Is the Cold War Back?
Despite a revival of the term, the political and physical landscape of the "Cold War" has changed significantly since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
A Ukrainian soldier stands on a military tank near the eastern Ukrainian town of Rozspyne on August 25, 2014.
Photograph by Roman Pilipey, EPA
Published September 12, 2014
The term "Cold War" has been resurrected in recent months as the conflict in Ukraine has ebbed and flowed. A cease-fire agreement has stilled full-scale fighting for now, but the peace is fragile and the conflict far from settled.
Both Russia and the U.S. maintain a significant nuclear capability, which remains a rising source of tension as relations fray. Meanwhile, modern forms of intimidation like cyber-warfare are also taking hold.
The Cold War tit-for-tat style, however, is still going strong. A new
round of sanctions on Russia takes aim at its vital energy sector, and
Europe is drafting an emergency energy plan in case Russia halts gas
shipments this winter. Russia is considering blocking Western airlines
from its airspace, which Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev claims "could
drive many struggling airlines into bankruptcy," given that Russia's
more than 6.5 million square miles holds more than one-eighth of the
world's inhabited land area.
Western nations and Russia have been hitting each other
with sanctions, and Moscow has upped the ante by saying it may block the
airspace over its vast territory, all nine time zones of it.
And in another modern echo of the era that ushered in the
Berlin Wall, Ukraine is planning a 1,000-mile-long wall along its land
border with Russia. The start of construction was announced, in a sign
of the times, by Ukraine's security forces on their Facebook page.
Much, clearly, has changed since the height of the Cold War,
a phrase used to describe the 40-odd years after World War II, when the
Soviet Union and its Eastern allies and the U.S. and its Western allies
were locked in competition over ideological and military influence
across the globe.
The phrase itself was popularized in 1947 when journalist
Walter Lippmann published a series of articles called "The Cold War,"
although the term had already been used by others, including author
George Orwell. He wrote
that a country with nuclear weapons would be one "which was at once
unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its
neighbors."
Pro-Russian rebels speak with a local woman at Izvaryne, a border crossing point in eastern Ukraine, in August 2014.
Photograph by Sergei Grits, Associated Press
Different Stakes, Smaller Forces
"You have to put cold water on the faddish idea of a 'second Cold War,'" says Mark Kramer,
director of Cold War studies and a senior fellow at Harvard
University's Davis Center. "This in fact is not a global military and
ideological struggle. It is just a regional dispute, and the stakes are
entirely different."
Russia, without the vast military might of the Soviet
Union, has significantly smaller military forces than the U.S. does, in
terms of both manpower and budget. It lost key bases in several East
European countries, all of which are now members of NATO.
Russia also lacks a key element of the Cold War battle: the
Marxist ideology that helped bring countries across the globe under its
influence, even as late as the 1980s in the cases of Nicaragua and
Ethiopia. Russia is now integrated into the European economy, and with
its vast natural resources is Europe's largest supplier of natural gas,
oil, and coal.
"Russia is still by far the world's largest country, but
it's not anywhere near as large as what the Soviet Union was," says
Kramer, who is also co-author of Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945-1990.
NATO has expanded farther eastward since its rival alliance of Soviet
republics and satellite states—the Warsaw Pact—disbanded along with the
Soviet Union when its 15 republics split into independent states in
1991.
Says Kramer: "A lot of repercussions of the breakup of the Soviet Union have figured very directly in the current crisis."
The conflict in Ukraine is one of those repercussions.
"Russia also lost some important military and transportation facilities
in 1991 that have figured directly in the current conflict, such as
basing the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet [in Ukraine],"
explains Kramer.
That base, at Sevastopol in Crimea, was part of independent
Ukraine after 1991, and until this year had to be leased by Russia.
"The thousands of Russian soldiers who were stationed in Sevastopol
under the leasing arrangement spearheaded Russia's annexation of Crimea
in March 2014 when Putin acted in the immediate wake of Ukraine's Maidan
revolution," he says.
Ukrainian soldiers ride on an armored personnel carrier in eastern Ukraine in August 2014.
Photograph by Sergei Grits, Associated Press
Cold War 2.0
The rhetoric and tensions, however, are reminiscent enough
of decades past that Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have had to address
the return of the phrase, even if both argue against its use.
"The nature of today's conflict is different," says Vasily Kashin, an analyst with the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense industry think tank.
"It's more like the conflict between the 19th-century great
powers," a time of imperial struggle over British versus Russian
supremacy in Central Asia. "It's more about the attempts of rising
powers like China and Russia to resist the dominant influence of the
United States. I think we are at the beginning of a difficult period in
our relations," Kashin says.
Yet Russian leaders have described sanctions as possibly
being beneficial, saying for example, that sanctions against China after
the government's crackdown at Tiananmen Square
actually strengthened China in the long term. Just as Europe slapped
new sanctions on Russia this week, President Putin was in Dushanbe, the
capital of Tajikistan, to meet with other leaders of what some say could
become an eastern answer to NATO, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, a Eurasian political and military organization including
Russia, China, and the Central Asian states. Kashin says that Russia's
relations with Asia, in fact, could be of greater consequence than its
relations with Europe in the current conflict over Ukraine: "Some are
seeing U.S. actions to isolate Russia as pushing Russia toward a
possible future alliance with China."
A Russian convoy carrying humanitarian aid crossed into eastern Ukraine on August 22, 2014.
Photograph by Sergei Grits, Associated Press
The quid pro quo can be found on multiple levels, from the
closing of four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow to reports that Russia
will be developing an array of new nuclear and conventional weapons in
response to recent moves by the U.S. and NATO, including a NATO "rapid
reaction force" to be positioned in Eastern Europe.
Much of the tension has been cumulative over the years. For
example, NATO expansion eastward has long been of serious concern to
Russia, says Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the U.K.'s
University of Oxford and author of The Myth of the Strong Leader and The Rise and Fall of Communism.
"Think what would happen, for example, if Canada or Mexico was
considering joining the Warsaw Pact, if it were still in existence.
Could you imagine the reaction in Washington?"
Still, Brown adds, "Calling this a second Cold War is an
exaggeration, even if elements of it are reminiscent of the real Cold
War."
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