The 21st Century Cold War

A New World Order?

Jeffrey Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367427863
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000740950
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The 21st Century Cold War is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the pattern of Russian interference in the internal affairs of other nations, suggesting that what in the Cold War was a simple conflict of East vs. West has expanded into a conflict between Russia and two increasingly separate Wests.

The book begins with an examination of the structure of the Cold War and post-Cold War world, and subsequently explores Russian interference by overt, grey, and covert means including, but not limited to, cyberespionage, "fake news", and the use of what in the Cold War would have been called front groups and agents of influence. The approach encompasses both historic and contemporary themes, with the question of whether the Cold War between East and West–capitalism and communism–is a thing of the past, or does it continue today in new ideological guises, as a central theme. Expert contributors explore what the motivations and implications for the pattern of Russian interference in the political processes of other states would be, and what new coalitions of actors are taking shape both for and against Russian activities.

With a series of historical and contemporary case studies, focusing on the origins and contemporary dimensions of Russian information warfare, and exploring the issues involved from every perspective, The 21st Century Cold War will be of great interest to scholars of Security and Strategic Studies, International Relations, and Cold War History, as well as policy makers and security professionals. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence.

1 The Wests: Decline Management and Geopolitics

David B. Kanin

ABSTRACT

The ebbing power of the United States signals the end of the period in which a series of “Wests” have created, globalized, and dominated an international order. Each “West” has had its own norms of authority and coercive utopia, but they shared in common the projection of a sense of modernity, technical proficiency, and inevitable, invincible authority. The two current Wests, the European Union and the United States, boast a partial normative overlap but have different creation myths. American fumbling of its hegemonic moments highlights the narrowing of room for error that defines decline. Still, decline does not necessarily lead to collapse, and skillful management could mitigate its effect. In part, this depends on whether Washington can come to rely less on neo-Wilsonian nostrums and more on the creative side of the American record.

It is easier to acknowledge the general principle that nothing lasts forever than it is that this principle is applicable to one’s own personal universe—now. This applies not only to the self, but also to collectivities in which individuals invest affective attachment and material interests. Whether decline is a cyclical inevitability along the lines of patterns suggested by Ibn Khaldun, Oswald Spengler, and others, or else the result of contingent processes, conditions, and decisions will not be a topic of this discussion, but the suggestion here is that—without exception—political-security power structures emerge, flourish, stagnate, and suffer decline or destruction.

“Decline” involves various combinations of internal social, political, and/or economic entropy and relative diminution of a community’s ability to contend with external competitors. It manifests itself in a narrowing of a polity’s margin for error—over time, those making decisions face more troubling opportunity costs, and mistakes begin to have larger consequences. Decline is not a simple linear process; what exactly is in decline can be a complicated issue. The Roman Republic clearly went into a terminal crisis in the first century BC. Yet it ruled an Empire that would continue to expand as Rome itself altered its political structure.¹ Perhaps Rome was then in a state of (material) rise and (social/normative) decline—a possibility not unknown to court figures debating at various points in Chinese history and to pundits at work in contemporary states. In any case, the Roman Empire too was of limited—if centuries long—duration.

Rather than manage the process of decline, the pattern has been for powers—whether rising or declining—to live out Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue. The strong did what they could, the weak suffered what they must. Whether they think they are strong or weak, they do what they can and suffer what they must. For all the ink spilled over conflict management and institutional structures, more often than not powers have continued to test each other through the use of force, which remains a bedrock element of politics and intercommunal relations. Sometimes, as in the Soviet case, internal structural weaknesses bring a great power down. Other times, as in the Ottoman case, the belief that internal weaknesses are going to cause an imminent collapse can lead other powers (great and not so great) to act on expectations of imminent collapse that prove erroneous. (Eventually, the Habsburgs—worried about their own decline—and the Germans—believing their own relative decline could be around the corner—provoked a war that ensured the catastrophe they wanted to stem or forestall and ended up bringing the Ottomans down with them.)

On the other hand, periods of resurgence can feed a self-assured illusion that a country in decline is not, after all, in decline. Repeatedly, rationales offered by officials and public intellectuals and personal, family, or national creation myths combine to obstruct the construction of strategic approaches to decline. People and states rationalize—and wish away—circumstances and events that mark permanent diminishment in influence and capabilities.

