Your Cold War Concerns Aren’t Total Nonsense

The fine folks at the Nation are up in arms about the idea that the Obama administration has started up a new Cold War without so much as a whisper from the press, pundits, and other members of the political peanut gallery. The White House has apparently dusted off the most venerable of the Cold War playbooks — containment — which basically amounted to trying to restrain Soviet expansion with the threat of military force and all 31 flavors of soft power.

The concern that we're in a new Cold War isn't outlandish nonsense. The West has been fretful ever since folks in Crimea boldly informed the world that they wanted to undergo radical nationhood-reassignment surgery. Outside of its role in the current crisis, Crimea isn't really on the top 100 (or 1000, or whatever) list of places that the West is particularly concerned about, so a lot of the uproar had to do with the fact that it looked like Russia wanted to drive a tank over the nice, safe, warm, comforting, bureaucratic intergovernmental organizations like the IMF, OECD, WTO and ILO.

Such was the anxiety that one imagines the self-appointed guardians of the 21st Century's geopolitical landscape waking up in cold sweats from nightmares of Putin sitting in a tank turret, driving roughshod over international institutions from Bretton Woods to Davos, giggling as acronym after acronym was crushed under the treads of his tank.

The "brain" behind the Crimea annexation wants to see a return to Russian imperialism. Read more here.

"Why," they cried, "is Russia so dismissive of all the carrots and sticks and other inducements to being a good member in standing of the official 21st Century diplomacy club? Why oh why is Russia so intent on bringing the international order down in a pile of smoking rubble?"

Why, indeed. Between the breathless shock of the West and the legions of mouth-breathing, pro-Kremlin trolls that are popping up everywhere, it can be pretty hard to actually figure out whether or not Russia has the kind of real, long-term beef of which Cold Wars are made, or if this is just a flash in the pan.

Certainly a lot of Russian observers have been alarmed by the "color revolutions" and Arab Spring movements that seem to be toppling governments like so many dominoes. And ever since the West went from arguing against the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War (except for the Baltic states, were to be politely excused from further participation) to pushing NATO's eastward expansion all the way to the borders of the former Soviet Union, Russia has seen NATO as a definite and distinct threat. While it seems to be dawning on a few perceptive folks that Russia doesn't love NATO, the concern seems at this late stage of the game to be more of the "You mad, bro?" variety.

Putin's actions in Ukraine give NATO a new purpose. Read more here.

These developments could easily lead one to believe that the US and Russia are once again locked in a new Cold War. And that's not even taking into consideration the suggestion that modern conflicts involving intensive information warfare demand a shift "from war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life," as a paper by the National Defense Academy of Latvia recently put it.

Even so, if we're really asking if geostrategic thinking is going retro, the key missing ingredient is ideology. Ideology isn't an absolute requirement for a cold war, but was essential to the Cold War. The difference between a generic, refrigerated war and the Cold War is the difference between a war and a World War. Nobody planned on having a Cold War following World War II. The fact that it happened and remained more or less cold was an accident.

Originally, the Cold War started out as a quick breather on the way to an undesirable but seemingly unavoidable World War III, which was originally expected some time between the late 1940s and the late 1950s. There was, at the time, a genuine conviction that the world would become embroiled in another global conflict. It took a while for the whole nuclear deterrence thing to catch on. When it did, the embryonic World War III (with nukes) was put into suspended animation, where it was to remain until some specified event awakened it from dormancy. It was only by sheer dumb luck that the monster died while dormant.

Russia is weaponizing jedi mind tricks. Read more here.

It's only possible to entertain the idea of a truly all-consuming fight is if it's a fight over the fate of the world. Absent ideology, that's impossible. Ultimately, all politics are local, and ideology is a means of taking abstract global political issues and making them personal and local. It provides "teams" so countries everywhere know where to place their allegiance. Kind of like political parties. With an ideological label, the alliances are plain for all to see, sides are picked automatically, and people can get on with the business of fighting as usual.

Russia simply doesn't stand for a sufficiently distinct ideology, beyond being adamantly pro-Russia, to provide much fodder for a global conflict. Globalization is a factor, sure, but it's more of a phenomenon than a cause (angry protesters notwithstanding). The world could be going multi-polar, reminiscent of the pre-World War I every-nation-for-itself era. Or maybe there's something to the Axis of Evil or growing political Islam.

In all likelihood, nations will discover mutual interests on some topics (like keeping the space station running) that will allow for temporary alliances of convenience, but those won't be the kind of permanent relationships built around existential issues of core identity.

Even if Russia decides that implacable opposition to the US should be a cornerstone of its foreign policy, this would be the basis for a frigid diplomatic relationship — but nowhere near enough to start the New Cold War.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan

Photo via Wikimedia Commons