Whether you realize it or not, it is actually taking place ...
The Second Cold War. The US Might Come Out on the Losing Side…
Global Research, December 08, 2015
In the light of the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, there has been much talk about the clouding of US-Russian relations. Some voices in
the Internet’s alternative media have pointed to the possibility that
these conflicts might lead to a new major war, while social networks
like Twitter saw
the usage of the hashtags #WorldWarIII and #WorldWar3 explode after
Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 jet in the vicinity of the
Syrian border. Headlines in mainstream media outlets like Foreign Policy and the Guardian also proclaimed, “Welcome to Cold War III” and asked “are we going back to the bad old days?”.
This
article suggests that although the ideological division of the Cold War
ended de facto with the collapse of the Soviet Union, American
geopolitical schemes to contain Russian power abroad have never really
been abandoned. Throughout the 1990s and until today, US policymakers
have been determined to wage overt or covert proxy wars with the aim of
curbing its former adversary’s political, economic, and military
influence. Chechnya, Ukraine, and Syria are the key spots where the
logic of this second Cold War is played out.
A
short glance over the state of the world today and its representation in
the media suffices to identify a growing number of actual and potential
centers of conflicts:
Civil war is raging in parts of Ukraine,
military tensions are growing in the South Chinese Sea, and the Middle
East is more of a mess than ever. Nonetheless, some have
suggested that the actual number of armed conflicts has actually
reached a historical low. But this assertion is solely based on
statistical preference. It is true that
interstate (conflicts between two or more states) wars are on the
decline. Instead, wars today are much more likely to take the form of
intrastate conflicts between governments and insurgents, rather than
national armies fighting over territory. As demonstrated to an
outstanding degree in Syria, these conflicts are more and more
internationalized and involve a bulk of non-state actors and countries
who try to reach their goals through proxies rather than direct
involvement, which would require “boots on the ground.”
But
let’s start at the end. The end of the Cold War, that is. The situation
during the years of systemic antagonism between the Eastern and Western
Blocs has sometimes been captured in the image of three separate
“worlds”: the capitalist First World, the socialist Second World, and a
Third World. The latter term was not used as a marker for impoverishment
and instability as it is commonly understood today, but as a
postcolonial alternative “third way” for those newly independent states
that struggled to avoid their renewed absorption by the two towering
ideological empires. One strategy through which developing countries
attempted to duck the neocolonial policies of the Cold War Blocs was by
founding the informal Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in 1961, initiated by
India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia. Counting 120 members as
of now—in fact a large part of the global South—the movement’s
anti-imperialist and anti-colonial stance has lost much of its
bargaining power after the end of the Cold War.
Still, the final document of
the movement’s 1998 summit in Durban, South Africa suggests that the
end of the long-standing bipolar power configuration has by no means led
to the betterment of those countries’ situation. Unipolar American
dominance and the collapse of the Soviet Union instigated what was
understood to be “a worrisome and damaging uni-polarity in political and
military terms that is conducive to further inequality and injustice
and, therefore, to a more complex and disquieting world situation.” This
analysis turned out to be correct in many respects, particularly
concerning the period of the 1990s.
While
the Clinton years of domestic prosperity saw the US economy achieve the
rarity of a budget surplus, the citizens of its erstwhile antagonist
were (probably with the exception of Boris Yeltsin)
experiencing the more sobering effects of Russia’s political and
economic paradigm shift. Democratic Russia struggled to consolidate its
deeply shaken economy in an environment ripe with organized crime,
crippling corruption, and under the doubtful patronage of oligarchs like
Boris Berezovsky who controlled the influential television channel ORT
and whom Ron Unz in “Our American Pravda” described as “the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s.”
