Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 22 – Most people
assume that the Cold War began on a specific date either when Stalin began
imposing regimes in portions of Eastern Europe the Red Army had occupied or
when Winston Churchill delivered his speech in Fulton, Missouri, and spoke of
the rise of an iron curtain dividing Europe.
But in fact, Dimitry Savvin, the
editor of the Riga-based conservative Russian nationalist Harbin portal,
says, the first cold war did not emerge full blown all at once but rather took
until at least 1949 to assume the shape that it is now remembered for (harbin.lv/vtoraya-kholodnaya-voyna-roli-raspredeleny).
Something similar is happening
again. Vladimir Putin really began the new cold war with his aggression against
Ukraine and seizure of Crimea in 2014, the writer says; but the second edition
of the cold war is taking final shape only now, seven years later, and in a
form somewhat different from its namesake.
The rise of Communist China, both because
it is communist in its aspirations and because it has been relatively
successful in its NEP-like promotion of capitalism, makes “a new cold war an
objective necessity,” Savvin argues, given that the communist threat has not
disappeared and the involvement of China within Western economies has become
stronger and threatening.
That is all the more so because
since the US emerged victorious in the first cold war, it has been engaged in “a
great imperial withdrawal,” no longer willing to promote its own version of
democracy and “step by step ceding its positions” to countries like China and
the Russian Federation willing to take more aggressive actions.
The new cold war is not only
objectively necessary but has already assumed two poles, but this time, one led
by China rather than Russia and the other led again by the United States. But
what has not yet occurred is the rethinking of how to conduct it given that
each side has more thoroughly penetrated the other, meaning that there is a far
larger “fifth column” in both.
“The level of mutual and all-sided
integration is now such that the border between foreign and domestic in essence
is not absence. And each side has its rear ‘a fifth column,’ and battles since
not too bloody will have to be conducted not only and even now so much on the
former perimeter” as was the case in the first cold war “as at home.”
The Soviet Union sought to use
communist parties in this way in the first cold war, but they were far less
influential and far easier for Western countries to counter than the new forces
representing China and Russia in the second cold war, Savvin continues. And “this
creates many new problems” for opposition groups in Russia too.
They can no longer view the West as
unified and supportive of them against their governments. Instead, the Russian
opposition can see that many in the West, under the influence of the new and
more influential fifth columns want to do business with Moscow and are no
longer constrained by fears of being called “soft on communism.”
The far right in both Europe and
America have become the enemies of the opposition in Russia no less than the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China or the FSB of the Russian
Federation, the conservative Russian commentator says. And the left in these
countries is also playing a much more negative role now.
But at the same time, Savvin argues,
one must not forget that “besides the enemy in the rear, their exists one at
the front, the coalition of neo-communist China and neo-Soviet regimes of the former
USSR, together with their socialist allies and also a number of Islamist regimes
and movement. And the struggle against them remains our first priority task.”
And this struggle will be made more
difficult because there has emerged again a group of countries in between who
seek to benefit from the competition between the two poles of a cold war. These
include both leaders in the east, like Tito in the times of the first cold war,
and de Gaulle and Brandt in the West.
According to Savvin, “today’s neo-Soviet
Russian Federation and neo-communist China in principle have returned to that
model of relations which existed between the USSR and the CPR between 1949 and
1956,” with integration again extremely high but with the relative positions of
the two exchanged.
In this new situation, Putin as
leader of the Russian Federation is behaving simultaneously as a leader of one
pole and as someone who wants to win benefits for himself by seeking to play
China and the West off against each other, remaining allied with China but promising
to help the West resist Beijing.
That makes relations between the
West and Russia far more fraught, with the risk that the West will make a deal
with Russia that sacrifices its principles and its allies in eastern Europe in
order to make use of Russia as an ally of sorts against China. And this is all
the more likely because of domestic American policies.
Increasingly, Savvin says, the
American left wants to promote a kind of socio-cultural agenda which is
alienating many in the conservative East European countries, leading them to
behave in ways that will make it easier for Washington to sacrifice them to
Russia rather than defend them against the Kremlin.
Avoiding that disaster and thus a
defeat in the second cold war requires that the West understand not only what
is at stake but how Russia is behaving in this dual fashion and thus making it
far harder to defeat China and Russia as well and also to see that America’s
own domestic activists are promoting what earlier they had more consistently
opposed.
