Cold War Deux?

Tensions with Russia are... probably falling, actually, the violence in Gaza has been pretty distracting and no passenger aircraft have been shot down lately.  This doesn't mean that the situation in Ukraine is necessarily better - though the Ukrainian army has made progress against the secessionists, there's a lot of Russian soldiers hovering on the border, and it's easy to imagine them moving in to rescue persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians from those national socialists in Kiev, or responding to an attack that those treacherous Ukrainians claimed they never made.

So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two."  The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War.  But let's humor the magazine anyway.

The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes.  By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended.  So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was.  The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting.  Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?

Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system.  Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate.  After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else.  With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system.  And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.

Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military.  A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."

On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were.  The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg."  It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.

Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards.  More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies."  It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power.  What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for?  Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians?  For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.

The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level.  That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites.  Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine.  And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.

Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves.  After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism.  These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution.  When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history."  The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.

Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years.  With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels.  But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power.  And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.

Russia is, technically, a democracy.  There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power.  It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots.  And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances.  And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power.  And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB. 

In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals.  But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation.  Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler.  Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants.  This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.

So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse.  Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy.  Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa.  Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment.  The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.

Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources.  It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power).  At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world.  Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.

In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."

Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other.  Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy.  Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot.  Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?

As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on.  Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev.  In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support.  And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.

On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map.  So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning.  Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again.  Central Asia, meh.

So, to wrap things up:

This is not a second Cold War.  Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again.  But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran.  Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip.  The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.

During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx.  Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower.  And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust.  Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.

The problem is that it sounds like Putin is.  As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power.  Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality.  Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.