The actual situation in the former
Soviet heartland during the 1990s was utterly different from what
American elites and media often depicted as a “golden age” of newfound
democracy and a ballooning private sector. From the perspective of many
US elites, the country’s plundering by oligarchs, ruthless criminal
gangs, kleptocratic politicians, and corrupt military officers was
welcomed as a convenient, self-fulfilling mechanism to permanently
destabilize its mortally wounded adversary. But Russia never completed
all the stages of collapse,
not least because Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin eventually took
legal action to put such “businessmen” like Roman Abramovich and
Berezovsky out of business. The latter was forced to seek refuge in
London, from where he threatened to use his £850m private fortune to
plot “a new Russian revolution” and violently remove his former protégé from the Kremlin.
The
chaotic and aimless term of the alcoholic Yeltsin is often regarded as a
chiefly positive time in which the East and the West closed ranks,
although politicians and neoconservative think tanks in reality
conducted the political and economic sellout of Russia during these
years. The presidency of Vladimir Putin, while anything but perfect and
with its own set of domestic issues, still managed to halt the nation’s
downward spiral in many areas. Nevertheless, it is persistently depicted
by Western elites and their “Pravda” as dubious, “authoritarian,” and
semi-democratic at best.
Thus,
in spite of Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist proclamation of the “End of
History” after the fall of the Berlin wall that supposedly heralded the
universal rein of liberal democracy, the legacy of the Cold War is
anything but behind us. Ostensibly, the current geopolitical situation
with its fragmented, oblique, and often contradictory constellations and
fault lines is utterly different from the much more straightforward
Cold War dualism. Of the Marxist ideology only insular traces remain
today, watered down and institutionalized in China, exploited in a
system of nationalistic iconography in Cuba, and arranged around an
absurdly twisted personality cult in North Korea. As of 2015, Russia is
an utterly capitalistic nation, highly integrated in the globalized
economy and particularly interdependent with the members of the European
economic zone. Its military clout and budget ($52 billion) are dwarfed by US military spending of $598.5 billion in
2015. Even more importantly, after 1991 Russia had to close down or
abandon many of its important bases, ports and other military
installations as a result of the NATO’s eastward expansion.
Nevertheless,
the sheer size of its territory and its command of a substantial
nuclear weapon arsenal, cement Russia’s role as a primary threat to
American national interests. This is illustrated by the fact that since
three and a half decades, the US has covertly supported radical Islamic
movements with the goal to permanently destabilize the Russian state by
entrapping it in a succession of messy and virtually unwinnable
conflicts. Pursued openly during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s,
this scheme continued to be employed throughout the 1990s during both
Chechen Wars, as well as in Russia’s so-called “near abroad” spheres of
influence: Dagestan, Ingushetia, South Ossetia, and other former Soviet
vassal republics in the Caucasus, which have constantly suffered from
extremists who exploit the lack of governmental pervasion in their
remote mountain regions. These regions are home to over 25 million
ethnic Russians and important components of the country’s economy. After
the Soviet-Afghan War and the CIA’s buildup of Osama bin-Laden’s
“resistance fighters,” American policymakers recognized the
destabilizing potential inherent in the volatile political and sectarian
configurations in the Islamic countries that encircle the post-Soviet
Russian borderlands.
Hence,
despite many political ceremonies, pledges of cooperation, and the
opening of Moscow’s first McDonalds in 1990, this policy was never fully
abandoned. As a matter of fact, peaceful political coexistence and
economic convergence never were the primary goals. Democratic Russia
with its allies, military potential, and possible Eurasian trade
agreements that threaten to isolate or hamper US hegemony was and still
is considered a menace to American ambitions of unipolar, universal
dominance.
Since
the First Chechen War in 1994, Russia’s prolonged struggle against
Islamic terrorism has for the most part been disregarded by Western
media. Particularly after 9/11, the “war on terror” acted like a black
hole that sucked up the bulk of the Western media’s attention. When the
acts of terrorism on Russian soil became too horrifying to ignore—the
2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 Beslan school siege in
particular—the massive death tolls were blamed on the drastic responses
of Russian security forces who were not adequately prepared and
overwhelmed by the vicious and meticulously planned attacks. In Beslan,
the death of hundreds of innocents (186 children were murdered on their
first day at school) was indirectly condoned and
sardonically depicted as the consequences of the “separatist movement
[and its] increasingly desperate attempts to break Russia’s stranglehold
on its home turf.” Truly, to describe those who shoot children in front
of their parents and vice versa as “separatists” and glorify them as
“rebels” who act in self defense against an “authoritarian” regime
demands a very special kind of callous apathy.
