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2 The Cold War: Fears of an
unfinished victory By W Joseph
Stroupe
"The Cold War is dead!" read the
newspaper headlines of 1991, and ever since,
confidence has been absolute that the victory of
the West over the former bloc of the East was a
complete one - until lately.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin's Cold War-style speech
in Munich in February and its combative follow-up,
the State of the Nation speech in April, are being
matched by Russia's stiffening,
and
its mounting assertiveness, in opposition to any
bolstering or reconsolidating of ailing US-led
unipolarity.
Around the globe, Russia is
acting against unipolarity's accommodating
ideologies and politics, against its recently
resurgent manifestations and machinations, and
against the instruments of its perpetuation, such
as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Russia is actively and now more openly
working to bring to an end what remains of the
atmosphere of acquiescence to America's will,
whether it be willing or unwilling acquiescence,
that arose in the post-1991 period and that was
absolutely crucial to the thriving of US-led
unipolarity. The United States, it turns out,
achieved and maintained its global hegemony
largely by the consent of the globe's lesser
powers who, fearful of standing up to or opposing
"the last superpower" and distinctly insecure
about the potency of their own leverage, permitted
it to dominate without the considerable
encumbrances and obstructions that are now
arising.
Since US overreach after the Iraq
invasion of 2003, and the subsequent decline of
the US and the unrelenting rise of Russia, China
and India, in concert with the globe's key
resource-exporting regimes, have become ever more
strident, even brazen, in opposition to US global
hegemony. The US can no longer ride roughshod
over, nor bully, nor simply ignore resurgent
Russia, rising China, or the globe's regimes that
supply the vital oil that fuels the US economy.
In the face of such developments, the US
isn't finished in its attempt to stand unipolarity
back on both its feet. It has by no means conceded
the game. Instead, belatedly recognizing the
damage done by its distraction in Iraq, a
desperate and determined US is refocusing and
getting started on the geopolitical project of
restoring its lost global might.
Against
the backdrop of a renewed US push to enlarge NATO
membership eastward, expand its mission to take on
a global range, establish anti-ballistic-missile
(ABM) defenses in Europe and the Caucasus along
Russia's western and southern flanks, instigate
and re-energize the "colored" revolutions, and cut
deeply into Russia's mounting global energy
leverage, US-Russia relations are sharply and
strategically deteriorating. So are US-China
relations, as economic protectionism mounts on the
part of the US and it builds up its military
forces and proxies in Southeast Asia aimed at
containing China's rise.
This worsening
state of East-West relations is prompting rising
fears that the loudly proclaimed Cold War victory
of the West in 1991, contrary to appearances, may
be turning out to have been an unfinished,
incomplete victory after all. The death of the
formal Cold War did not in itself automatically
guarantee the death of all its virulent elemental
components, nor of its style of thinking, nor of
the enduring global forces that prompted its
emergence in the first place shortly after World
War II.
In one famous scene in the movie
Terminator II, the frightening assassin is
melted down and blasted into mercury-like droplets
that are spattered over a wide area of pavement.
Initially that appeared to be the complete and
welcome end of the assassin. But then dread
revisited our heroes as they watched each of the
spattered droplets begin to reassemble again into
the living terminator, but in a new and restyled
form that bore little obvious resemblance to its
previous form. That monster proved to be much more
resilient than our heroes had ever imagined. Why?
Because its component parts refused to die.
Is it possible that certain potent
elements of the Cold War refused to die, but went
instead into a long hibernation, only to
reassemble and re-emerge now into a newly styled
neo-cold war?
Heightened fears of a
nuclear catastrophe Today, the threat of
nuclear catastrophe remains potent, and even
though we generally aren't talking about a
catastrophe resulting from an East-West
confrontation, sharply rising US-Russia tensions
over planned ABM complexes in Poland, the Czech
Republic and the Caucasus are ratcheting up fears
of a scrapping of arms treaties, a proliferation
of missiles on both sides, heightened strategic
tensions, and possible confrontation in which
nuclear weapons could be employed, either
purposefully or by accident.
In reaction
to the US plans, Russia is building up its
strategic nuclear arsenal by placing multiple
independently targeting re-entry vehicles (MIRVs)
in its advanced Topol-M missiles. Russia also
threatens to scrap treaties and build up
conventional missiles along the borders with
states cooperating in the United States' ABM
scheme, and it further asserts its right to attack
and destroy the sites as they become operational.
The former assumption, that virtually no US-Russia
military confrontation is likely, is increasingly
an unsafe one as a more desperate US pushes back
against a much more assertive Russia.
In
important ways the nuclear threat today is more
insidious and worrisome than before as radical
states acquire the technologies and non-state
terrorist groups bent on the destruction of the
West seek the technology. The credible case can be
made that both sides, East and West, are massively
contributing to the worsening state of nuclear
fear. Aggressive, unilateralist US foreign policy
provides compelling motivation for so-called "axis
of evil" states to accelerate their pursuit of
nuclear weapons to immunize themselves against US
military strikes. And Russia, China and others are
only too happy to sell nuclear technology to such
states to further their own economic and
geopolitical aims, failing to consider properly
the global consequences.
The new arms
race A new kind of arms race is also
increasingly in evidence. The US has pursued an
aggressive policy in regions across the globe,
while comparatively weaker powers such as Russia
and China have taken asymmetric steps to level the
playing field and undermine the ability of the US
to project its military power effectively into
their neighborhoods and into those of their
partners and allies.
Wide proliferation of
nuclear and missile technologies has been the
direct result of the persistent yet sometimes
hidden East-West rivalry over regional and global
influence, a rivalry that only temporarily eased
after 1991. The response of Russia and China to
the NATO bombing of the sovereign state of Serbia
in 1999 was to engage in determined efforts to
form a Russia-China axis and to militarize it in
response to the encroachment from the West. Since
then the determination in the East to meet ever
more deeply encroaching force with asymmetric
force multipliers has been bolstered by aggressive
Western policies, both military and
political/ideological.
However, today's
arms race is quite different from that of the Cold
War. Russia and China are now pleased to let the
US spend itself deeper and deeper into economic
jeopardy while they, in turn, spend far less on
potent asymmetric weapons and strategies that
effectively exploit the vulnerabilities of large,
unwieldy US weapons platforms.
As Putin
stated recently, Russia's responses are
"asymmetrical" and "potent", and Russia will not
let the US goad it into a costly arms race.
Likewise, China's response to US moves and
intentions to weaponize space was a simple and
relatively inexpensive demonstration of its
satellite killer, which left thousands of chunks
and particles of debris smack in the middle of the
low-earth orbits of most US spy satellites - in
effect, China has planted a very inexpensive time
bomb there.
Therefore, the correct measure
of the potential destructiveness of today's arms
race is not the competing sums of money spent by
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