and energy resources Russia was using to advance its malign agenda by denying the Russians capital markets; pay the unavoidable price of freeing Europe from dependence on Russian oil and gas; kick the country out of organizations where it does not belong, such as the G-8; and go to battle, trumpeting the virtue of Western democratic values over the evil of those animating Putin’s Russia. (Seven years later, it might be noted, US and European leaders who in 2014 dismissed the notion that the collapse in relations represented a new Cold War were doing pretty much everything Lucas called for to “win” a “new Cold War.”)

Lucas was hardly alone. Another British journalist, Mark MacKinnon, also published a book with the same title and largely the same theme (MacKinnon, 2007). In the United States, early in Putin’s first presidential term, Senator John McCain had been sounding the alarm over Russia’s bullying of neighbors, manipulation of energy supplies, intention to reconstitute the empire of Imperial Russia, and descent into tyranny with its security forces run amok. In 2005 McCain, joined by Senator Joseph Lieberman, had introduced a Senate resolution demanding that Russia be suspended from the G-8. Then, and in the years that followed, McCain and Lieberman had more than a few allies in the Congress and on the editorial pages of US newspapers.

The vindication that Lucas felt as the Ukrainian crisis exploded in 2014 (he quickly reissued his book and boasted, “I told you so”) did not persuade the doubters. For the earlier period, even if one shared his view of Russia’s leadership and its malevolent aims, it would be hard to argue that a cold war was underway, if, as he maintained, Western leaders failed to realize it. A war does not exist until both sides fight it. By 2014 both sides were fighting it, but by then a far broader array of commentators had latched on to the cold war metaphor. It was the speed with which the label gained popularity that stirred a number of analysts to take a hard look at the collapse of relations, and to say, no.

Dmitri Trenin, one of the most serious of these analysts, did not come casually to this conclusion. He was, in fact, among the first to describe the dramatic rupture in relations as the beginning of “Cold War II” (Trenin, 2014b). After deeper thought, however, he decided that cold war was the wrong way to think about the transformation. “Today’s situation,” he now wrote, lacks the ideological focus of the conflict “between communism and liberal democracy” (Trenin, 2014a). While it has “a traditional military dimension,” this is “as yet” not dominant. It has “global implications” but is “not central to the global system.” And, most importantly, “unlike the Cold War,” it is “not the organizing principle of either world politics or even the foreign policies of the conflict’s main contestants, particularly that of the United States.” Better, he concluded, to see the confrontation as a renewal of great power rivalry, and, if a historical parallel was sought, it should be the nineteenth-century Great Game between the Russian and British empires, the struggle over control of the gateway to the Indian subcontinent, not the post-World War II Cold War.

Trenin’s reconsidered view of the tailspin US–Russian relations were now in scarcely made it milder or safer than a cold war. On the contrary, as he wrote by fall 2014, “In contrast to the Cold War,” the new rivalry “lacks agreed, if unwritten, rules,” suffers “a gross asymmetry in power,” and is “utterly devoid of mutual respect” (Trenin, 2014c). Given “a near-universal lack of strategic thinking,” he warned, “it is thus more prone than the US–Soviet conflict to lead to a collision in the style of 1914. The Cold War, after all, stayed largely cold. There is no such certainty about the present situation.”

Trenin’s phrasing – a return to great power rivalry – flowed into a much broader and steamier debate. The drama over the exploding acrimony in US–Russian relations brought into the open a long-brewing argument over the very nature of the world facing the United States and its allies. The stakes were high. The issue was not merely over which academic camp’s theory performed better. Deep in the entrails of the argument was whether US and European leaders did or did not understand the world in which they were operating and, therefore, whether they had botched two decades of foreign policy or, on the contrary, had set the right course, and only needed to adjust their sails modestly. Buried in the debate were very different notions of the challenge posed by Russia.

One side, best represented by Walter Russell Mead (2014) and Stephan Walt (2014), insisted that “geopolitics were back” – indeed, that they had never left. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the US leadership and foreign policy elite had embraced the gauzy illusion that crude power politics had also died. In the future, relations among nations would be softened and redirected, as Walt described their enticing vision, into “an increasingly democratic, globalized, market-driven, institutionalized, and allegedly benevolent world order.” In scholarly circles this was known as a “liberal international order,” but those who bought into it, Mead contended, had “fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant.” It may have represented the “ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism,” but certainly “not the obsolescence of hard power.” The United States and its partners, the designers and beneficiaries of the system, had persuaded themselves that the rough and tumble political contests of the past made no sense in a world whose threats were climate change, failing states, religious and ethnic extremism and its scurvy offspring terrorism, along with a variety of ills spawned by globalization. But others, such as Russia, China, and Iran, did not agree, and, having nursed their grievances, when in a position to act, did so.

Viewed through this lens, the collapse of US–Russian relations and Russia’s role in it presented no puzzle. The United States and its European allies, charmed by the notion that the age of realpolitik had passed, assumed that extending the institutions underpinning Western Europe’s democratic peace to the Soviet Union’s former empire was both constructive and in tune with the times. Russia disagreed, and it ended in the Ukrainian crisis. Starkly put – and no one put it more starkly than John Mearsheimer in a brash Foreign Affairs article in fall 2014 – the crisis was largely the “West’s fault” (Mearsheimer, 2014). Major powers do not respond graciously to hostile alliances pushing up to their borders. The United States and its NATO partners should have understood that, by meddling in Ukraine – rallying to political forces hostile to Russia and set on NATO membership, a prospect Washington and Brussels refused to rule out – they were guaranteeing a predictably aggressive Russian response. It was, he wrote, simply “Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory.”

Russia’s harsh moves to defend a vital strategic interest, Mearsheimer argued, scarcely meant that it was bent on grabbing all of Ukraine or the territory of other neighbors. If the West acted on this false assumption, it would make much worse a situation that its blundering had already made bad enough.

Mead, who shares Mearsheimer’s hard-nosed view of power politics, took the notion of geopolitics to its logical extreme or, more accurately, back to its origins, and it led him to an entirely different assessment of the challenge posed by Russia. In the early twentieth century, Halford MacKinder, a British geographer, advanced the idea that whoever controlled the core of the European and Asian landmasses – what today is usually referred to as Eurasia – would rule the world. Geography met politics, and the field of geopolitics was born. In its original form it is not much referred to these days, but Mead seems to have it in mind when he identifies Russia, China, and Iran as three countries determined to prove liberal internationalists wrong – that is, determined to rewrite the rules governing what happens in their backyard. Their backyard is Eurasia, and all three, Mead contends, are hard at work redoing the expectations, territorial arrangements, and military understandings that once prevailed in this vital region. In short, according to Mead, Russia is not merely once again a normal power, playing normal power politics, but a revisionist power, eager to redesign who does what, when, and how in the approaches to Russia’s borders.

Those on the other side of the argument think that Mead, Walt, and their allies mistake surface foam for the currents below. John Ikenberry, one of the most articulate and unbowed defenders of the opposing view, argues that the environment US leaders have crafted over the seventy years since World War II – a “far-flung system of multilateral institutions, alliances, trade agreements, and political partnerships” – still reigns (Ikenberry, 2014). Not only, he insists, are Russia, China, and Iran incapable of displacing the United States as the dominant for...