In a 2013 article that examined the Chechen descent of the suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombing, retired FBI agent and 2002 Time Person of the Year Coleen
Rowley exposed “how the Chechen ‘terrorists’ proved useful to the U.S.
in keeping pressure on the Russians.” She explicitly refers to a 2004 Guardian piece by
John Laughland, in which the author connects the anti-Russian
sentiments in the BBC and CNN coverage of the Beslan massacre to the
influence of one particular organization, the American Committee for
Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), whose list of members reads like “a rollcall
of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically (sic)
support the ‘war on terror,’” among them Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams,
James Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney. Laughland describes the ACPC as an
organization that
heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin’s Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable “Muslim” causes, Bosnia and Kosovo – implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there.
There
are three key elements in the organization’s lobbying strategy to
denigrate Russia and promote an intervention in Chechnya that serve to
unmask a larger pattern behind the US foreign policy after 9/11. First,
the labeling of a particular leader or government as “authoritarian” or
in some other way “undemocratic” (Vladimir Putin, in this case). Second,
the concept of an oppressed yet positively connoted population that
strives for freedom and democracy (Chechen terrorists with ties to a-Qaeda, in this case). Finally, the stressing of “human rights violations” that warrant an intervention or economic embargo.
If all of these conditions are
satisfied, the violation of the borders of a sovereign state is seen as
justified (UN mandate not needed), enabling the US to emerge as a knight
in shining armor and champion of human rights, bolting to the rescue of
the world’s downtrodden, while covertly achieving an utterly different
goal: To further the logic of a second Cold War through proxy warfare
and weaken Russian by diminishing its foothold in its surrounding “near
abroad” regions, which in many respects represent vital interests, both
economically and strategically.
Swap out names and dates and it becomes
evident that the same tripartite strategy was used to justify every
recent intervention of the US and other NATO members, in Iraq (2003),
Libya (2011), and Syria (since 2011). Interventions that were
legitimized under the banner of humanitarian relief through the removal
of “authoritarian” tyrants and supposed dictators and which have
resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500.000 people, in Iraq alone.
When the ASPC’s made its appeal regarding Chechnya in 2004, mind you,
only one year had passed since the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked
and two years since the first inmates arrived in the extralegal
detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Regarding the sweltering conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the key dynamics are similar. President Viktor Yanukovych, accused by
the Euromaidan movement—fueled by aggressive US and EU media propaganda
and enticed with promises of lucrative NATO and EU memberships—of
“abusing power” and “violation of human rights,” was forced to resign
and replaced with a ultranationalist, anti-Russian and pro-Western
government. Again, this campaign had nothing to do with actual
humanitarian relief or concerns about the country’s democratic
integrity. Instead, the hopes of a whole generation for a better future
under Western influence were exploited by US policymakers who hoped to
stifle Russia’s geostrategic elbowroom by ousting the naval bases of its
Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea.
These
bases, mostly located in the city of Sevastopol, have been the home
port of the Russian navy for over 230 years, and are vital because they
provide the only direct access to the Black Sea and (through the
Bosporus strait in Turkey) to the Mediterranean. Any expansion of NATO
towards these bases had to be regarded as a direct threat, leaving the
Russian government practically no choice but to protect them with all
means necessary. However, in the stories emanating from Western
mainstream media, these bases were showcased as an occupation of
sovereign Ukrainian territory and used as proof of Russia’s aggressive,
“authoritarian,” and imperial aspirations. In reality, Ukraine and
Russia signed a Partition Contract in 1997, in which the Ukraine agreed
to lease major parts of its facilities to the Russian Black Sea Fleet
until 2017, for an annual payment of $98 million.
