The 'New Cold War' Was Never

Inevitable
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-new-cold-war-was-never-inevitable-22023

In a decade, today’s Russian Peril will probably seem as deranged as the Red
Scares of the 1920s and the 1950s.
Michael Lind

August 23, 2017

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September-October 2017

Note: this article is part of a symposium on U.S.-Russia relations included in

the September/October 2017 issue of the National Interest.
On May 2, 1998, the journalist Thomas L. Friedman published a column in
the New York Times based on an interview with the dean of American
students of Russia, George Kennan. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold
war,” Kennan answered, when asked his opinion of the decision of the Clinton
administration to expand NATO into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact,
while excluding Russia from NATO membership. Kennan continued: “I think
the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their
policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”
Friedman went on to write that “if we are lucky,” future historians would say
that
Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and
Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If
we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion
set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to
Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these
three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.
The future has arrived, and confirmed the pessimism of Kennan and Friedman
back in 1998. The attempt of the United States and its European allies to draw
Georgia into their orbit provoked the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. A similar
attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU provoked Russia’s
annexation of Crimea in 2014, and a proxy war in Ukraine that continues
today. To these actions—seen as defensive by Moscow but aggressive by the
West—the United States and its allies responded with financial sanctions. In
turn, Putin’s government engaged in further provocative military actions,
including its intervention in Syria, and is accused of having had a role in
hacking Democratic Party records in order to embarrass the Clinton campaign
in the 2016 election.
Russian-American relations today can be described by Kennan’s phrase: “a
new cold war.” If any further proof were needed, it can be found in the revival
of Cold War–style McCarthyite paranoia—this time not among conservatives,
but among progressives, many of whom sincerely believe that Vladimir Putin
is responsible for the election of Donald Trump. This explanation provides a
comforting alibi for the disastrous failure of the Clinton campaign and for the
decline of the Democratic Party as a whole, which has been reduced to its
lowest share of government power at all levels in the United States in nearly a
century.
The fires of Russophobia are stoked by many neoconservatives as well as
partisan Democrats. Temporarily disgraced by their support for the
catastrophic war in Iraq, neoconservatives nostalgic for Cold War One can try
to regain influence by rallying Washington and the American people to heroic
efforts in Cold War Two against Putin’s shrunken, post-imperial Russian
Federation.
Russia, we are supposed to be believe, is a threat on the scale of the former
Soviet Union. Unlike the USSR, which sought to overturn Western liberalism
by promoting Marxism-Leninism, Putin’s Russia, it is claimed, seeks to spread
an “alt-right” ideology of neofascism via its fifth columnists—populist
politicians like Trump and Marine Le Pen—in Europe and the West.
Just as Russian interference in the 2016 election provides an alibi for the
failed Clinton campaign, so the alleged Russian global ideological conspiracy
absolves the centrist establishments of the United States and Europe of any
responsibility for provoking the current transatlantic populist rebellion
against neoliberal trade and immigration policies. Western dissidents who
reject the bipartisan neoliberal consensus shared by center-right and center-
left parties do not have legitimate domestic grievances; no, they are Russian
dupes—when they are not Russian agents! Many on today’s center-left and
center-right interpret domestic populist movements exactly as much of the
Right interpreted civil-rights and prolabor movements for much of the
twentieth century between 1917 and 1989—as conspiracies directed by
Moscow.
At some point the fever will break. In a decade, today’s Russian Peril will
probably seem as deranged, and as manipulated for partisan domestic
purposes, as the Red Scares of the 1920s and the 1950s. In time, it is likely that
President Trump or a successor will deescalate Cold War Two in favor of
something like détente during the Nixon era. But with one of the two parties—
the Democrats—along with most of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment
(which benefits from threat inflation) committed to making Cold War Two
even colder, a thaw is unlikely any time soon.
Michael Lind is a contributing editor at the National Interest and author
of The American Way of Strategy.
Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin reacts during a joint news
conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, at the Hotel Punkaharju in
Savonlinna, Finland, July 27, 2017. Lehtikuva/Martti Kainulainen/via
REUTERS