Versions of both patterns are at work in what has been called “the West,” a collective noun incorporating succeeding constellations of transatlantic powers that in recent centuries have imposed themselves on everyone else’s politics, economies, and cultures. For all their claims of administrative, scientific, philosophical, or cultural superiority, European and then American rulers have been slow to recognize that internal stresses, accumulating effects of wars, rise of rival powers, and changing economic and technological circumstances over time have sapped their comparative geostrategic edge. After mythologizing stabs-in-the-back and placing blame on Jews and Communists for the defeat in World War I, what was left of German elites were left no choice by the victors of 1945 but to acknowledge terminal loss of power and status. At the same time, even the two world wars and imperial retrenchment did not convince the British and French that their time at the top of the pole was done—the humiliation at American hands at Suez seems finally to have done the trick (for everyone except Charles de Gaulle). Since then, the European have constructed the myth of “Europe” to deny the permanent condition of European decline. More on this below.

It will be argued here that the United States now is going through its own structural decline as a world power, and that it so far is missing an opportunity to manage that decline better than did its European predecessors. The advantages the US had, which involved location and circumstance at least as much as skillful leadership or effective strategies, are gone—permanently.

To focus for a moment on one measure of power, Washington can count exactly one of the various wars it has fought since 1945 against meaningful military opposition as an unqualified success. Still, in the 1960s and 1970s the United States could maintain a 500,000-person commitment to a poorly thought through and mismanaged war in Vietnam and still end up winning the global competition with the Soviet Union. Now, it could not afford to send a half million troops anywhere, and its once-vaunted technology-driven “Revolution in Military Affairs” clearly has not had a decisive impact in Afghanistan and the evolving geopolitical spaces labeled “Iraq” and “Syria.” Classical kinetic strategies of Russia, Turkey, and Iran are having more influence than the waning American presence on whatever is going to replace the Western-imposed post-1918 map of the Middle East.

America’s one-time enormous economic dominance is diminishing and will diminish further. Economic and social change is undermining the cohesion of what always has been a rather raucous and fragmented political system. Nevertheless, American government and public intellectual establishments² continue to treat American power as preeminent and continuing to rest—if uncomfortably—on the supposed strengths of democracy, transparency, rule of law, and other teleological slogans. For now, claims about American innovative ingenuity retain some truth, pending the further decay of the US educational system. Over the longer run, however, clear-headed management of secular decline will be required if the US is to have more going for it than its comparative advantage in various forms of entertainment.

This essay will consider the post-Cold War strategic environment as a dynamic process that, while it may or may not be a transition to a new global order, marks not only the end of short-lived US hegemony, but of the universe of Western domination of an international system largely built on Western pillars. It proposes that the “West” is a plural concept and will trace the distinct “Wests” that created and now are losing control over the existing international order. The argument here will develop from a suggestion that each of these multiple “Wests” has had its distinctive coercive utopia, power structures, and operating rhythms. It will suggest the reasons for Western decline are structural; perceived acceleration or deceleration of the process of decline by the activities or inaction of individual authorities or their administrative institutions matter but are largely epiphenomenal.

The Wests

The conceptual bundling in the word “West” of European and, eventually, American power as a noun of power and modernity goes back at least to Condorcet. As is often suggested, it appears to date as a common concept from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. European colonial empires came into being centuries earlier, of course, and indigenes coming into contact with explorers, merchants, and adventurers picked up skewed perceptions of European kingdoms.³ Nevertheless, Western power and pretensions led Western thinkers and practitioners of power to begin to distinguish between what was “West” and what was not.

Larry Wolff and Wendy Bracewell have identified distinctions Voltaire and others made between Western Europe and a more backward Eastern Europe via their travels and analyses, but the notion of a West that was invincible and the fount of an inevitable modernity did not begin to take on a global relevance until it became clear Western military capabilities were vastly superior to those of Ottoman, Persian, Chinese, and any other powers that believed themselves to have hegemonic traditions and perquisites. The series of Wests that followed have had in common a sense of superior power, knowledge, and moral authority that authorized their supervisory latitude. These Wests have overlapped each other, competed and borrowed from each other, and globalized their systems and teleologies.

Each West has had its own coercive utopia.⁴ From Napoleon on, the Wests have couched their versions of the Melian dialogue in religious and ideological wrappings designed to justify brute force and to convince those on the receiving end of its guns, faiths, ideas, and material culture why what was being done to them was for their own good. A sliver of the locals would buy into these intellectual projects; the thinning now of that slice of what the Marxists called “compradors” as non-Westerners bring Western influences to heel and establish their own agency is one mark of the decline of the West.