Along the lines of the currently revitalized genre
of alternate history, let’s briefly indulge in the notion that we were
still living in the ideologically divided world of the Cold War, in
which the Warsaw Pact still existed. For a second, imagine if Mexico or
Guatemala or Canada expressed their desire to join said pact and invited
its troops to conduct military exercises at
their shared border with the US. Even without the existence of an
American naval base in that country, how do you think the US would react
to such a scenario? Would it stand by idly and let itself be surrounded
by its adversaries? For an even more striking parallel, take the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962. The American military actually has a naval base
there—Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous detention camp. Many
historians see the deployment of Soviet missiles and troops on the
island as the closest that humanity ever came to entering World War III
and mutually assured destruction (MAD). With its support for “regime
change” in Ukraine and extension of the NATO to the Russian borders, the
US today is engaged in the same old Cold War superpower games that the
Soviets played in Cuba 53 years ago. In fact, we should think of Ukraine
as being situated in Mother Russia’s “backyard.”
Thousands of miles away from the coasts of North America, the Middle East is the region that Uncle Sam seems to regard as his very
own backyard. Many consider George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” after 9/11
and the subsequent interventions in Iraq and (to a lesser degree)
Afghanistan as those catastrophic policy decisions that resulted in the
sociopolitical destabilization of large parts of this region, resulting
in the death, injury, and displacement of millions. In Iraq, Libya, and
Syria, the spurious US rhetorical agenda of removing “tyrants” and
endowing the local demographics with the liberating gift of democracy
has in fact produced vast ungoverned spaces where militant groups like
the al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State (also known
as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh)
were able to carve out their “caliphates” and claim other territorial
prices. For a long time, the rapid expansion of the Islamic State and
its death-loving, apocalyptic ideology was
resisted only by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the paramilitary National
Defense Forces (NDF), and Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG). The
SAA alone has lost as much as 200.000 soldiers in its struggle against various terrorist factions since March 2011.
US politicians and media have expressed their
hopes that the Russian intervention to assist the Syrian government in
its resistance against these Western, Saudi, and Turkey-backed groups
will result in a military and economic debacle, comparable to the
Soviet-Afghan war, which lasted well over nine years. It was during the
course of this brutal and protracted conflict that US policymakers
realized that there was really no need to shed American blood in order
to deal the death blow to the Soviet Union. They drew their lessons from
the CIA’s countless ventures in South American “nation building,” where
a government’s legitimacy and an opposition’s status as either
terrorists or freedom fighters depended on their usefulness for American
national interests, often accoutered in pithy terms like the “war on
drugs.”
Since
the days of Pablo Escobar, however, US foreign policy has shifted its
main focus towards the Middle East, where the long-term goal has been to
weaken the enemies of Israel and strengthen the enemies of Iran. Other
goals are to guarantee American access to oil and other natural
resources, to establish military bases and
consolidate the network of troops abroad, and to secure arms deals for
the one-percenters who preside over what president Eisenhower cautioned
his nation about in his farewell address: the “military-industrial
complex.” As a consequence of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Obama administration has shifted its strategy towards aerial and drone
only warfare combined with the support and (illusion of) control over
local militant factions.
Among the many groups fighting in Syria,
the Free Syrian Army (FSA), also known as “moderate rebels,” is the US
faction of choice. Much like the bin Laden’s Mujahideen fighters in
1980s Afghanistan, they are armed with the help of the CIA.
In spite of their apparent moderation, however, a wealth of evidence
suggests that this group is directly responsible for a multitude of massacres, mass executions, the ethnic cleansing of non-Sunni citizens, and eating the hearts of their fallen enemies.
The FSA has also been a suspect in the
2013 Ghouta chemical attacks, which some have claimed the US used as a
false flag operation to engender international support for the violent
removal of the Syrian government. The subsequent UN investigation
however failed to establish any conclusive evidence concerning the
perpetrator of the war crime and concluded that the sarin gas used in
the attacks had most certainly been removed from government arsenals.
