[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The New American Cold War

[Bill Totten]

by Stephen F Cohen

The Nation (June 8 2008)

Editor's Note: This article - originally published in the July 10 2006,
issue of The Nation - appears with a new introduction by the author
restating his analyses and arguments in the context of recent developments.

Two reactions to this article were particularly noteworthy when it first
appeared in The Nation almost exactly one year ago. Judging by activity
on the magazine's website and by responses sent to me personally, it was
very widely read and discussed both in the United States and in Russia,
where it was quickly translated on a Russian-language site. And, unlike
most Russian commentators, almost every American specialist who reacted
to the article, directly or indirectly, adamantly disputed my thesis
that US-Russian relations had deteriorated so badly they should now be
understood as a new cold war - or possibly as a continuation of the old
one.

Developments during the last year have amply confirmed that thesis.
Several examples could be cited, but two should be enough. The
increasingly belligerent charges and counter-charges by officials and in
the media on both sides, "Cold-War-style rhetoric and threats", as the
Associated Press recently reported, read like a replay of the
American-Soviet discourse of the 1970s and early 1980s. And the
unfolding conflict over US plans to build missile defense components
near post-Soviet Russia, in Poland and the Czech Republic, threatens to
reintroduce a dangerous military feature of that cold-war era in Europe.

Nonetheless, most American officials, journalists and academics,
unwilling perhaps to confront their unwise policies and mistaken
analyses since the Soviet Union ended in 1991, continue to deny the
cold-war nature of today's relationship with Russia. A resident expert
at the Council on Foreign Relations tells us, for example, that "the
situation today is nothing like the Cold War times", while another
think-tank specialist, testifying to Congress, can "see no prospect of a
new Cold War".

Indeed, many commentators even insist that cold war is no longer
possible because today's US-Russian conflicts are not global,
ideological or clashes between two different systems; because
post-Soviet Russia is too weak to wage such a struggle; and because of
the avowed personal "friendship" between Presidents Bush and Putin. They
seem unaware that the last cold war began regionally, in Central and
Eastern Europe; that present-day antagonisms between Washington's
"democracy-promotion" policies and Moscow's self-described "sovereign
democracy" have become intensely ideological; that Russia's new,
non-Communist system is scarcely like the American one; that Russia is
well situated, as I explained in the article, to compete in a new cold
war whose front lines run through the former Soviet territories, from
Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia; and that there was also, back in
the cold-war 1970s, a Nixon-Brezhnev "friendship".

Nor is this merely an academic dispute. Unless US policy-makers and
opinion-makers recognize how bad the relationship has become, we risk
losing not only the historic opportunity for an American-Russian
partnership created in the late 1980s by Gorbachev, Reagan and the first
President Bush, and which is even more essential for our real national
security today; we also risk a prolonged cold war even more dangerous
than was the last one, for reasons spelled out in my article.

Still worse, the overwhelming majority of US officials and
opinion-makers who do acknowledge the serious deterioration in relations
between Washington and Moscow blame the development solely on Putin's
domestic and foreign policies. Not surprisingly, the most heretical part
of my article - that the origins of the new cold war are to be found
instead in attitudes and policies toward post-Soviet Russia adopted by
the Clinton administration back in the 1990s and largely continued by
this Bush administration - has found even less support. But unless it
too is fully acknowledged, we are left only with the astonishing
admission of a leading academic specialist with longstanding ties in
Washington. Lamenting the state of US-Russian relations, he informs us,
"Nobody has a good idea of what is to be done".

What must be done, however, is clear enough. Because the new cold war
began in Washington, steps toward ending it also have to begin in
Washington. Two are especially urgent, for reasons also explained in the
article: A US recognition that post-Soviet Russia is not a defeated
supplicant or American client state, as seems to have been the
prevailing view since 1991, but a fully sovereign nation at home with
legitimate national interests abroad equal to our own; and an immediate
end to the reckless expansion of NATO around Russia's borders.

According to principles of American democracy, the best time to fight
for such a change in policy is in the course of campaigns for the
presidency. That is why I am pleased my article is reappearing at this
time. On the other hand, the hour is late, and it is hard to be optimistic.

--  Stephen F Cohen (June 08 2007)


Contrary to established opinion, the gravest threats to America's
national security are still in Russia. They derive from an unprecedented
development that most US policy-makers have recklessly disregarded, as
evidenced by the undeclared cold war Washington has waged, under both
parties, against post-Communist Russia during the past fifteen years.

As a result of the Soviet breakup in 1991, Russia, a state bearing every
nuclear and other device of mass destruction, virtually collapsed.
During the 1990s its essential infrastructures - political, economic and
social - disintegrated. Moscow's hold on its vast territories was
weakened by separatism, official corruption and Mafia-like crime. The
worst peacetime depression in modern history brought economic losses
more than twice those suffered in World War II. GDP plummeted by nearly
half and capital investment by eighty percent. Most Russians were thrown
into poverty. Death rates soared and the population shrank. And in
August 1998, the financial system imploded.

