Page 2 of 2 The Cold War: Fears of an
unfinished victory By W Joseph Stroupe
both sides. Instead, it is the
potency of Russian and Chinese asymmetric systems
and strategies and their wide proliferation to US
rivals.
These two elements of the Cold
War, fears of nuclear catastrophe and the arms
race, have refused to die. Instead, they have
morphed into forms that are insidious and just as
deadly as ever. Hence the Cold War victory of 1991
is proving to be an unfinished
one,
with serious consequences today as a neo-cold war
signals its ominous emergence on the global stage.
Putin has been vocal in roundly condemning
US-led unipolarity and foreign policy. Whether or
not Putin's Cold War-style criticism of the US
genuinely signals the emergence of a new cold war
depends on your definition of the term "cold war".
An examination of two more of the
components of the old Cold War, (1) hot proxy wars
and (2) "winner takes all" ideological warfare,
prove instructive. The reader should be careful to
resist the unfounded yet immensely popular notion
that says only the rising of entirely familiar
evils, such as an old-style cold war that employs
the old principles and ideologies, is something to
be concerned about.
Prudently, the reader
should be alert for signs of equally destructive
evils masquerading in a different, newly styled
and only apparently less threatening veneer, a
facade intentionally constructed to provide cover
for both background and foreground machinations
aimed at achieving precisely the same aim as those
of the principal participants in the old Cold War
- the seizing of irrevocable global control and
dominance by one side.
A new kind of
proxy war Newly styled proxy "wars" between
East and West are being sponsored - "wars" for
increased leverage in strategically vital regions
via willing proxies. Whereas in the old Cold War
such proxy wars were "hot" conflicts, they are
now, generally speaking, political "wars".
The East sponsors proxies in Iraq, North
Korea, Iran, Syria and Venezuela, which obliges
the West to engage and/or compromise and perhaps
overreach in an effort to roll back the rising
potency of those sponsored proxies. The recent
North Korea nuclear deal is a potent example, a
deal in which the US is undoubtedly compromising
for apparently little or no tangible benefit in
return. And its impotency and isolation are
showcased, leading to a dilution of its leverage
on the regional and global stages.
The
West sponsors proxies such as Chechen separatists
and "colored" revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and
Kyrgyzstan, and expands the European Union and
NATO to include former Soviet states, all aimed at
obliging Russia and the East to make concessions,
cutting into the influence and control they
exercise in energy-rich strategic regions, aimed
at affording the West increased leverage in those
same regions.
Obviously, these actions by
both the East and West can sometimes end up in a
hot war, as Iraq did, and as Iran seems likely to,
but generally this is a newly styled version of
the "hot proxy wars" component of the old Cold
War. As such, it aptly illustrates the principle
mentioned earlier of evils as equally destructive
as those inherent in the old Cold War masquerading
under a new and updated facade. In a world where
the energy-dependent industrialized economy is the
norm and where such wars are almost always engaged
in over the issue of control of strategic
resources, everyone knows the enormous stakes.
The new ideological war
Consequently, there arises the matter of
the "winner takes all" ideological warfare
component one expects to find in a cold war. In
the old Cold War it was democratic capitalism vs
communism, and when the West won the Cold War in
1991 it did take virtually all the spoils.
Yet today it is also true that Russia and
China have, in effect, co-opted certain democratic
and capitalistic principles, amalgamated these
with facets of totalitarianism and communism, to
form so-called "managed democracies" or "sovereign
democracies" to make a profoundly effective
economic assault on the global center of economic
might - the liberal democratic-capitalistic West.
So effective is that assault that it is
now widely recognized that the global economic
compass irrevocably points to Eurasia - the global
center of economic might is shifting to the East,
led by China. In reality, nearly all the spoils of
the West's Cold War victory are being
incrementally handed back to the East as
authoritarian democracy credibly threatens to
become economically and geopolitically ascendant
over liberal democracy. That present, newly
styled ideological war between the liberal
democracy of the West and the authoritarian
democracy of the East plays directly into the race
to achieve control of global strategic resources.
In the old Cold War the ideological rivalry gave
thick cover to the quest on each side for control
over oil - the industrialized West's Achilles'
heel. Today, just as in the past, ideology is used
on both sides to justify and to implement
geopolitical moves that are really aimed at
achieving control of strategic global resources.
The West instigates "colored"
liberal-democratic revolutions in certain
strategically vital regions, promotes
liberal-democratic reform in other strategically
vital regions, and invades to bring democracy at
the point of a gun in yet other places, all in an
effort to achieve "regime changes" that will
underwrite a consolidation of the West's control
of strategic resources - for such moves are only
tried where strategic resources are abundant or
where their transit to markets in the West is at
stake.
Conversely, the East bolsters
autocratic regimes while simultaneously helping
such regimes to proliferate around the globe,
encourages state takeovers of resources
industries, and assists such regimes to form
authoritarian democracies and authoritarian
resources-based and exports-based corporate states
similar to the ones found in Russia and China,
respectively. All the while, the potent
ideological justification of the inequitability
and destructiveness of US-led unipolarity, and the
desirability of the more democratic "multipolar"
world order, is employed to justify and implement
all such moves.
In today's East-West
rivalry, the vital ideological component provides
only a thin veneer for the geopolitical moves in
the Great Game over control of strategic global
resources, and the side that wins that game will
absolutely take all the spoils of war.
The war no longer in the
shadows Clearly, all the fundamental Cold
War components are present today in a newly styled
but potent form. Additionally, just as was the
case in the old Cold War, the aims and the stakes
are identical - the seizing of irrevocable global
control by one side and the loss of political,
economic and even military autonomy and might by
the losing side.
Consequently, we do not
have now a reviving of the old Cold War, but
rather the ongoing emergence from the shadows of
an entirely new style and type of cold war, the
neo-cold war, as an expression of the
irreversible, fundamental and ongoing competition
and rivalry between an unrelenting rising East and
a West that insists, at almost any cost, on
recapturing and retaining all the spoils of its
old Cold War "win"; spoils that are already
slipping through its fingers as the global
momentum in almost every sphere shifts in the
favor of Russia, China, India and the East.
Increasingly, East and West are polarized
along the closely braided twin dividing lines of
(1) the issue of unipolarity vs so-called
multipolarity and the intimately intertwined issue
of (2) who shall control strategic global
resources - the West or the East? Any neutral
ground between East and West is rapidly
disappearing as states are being pressured by both
sides to declare their true positions by their
actions.
Events signifying deepening
global polarization into two de facto geopolitical
blocs opposed to each other and the resulting
mounting East-West rivalry and divide are the
signal that the neo-cold war does already exist
and is emerging from the shadows.
W
Joseph Stroupe is author of the books
Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West
and Grand Reversal: Russian Global
Ascendancy and is editor of Global Events
Magazine, online at
www.GlobalEventsMagazine.com.
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