This time, the US can avoid the tragedies of the Cold War
The United States and Russia have set themselves up for a long period of intense confrontation. The worst scenario would be the transformation of the conflict in Ukraine into the beginning of another global crusade, warns Anatole Lieven on the pages of The Atlantic.
Anatole Lieven
Deterring Russia is a good thing, unlike organizing a crusade against it
Regardless of the events in Ukraine, the United States and Russia are set for a long period of intense confrontation. America's support for Ukraine in the face of the Russian special operation was fully justified. But as the fighting continues, Washington's participation in Ukraine's military efforts, including colossal financial and economic assistance, as well as the supply of heavy and advanced weapons, can escalate into a large-scale conflict directly between the two great powers. A new cold war may force the United States to commit itself unconditionally to the most dangerous goals that contradict national interests, as warned by Henry Kissinger and others.
If we recall the early stage of the first Cold War, when the United States was involved in a number of similar commitments, it is possible to prevent new disasters that followed. The American policy of containment towards the Soviet Union after World War II was absolutely necessary, but excessive diligence in developing a strategy led to unnecessary conflicts and terrible suffering of people around the world. Despite the fact that the Cold War ended with the final victory of the West, as a result of the prolonged confrontation, the United States itself suffered damage from which they could not recover.
Comparing the current situation with the beginning of the Cold War is not entirely correct. Stalinist communism was a pernicious force with real ambitions to organize a world revolution and destroy all democratic capitalist systems. The Soviet Union, which undoubtedly played an important role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, was undoubtedly a powerful military superpower. The battalions of the Red Army stood in the heart of Germany. The USSR and Soviet communism posed a real threat to US allies and their economic interests in Western Europe.
Modern Russian ground forces are far from the power of the USSR of the Stalin era and appear to be little better than heavily armed bandits of cruel villains and a scourge for Ukraine and Ukrainians, but from the point of view of the West they do not pose a serious danger. Despite the initial ambitions of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, military defeats and setbacks have reduced its scale to a post-colonial conflict, which started because of a small territory in the south and east of the country.
It's not a pleasant sight, but the limited scale allows the United States to approach the response more calmly and carefully than it seemed necessary at first, in the first days. However, excessive arrogance should still be avoided. The most important feature of the current conflict compared to the Cold War is that it is not sublimated and is not exported to some remote part of the globe: US military assistance to Ukraine is carried out in Europe, right on the border with Russia. Every American president of the post-war period tried to avoid the appearance of such a European theater of operations, because they understood that as a result of a real war in Eastern Europe, the risks of escalation fraught with nuclear catastrophe would seriously increase.
In this regard, the transition that took place during Truman's second term from George Kennan's approach to containing the Soviet Union to Paul Nitze's approach should serve as a warning to the United States and its allies. Kennan's strategy of limited and defensive containment in Europe was based on a deep understanding of the internal weaknesses of the Soviet system: he hoped that if Soviet expansion could be contained, this system would eventually collapse on its own.
This is exactly what happened in the end, however, not before Nitze's intervention in an attempt to turn deterrence into a more aggressive policy, global and militarized, uniting all the local disputes of the world under the auspices of the Cold War, which led to devastating consequences. Here 's what the official historian of the State Department says about this:
"In 1950, Nitze's concept of containment took over Kennan's concept. The NSC Memorandum 68... called for an urgent increase in the US military budget. The document also extended the scope of deterrence beyond the protection of large centers of industrial power to cover the whole world. “In the context of the current polarization of power, it said, the fall of free institutions in one place is shaking their foundations everywhere.”"
Based on this document of the National Security Council, the United States interpreted North Korea's invasion of South Korea as part of Moscow's plan for world domination, and not a civil war on the peninsula. Ten years later, a similar misconception, coupled with the “domino theory”, according to which any widespread success of the Communists was considered a dangerous step towards the comprehensive triumph of the USSR, led America to a completely unjustified tragedy in Vietnam. The thinking underlying the NSC-68 memorandum caused a number of other catastrophic mistakes, including the overthrow in 1953 of the liberal-nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, coups and massacres in Central America and the support of formally anti-communist, but odious forces in the civil wars of Africa.
And although Nitze's approach only aggravated the bloodshed, some responsibility lies with one of the original shortcomings of the Kennan doctrine: as Walter Lippmann noted, it did not properly distinguish between vital national interests and issues of secondary importance (the USSR, by the way, stepped on the same rake). Nevertheless, in times of dangerous tension, the United States still remembered this difference and refrained from using nuclear weapons in both Korea and Vietnam. Fear of a nuclear cataclysm and Kennan's advice influenced Dwight Eisenhower's decision to reject John Foster Dulles' idea of “throwing back” Soviet power in Eastern Europe by inciting uprisings and riots with the support of US military power. Deterrence was rooted in the fact that communist influence in Eastern Europe really affected vital Soviet interests, for the sake of which Moscow would even risk nuclear war.
Today's US policy is capable of making some of the same mistakes as in the early years of the Cold War. The theater is now much smaller, but the danger, in a sense, is greater due to the growing conflict in the territory that Russia considers critical in the context of its national interests and which also borders the lands of NATO member countries. If the United States introduced a new version of the “rejection”, in which Russia would be subjected not only to containment in the east of Ukraine, but would be completely defeated, which would provoke unrest inside the country and, as a result, regime change, all this would significantly increase the risk of nuclear escalation.
The memory of the Cold War should serve as a warning about the danger of the modern neo-Nitz doctrine, according to which every dispute involving Russia is viewed as a tug of war with an existential enemy, regardless of the pressing interests of the United States and the real state of affairs on the ground. Sometimes we should recognize that American and Russian interests may still coincide. No matter how bad, for example, the Assad regime in Syria is, do not forget that in this country American and Russian forces are on the same side of the barricades in the fight against the Islamic State (recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in Russia – approx. trans.), which wants to destroy both Moscow and Washington. In other words, Russia supports Bashar al-Assad for the same reasons that the United States supports Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. The same pragmatic logic applies to the presence of the Russian military in the Sahel. We must also recognize that Russia's criticism of some of America's political steps (in particular, military interventions in Iraq and Libya) has a right to exist.
Finally, the new cold war is fraught with the risk of making enemies both at home and abroad. The ghost of McCarthyism still haunts the country in the guise of the paranoia and hatred that have settled in American political culture. Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy grotesquely exaggerated the minor communist threat inside America, accusations of treacherous behavior by Americans who supported Donald Trump's pro-Putin position were also inflated. The tactic of accusing political opponents of betrayal has not proven itself very well in the context of democracy. In any case, right-wing extremism is as deeply rooted in America as it is in Brazil, Poland, India and Russia.
None of the above-mentioned history lessons makes arguments against Washington's support for Ukraine in its current conflict with Russia. But they loudly "protest" against the exclusion of the option of a compromise peace in favor of a complete victory of Ukraine. The worst scenario would be the transformation of the conflict in Ukraine into the beginning of another global crusade.