West 1. Napoleon and aggressive administration

The ease with which French firepower smashed Mamluk forces in Egypt marked a sea change in the centuries-old conflict between Christian Europe and the Ottomans, leading almost immediately to a very premature judgment that the latter was about to collapse. Napoleon’s brief stay in Egypt was marked by his characteristic frenetic administrative sweep. He put in place systems and functionaries whose impact long outlasted direct memories of the Battle of the Nile and the naval action Nelson used to make it militarily irrelevant to the larger European conflict. For the rest of the Ottoman era, the Sultans and the Albanian dynasty that would take over in Egypt hired French and other European advisors to oversee reforms and manage increasingly shaky finances. Some local notables and bureaucrats adopted European methods and came to favor local versions of Western rationalist modernity (with or without an Islamic patina). Other people set a pattern that has remained constant during the Western centuries—they would take from the West what they could use while rejecting or ignoring Western messages regarding the natural (and, later, social Darwinian) superiority of Western thought, culture, and belief systems.

China, whose Qianlong emperor famously rejected Lord McCartney’s trade mission in 1793, did not have direct experience of Napoleon or—at first—of Western weaponry. Japan had banned the gun in the opening years of the Tokugawa shogunate in fear of its social leveling impact. Still, the British and, to a much lesser extent, the French were able to force their way into China by the period of the Taiping rebellion and influence the administration of government and war on both sides. The American Commodore Perry and his warships sparked a series of events that led to a modernizing Japanese government, which initially took on knowledge, educational and administrative principles, and warfighting structures from various Western powers in order to compete with them (in a manner not dissimilar to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in contemporary China). By the third quarter of the 19th century, Persia and other longstanding and newer polities had no choice but to contend with the influence of Western mechanical rationalism and systemic industrial economic organization.

West 2. Byronic Neo-Classicism

This is an odd duck but not a detour; this is a West with importance because of how it shaped a central component of European geopolitics. The rediscovery of Greece in the 19th century, unlike the impact of the riveting experience of Rome during the Renaissance, did not provoke an instinct that the ancients were superior to the moderns. Western philhellenes and classicists—the two were not the same—reimagined ancient Greece in the context of self-examination and the creative friction between the legacy of the enlightenment and the romantic and, eventually, pre-Raphaelite reactions to it. Lord Byron, while initially enamored of the idea of Greece, quickly took the measure of actual Greeks and Albanians he came in contact with during his brief, fatal adventure in the Balkans. What took hold was the idea of melding classical thought (whose thought and interpretations of a chosen philosopher’s surviving writings would be matters of much contention) with a march toward the modern.⁵

And that became a decisive process in what would become Germany. The divisions and disputes among notables speaking a German language that was becoming standardized drew comparison with the “civilization” and fragmentation of classical Greece. Greek philosophy became the starting point for German thinkers of many stripes—the mythology of the Sonderweg had a heavy Greek component, augmented by the Herderian coercive utopia of national development. Well before Nietzsche, poets like Holderlin made clear the Greek content in German development was as much about as reason and logic. Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics included classical allusions that spoke to the fascist version of Germany as embodying (literally) the heritage of ancient Greece.

The vogue in things Greek in Germany and elsewhere (as Germany coalesced other Europeans mixed the classical content in German development with social Darwinism to create a notion of “national character”) circled back to Greece. This “West” affected a three-way struggle for political and cultural hegemony among those Greeks who served the Ottoman Empire by administering its Balkan holdings (the so-called “Phanariots”), modernizing political and commercial entrepreneurs building their fortunes around the small Greek state that emerged from the war for independence that had attracted Byron and other Philhellene adventurers, and the considerable, now-forgotten movement around the “Great Idea” of, in effect, restoring the Byzantine Empire and the status of Constantinople as the capital of the Ecumene.

One practical impact of this West was its contribution to the serious political, security, economic, and religious struggle among Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, and—later—Albanians over the Balkans as Ottoman power receded. Greek Prime Minister Trikoupes used the first modern Olympic Games in Athens to enlist the West in his political interests and to bolster the legitimacy of Greek claims to Crete and to a larger regional footprint.

West 3. The gradual melding of monarchy and nationalism

The idea that kings and nationalists could work together took a while to make headway. It is important to remember that the so-called Westphalian system originally was built largely on the rights and responsibilities of princes and others claiming noble sovereignty, not the rights and relations of the states that contemporary “realists” treat as if they are the natural and permanent hegemons of geostrategic power. The West’s developing international system underwent considerable changes in norms and rules after each of its ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Wests: Decline Management and Geopolitics
• 2 More East than West: The World Council of Churches at the Dawn of the Cold War
• 3 Useful Idiots or Fellow Travelers? The Relationship between the American Far Right and Russia
• 4 Russian Foreign Policy Management and Manipulation with the Soviet Successor States
• 5 Hybrid Warfare and the Legal Domain
• 6 Irregular Militias and Radical Nationalism in Post-Euromaydan Ukraine: The Prehistory and Emergence of the “Azov” Battalion in 2014
• 7 The Africa Policy of Russia
• 8 The Asymmetric Approach in Russian Security Strategy: Implications for the Nordic Countries
• Index