No one in authority anywhere had ever foreseen that one of the twentieth
century's two superpowers would plunge, along with its arsenals of
destruction, into such catastrophic circumstances. Even today, we cannot
be sure what Russia's collapse might mean for the rest of the world.

Outwardly, the nation may now seem to have recovered. Its economy has
grown on average by six to seven percent annually since 1999, its
stock-market index increased last year by 83 percent and its gold and
foreign currency reserves are the world's fifth largest. Moscow is
booming with new construction, frenzied consumption of Western luxury
goods and fifty-six large casinos. Some of this wealth has trickled down
to the provinces and middle and lower classes, whose income has been
rising. But these advances, loudly touted by the Russian government and
Western investment-fund promoters, are due largely to high world prices
for the country's oil and gas and stand out only in comparison with the
wasteland of 1998.

More fundamental realities indicate that Russia remains in an
unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization and depopulation.
Investment in the economy and other basic infrastructures remains barely
a third of the 1990 level. Some two-thirds of Russians still live below
or very near the poverty line, including eighty percent of families with
two or more children, sixty percent of rural citizens and large segments
of the educated and professional classes, among them teachers, doctors
and military officers. The gap between the poor and the rich, Russian
experts tell us, is becoming "explosive".

Most tragic and telling, the nation continues to suffer wartime death
and birth rates, its population declining by 700,000 or more every year.
Male life expectancy is barely 59 years and, at the other end of the
life cycle, two to three million children are homeless. Old and new
diseases, from tuberculosis to HIV infections, have grown into
epidemics. Nationalists may exaggerate in charging that "the Motherland
is dying", but even the head of Moscow's most pro-Western university
warns that Russia remains in "extremely deep crisis".

The stability of the political regime atop this bleak post-Soviet
landscape rests heavily, if not entirely, on the personal popularity and
authority of one man, President Vladimir Putin, who admits the state "is
not yet completely stable". While Putin's ratings are an extraordinary
seventy to 75 percent positive, political institutions and would-be
leaders below him have almost no public support.

The top business and administrative elites, having rapaciously
"privatized" the Soviet state's richest assets in the 1990s, are
particularly despised. Indeed, their possession of that property,
because it lacks popular legitimacy, remains a time bomb embedded in the
political and economic system. The huge military is equally unstable,
its ranks torn by a lack of funds, abuses of authority and discontent.
No wonder serious analysts worry that one or more sudden developments -
a sharp fall in world oil prices, more major episodes of ethnic violence
or terrorism, or Putin's disappearance - might plunge Russia into an
even worse crisis. Pointing to the disorder spreading from Chechnya
through the country's southern rim, for example, the eminent scholar
Peter Reddaway even asks "whether Russia is stable enough to hold
together".

As long as catastrophic possibilities exist in that nation, so do the
unprecedented threats to US and international security. Experts differ
as to which danger is the gravest - proliferation of Russia's enormous
stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological materials; ill-maintained
nuclear reactors on land and on decommissioned submarines; an impaired
early-warning system controlling missiles on hair-trigger alert; or the
first-ever civil war in a shattered superpower, the terror-ridden
Chechen conflict. But no one should doubt that together they constitute
a much greater constant threat than any the United States faced during
the Soviet era.

Nor is a catastrophe involving weapons of mass destruction the only
danger in what remains the world's largest territorial country. Nearly a
quarter of the planet's people live on Russia's borders, among them
conflicting ethnic and religious groups. Any instability in Russia could
easily spread to a crucial and exceedingly volatile part of the world.

There is another, perhaps more likely, possibility. Petrodollars may
bring Russia long-term stability, but on the basis of growing
authoritarianism and xenophobic nationalism. Those ominous factors
derive primarily not from Russia's lost superpower status (or Putin's
KGB background), as the US press regularly misinforms readers, but from
so many lost and damaged lives at home since 1991. Often called the
"Weimar scenario", this outcome probably would not be truly fascist, but
it would be a Russia possessing weapons of mass destruction and large
proportions of the world's oil and natural gas, even more hostile to the
West than was its Soviet predecessor.

How has the US government responded to these unprecedented perils? It
doesn't require a degree in international relations or media punditry to
understand that the first principle of policy toward post-Communist
Russia must follow the Hippocratic injunction: Do no harm! Do nothing to
undermine its fragile stability, nothing to dissuade the Kremlin from
giving first priority to repairing the nation's crumbling
infrastructures, nothing to cause it to rely more heavily on its
stockpiles of superpower weapons instead of reducing them, nothing to
make Moscow uncooperative with the West in those joint pursuits.
Everything else in that savaged country is of far less consequence.

Since the early 1990s Washington has simultaneously conducted, under
Democrats and Republicans, two fundamentally different policies toward
post-Soviet Russia - one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other
real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been
taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently,
professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a
generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship". The
public image of this approach has featured happy-talk meetings between
American and Russian presidents, first "Bill and Boris" (Clinton and
Yeltsin), then "George and Vladimir".

