Is the Cold War Over?

David Hearst
Foreign leader writer for The Guardian


The Cold War was a military-industrial contest , a race between two competing and mutually exclusive systems in which the stakes were high (mutual destruction) and the prize was global domination. Somewhere on the home straight, one of the runners ran out of puff. Long  before that,  though, he stopped believing he could win.  The Soviet Union did not so much run out of steam, as political ideas and energy.  The absence of a functioning ideology made the system unreformable. Even the August 1991 coup lacked conviction. The tanks rumbling through Moscow's streets were to be seen stopping at red traffic lights. A curious sight indeed.

Once the existential self-questioning started, it was very difficult to stop and in a sense, it continues to this day. The former Soviet states experienced a birth or a rebirth of nationhood when the Soviet system imploded. Their economies collapsed, but the idea that a state was being born made the suffering worthwhile, even in conditions of civil war. The opposite happened inside Russia. When the idea of an independence day for the Russian Federation was first proposed,  it was greeted with popular bemusement.  Independence from whom? Ourselves?
 
A generation has grown up since then, but the Russian nation building project, despite the bombast and the nationalism,  is still work in progress. The unfinished nature of the Russian state takes many forms. It is inherent in the debate over exactly how much influence Russia should legitimately have in the internal affairs of its closest neighbours, and to what extent Russia should figure in Ukraine's economic and foreign affairs. The collective angst is there to be felt in the various words - russkii, rossiski, rossianin - used to describe ethnic Russians or Russian speakers both inside and beyond the federation's borders. 

It is to be seen in the Russian anxiety about the size of its territory. Space in other continents breeds confidence, the space to develop economically, to move, even the space to pollute. There is space enough at home for America to grow even if it retreats into isolationism. Size equals growth. In the Russian mindset, space can engender the opposite emotions: Is Russia too big? Are the regions going their own way ? Is Moscow losing control? Are its orders carried out or  do they can get lost in transmission? Can Russia be changed ?

The collective insecurity is to be glimpsed in the importance that Russian media attaches to  the foreign media, which it translates and replays obsessively . Why does it matter so much what foreign commentators say about Russia, since they are so ill- informed? A confident nation would not care. This is not about identity. There is a strong, perhaps overpowering, sense of Russian cultural, linguistic, historical and intellectual identity. But it is about the modern state of Russia, where it starts and ends, whether it is strong or weak, and over whom it holds dominion.

That is still a moveable feast.

Now look at what happened to the other runner, the one that found itself so far in front that it became disoriented. History did not end, but the rules of the game changed. America, we are constantly being told, does not have an empire or vassal states.  But it does have values. Its first two post-Soviet presidents, Bill Clinton and George Bush were each prepared to be muscular about the application of their values. Democracy promotion became indistinguishable from America promotion and until the catastrophe of Iraq unfolded, neoconservatives persuaded themselves that democracy could be unloaded from the ramp of a Chinook.  If there was a functioning military-industrial complex left in the world,  it belonged to Halliburton and the former vice-president Dick Cheney.

The collapse of nation building in Iraq, and the prospect of a bigger military defeat in Afghanistan, has re-injected a strong dose of pragmatism into the US debate. Not before time. It has stopped being a proselytiser about democracy and appreciates the limits of military action. Public opinion in America is turning against the war and its project to turn Afghanistan into a centrally run state. Domestic public opinion does not understand why American boys are losing their lives for a corrupt regime in Kabul. The American military still has a global reach , but after two failed military interventions, it is rapidly losing its appetite for mounting another one. It will be interesting to see how Barack Obama  plays the growing confrontation with Iran, after it was forced to admit the existence of a covert uranium enrichment site in Qom. But the reluctance of his defense secretary Robert Gates to accept a military strike, which he rightly said would only delay the construction of a nuclear bomb, is significant. He is no Democrat. On the contrary, he represents continuity from one administration to another.

The point I am making is that however Russia and America interact with each other in the future (and I am one of those who believe the reset button could outlast an agreement on START) the relationship will no longer be between two powers who are confident about their place in the world. Both have overreached themselves militarily. This is not deny that a trip-wire exists in the form of Georgia and Ukraine. Communism has been replaced by nationalism as the collective ideology. Authoritarian capitalism has taken hold, rather than democracy. But post-Soviet states share at least one problem to a greater or lesser degree. To what extent is nationalism a substitute for finding real solutions in the national interest? When Russia stops calling itself a Great Power, I for one, will start believing in the power that it has got. But coming from a country which also miscalls itself great, I am in a minority of one.