A New Cold War?

The more things change, the more they remain the same? When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in November 1989, German re-unification the next year and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the West triumphant proclaimed, “The End of History…” as Francis Fukuyama famously declared in his book of the same title. Fukuyama wrote that “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism” and argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of man kind’s ideological evolution”. From then, every reference to the United States of America on CNN and other western media was prefaced with the obligatory celebration, “the World’s sole superpower” rubbing it in to the ex-Soviets and all else who cared to listen that the US and its allies in NATO had conquered the world.

The Soviets were left stunned and confused. Mikhail Gorbachev had not sought the disintegration on of the USSR. He imagined himself to be a trusted partner of the US, and merely sought to ensure greater political and economic freedom in the USSR. While the west encouraged and celebrated him, their real objective was later revealed to be destruction of the Soviet system, and global dominance. In his resignation speech after the country he presided over disappeared beneath him, Gorbachev lamented, “I have firmly stood for independence, self-rule of nations, for the sovereignty of the republics, but at the same time for preservation of the union state, the unity of the country. Events went a different way. The policy prevailed of dismembering this country and disuniting the state, with which I cannot agree.”

I recall western analysts dismissing Gorbachev’s later distress with disdain, as the unstable Yeltsin became the new western friend and hero. The USSR became the Commonwealth of Independent States, then Russia, and continued to splinter in pieces. Many eastern bloc countries, (except the ones which switched unambiguously to the West such as Poland), continued to disintegrate-Yugoslavia into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and most recently Kosovo; Czechoslovakia into Czech and Slovakia, while on the other hand Western Germany which was in the western axis united with the weary eastern half. Russia continued to go down hill, as Yeltsin under western advice plunged into privatisation without market institutions leading to the emergence of oligarchs who seized control in the un-transparent sales. Until the remnants of the Russian security apparatus led by Vladimir Putin rose up to, as they saw it, rescue Russian from virtual ignominy and irrelevance.

I think the west misunderstood and mismanaged the undoubted victory of the free enterprise democratic system at the end of the cold war. The victory of the NATO Allies was most importantly a moral and philosophical victory that demonstrated the inherent superiority of the ideological underpinnings of free enterprise democracy. The USSR and its allies were not conquered; they decayed from inside. Gorbachev in the same speech earlier referred to admitted that the Soviet “society was suffocating in the vice of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limits of its possibilities.” Even Deng Xiaoping in China had in 1978 come to the same realisation that communism now needed a dose of capitalism to grow as stagnation emerged.

But the west in my view continued to fight against a defeated foe, strangely as this was an adversary who under Gorbachev voluntarily admitted defeat and sought friendly relations with the west. Gorbachev proclaimed that “we opened ourselves to the world, gave up interference into other people’s affairs, the use of troops beyond the borders of the country, and trust, solidarity and respect came in response”. A conservative backlash was inevitable as Russia felt betrayed, and the west must ponder why Putin has enjoyed approval ratings averaging over 80 percent in his years in power-most Russians now regret the break-up of the Soviet Union and Russia’s diminished place in the world.

The world may now be sliding into a new cold war, with Russia seeking to preserve its sphere of influence and China becoming a global power. The events in Georgia in the last week demonstrate what I suspect is western strategy that is now lacking in moral clarity. What principles for instance justify independence in Kosovo, but not South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Why must Russia accept western missiles on Russia’s border in Georgia, while the US rejected Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why must the territorial integrity of Georgia be preserved, when that of Serbia was not sacrosanct? Why has no one blamed Georgia which clearly started the fight in South Ossetia, giving Russia an opportunity to flex its muscles? US and Russian policy makers may be unwittingly creating a new cold war, but it may be one in which principles may not be entirely on either side.