The real US policy has been very different - a relentless,
winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied
by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for
unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and
uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist
Russia. Consider its defining elements as they have unfolded - with
fulsome support in both American political parties, influential
newspapers and policy think tanks - since the early 1990s:

* A growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by
US and NATO bases, which are already ensconced or being planned in at
least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics
and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia.
The result is a US-built reverse iron curtain and the remilitarization
of American-Russian relations.

* A tacit (and closely related) US denial that Russia has any legitimate
national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or
contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. How
else to explain, to take a bellwether example, the thinking of Richard
Holbrooke, Democratic would-be Secretary of State? While roundly
condemning the Kremlin for promoting a pro-Moscow government in
neighboring Ukraine, where Russia has centuries of shared linguistic,
marital, religious, economic and security ties, Holbrooke declares that
far-away Slav nation part of "our core zone of security".

* Even more, a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty
within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in
Moscow's internal affairs since 1992. They have included an on-site
crusade by swarms of American "advisers", particularly during the 1990s,
to direct Russia's "transition" from Communism; endless missionary
sermons from afar, often couched in threats, on how that nation should
and should not organize its political and economic systems; and active
support for Russian anti-Kremlin groups, some associated with hated
Yeltsin-era oligarchs.

That interventionary impulse has now grown even into suggestions that
Putin be overthrown by the kind of US-backed "color revolutions" carried
out since 2003 in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and attempted this
year in Belarus. Thus, while mainstream editorial pages increasingly
call the Russian president "thug", "fascist" and "Saddam Hussein", one
of the Carnegie Endowment's several Washington crusaders assures us of
"Putin's weakness" and vulnerability to "regime change". (Do proponents
of "democratic regime change" in Russia care that it might mean
destabilizing a nuclear state?)

* Underpinning these components of the real US policy are familiar cold
war double standards condemning Moscow for doing what Washington does -
such as seeking allies and military bases in former Soviet republics,
using its assets (oil and gas in Russia's case) as aid to friendly
governments and regulating foreign money in its political life.

More broadly, when NATO expands to Russia's front and back doorsteps,
gobbling up former Soviet-bloc members and republics, it is "fighting
terrorism" and "protecting new states"; when Moscow protests, it is
engaging in "cold war thinking". When Washington meddles in the politics
of Georgia and Ukraine, it is "promoting democracy"; when the Kremlin
does so, it is "neoimperialism". And not to forget the historical
background: When in the 1990s the US-supported Yeltsin overthrew
Russia's elected Parliament and Constitutional Court by force, gave its
national wealth and television networks to Kremlin insiders, imposed a
constitution without real constraints on executive power and rigged
elections, it was "democratic reform"; when Putin continues that
process, it is "authoritarianism".

* Finally, the United States is attempting, by exploiting Russia's
weakness, to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during
the Soviet era. That is the essential meaning of two major steps taken
by the Bush Administration in 2002, both against Moscow's strong wishes.
One was the Administration's unilateral withdrawal from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, freeing it to try to create a system
capable of destroying incoming missiles and thereby the capacity to
launch a nuclear first strike without fear of retaliation. The other was
pressuring the Kremlin to sign an ultimately empty nuclear weapons
reduction agreement requiring no actual destruction of weapons and
indeed allowing development of new ones; providing for no verification;
and permitting unilateral withdrawal before the specified reductions are
required.

The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of these policies casts serious
doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent "chill"
in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin's behavior at home and
abroad, and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago. The first axiom
is false, the second only half true: The cold war ended in Moscow, but
not in Washington, as is clear from a brief look back.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985 with
heretical "New Thinking" that proposed not merely to ease but to
actually abolish the decades-long cold war. His proposals triggered a
fateful struggle in Washington (and Moscow) between policy-makers who
wanted to seize the historic opportunity and those who did not.
President Ronald Reagan decided to meet Gorbachev at least part of the
way, as did his successor, the first President George Bush. As a result,
in December 1989, at a historic summit meeting at Malta, Gorbachev and
Bush declared the cold war over. (That extraordinary agreement evidently
has been forgotten; thus we have the New York Times recently asserting
that the US-Russian relationship today "is far better than it was
fifteen years ago".)

Declarations alone, however, could not terminate decades of warfare
attitudes. Even when Bush was agreeing to end the cold war in 1989-91,
many of his top advisers, like many members of the US political elite
and media, strongly resisted. (I witnessed that rift on the eve of
Malta, when I was asked to debate the issue in front of Bush and his
divided foreign policy team.) Proof came with the Soviet breakup in
December 1991: US officials and the media immediately presented the
purported "end of the cold war" not as a mutual Soviet-American
decision, which it certainly was, but as a great American victory and
Russian defeat.

That (now standard) triumphalist narrative is the primary reason the
cold war was quickly revived - not in Moscow a decade later by Putin but
in Washington in the early 1990s, when the Clinton Administration made
two epically unwise decisions. One was to treat post-Communist Russia as
a defeated nation that was expected to replicate America's domestic
practices and bow to its foreign policies. It required, behind the
facade of the Clinton-Yeltsin "partnership and friendship" (as Clinton's
top "Russia hand", Strobe Talbott, later confirmed), telling Yeltsin
"here's some more shit for your face" and Moscow's "submissiveness".