Based on this information, US, UK, and French leaders
and media outlets insisted that the Syrian government had to be the
culprit, and immediately pressed the international community to support
an intervention with the goal of eradicating Syria’s alleged arsenal of
nerve gas and other potential WMDs. This all begins to sound very
familiar. Of course, they also requested the bolstering of the “moderate
opposition.” Interestingly, though, the official UN report,
“careful not to blame either side,” let on that investigators were
actually being accompanied by rebel leaders at all times. Moreover, they
repeatedly encountered “individuals […] carrying other suspected
munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and
possibly manipulated.” On page 13, the report goes on to state that:
[a] leader of the local opposition forces […] was identified and
requested to take ‘custody’ of the Mission […] to ensure the security
and movement of the Mission, to facilitate the access to the most
critical cases/witnesses to be interviewed and sampled by the Mission
[…].
Recently, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have
protested that their “moderate rebels” were being targeted unjustly by
Russian airstrikes in Syria, complaining that “from their [i.e., the
Kremlin’s] perspective, they’re all terrorists.” Sometimes, one is
inclined to advise them, it can be wise and healthy to assume an
outsider’s perspective and check if your reality still coincides with
the facts that so many know are true about the FSA. These facts can be
broken down to a very short yet concise formula: If it looks like a
terrorist, if it talks like a terrorist, if it behaves like a
terrorist—it probably is a terrorist.
Instead,
the CIA is still supplying the “activists” with outdated-yet-deadly
weapons from Army surplus inventories, including hundreds of BGM-71 TOW
(“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided”) anti-tank missile systems, which the terrorists use against hard and soft targets alike. The same weapon platform can be seen in action in a recent FSA video that
shows the destruction of a Russian helicopter that was sent to extract
the Russian pilots at the crash site of their downed Su-24 plane on
November 24, 2015. On the same day, another US-supplied TOW missile was
used in an ambush targeting
a car occupied by RT news journalists Roman Kosarev, Sargon Hadaya, and
TASS reporter Alexander Yelistratov in Syria’s Latakia province.
The FSA and other groups, branded as “moderates” who fight against the “authoritarian” forces of tyranny (just like a certain “Saudi businessman”
back in the day), function as US proxies in Syria, just like al-Qaeda
did in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan War. They are dangerously
unstable pawns in a global strategy to secure American and Israeli
interests in the Middle East, irrespective of the millionfold suffering
and uprooting of entire societies caused by their crimes, the majority
of which is directed towards other Muslims.
Commenting on
the Russian military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian
government, Mr. Obama said that he had no interest in turning this civil
war into a proxy war between Russia and the United States, emphasizing
that “this is not some superpower chessboard contest.” But this is
exactly what US foreign policy, both Republican and Democrat, has done,
starting with the end of the Soviet Union and lasting until this very
moment. The only difference now being that the Libya-proven rhetorical
strategy of (illegal and mandate-less) intervention via “no-fly zones,”
“humanitarianism,” and “regime change” did not have the desired effect
in Syria because Iran, Lebanon, and Russia did not abandon their ally.
Their combined effort succeeded in fending off an unprecedented
onslaught of extremists that infiltrated the country, often across the
Southern Turkish border, armed with the money of American taxpayers and
Wahhabi sheiks.
The Syrian conflict can no longer be
described as a civil war. It may have started as one during the
ill-fated “Arab Spring” of 2011, when armed “protesters” (i.e., FSA
terrorists) murdered several policemen and
set government buildings on fire in Daraa, provoking a violent backlash
from government forces. The ensuing nationwide chaos was spun by the
Western mainstream media troika, namely those media outlets that
serve as propaganda tools for the US political and financial elites and
who fabricated the myth of the tyrant who massacred peaceful
protestors—to be readily sucked up by their indoctrinated clientele.
As a result of the “moderate’s” recent setbacks, the official American position, insofar as its mixed messages can
be deciphered, has boiled down to a butt-hurt attitude and passive
aggressive lecturing about how to distinguish between varying degrees of
moderation among mass-murdering lunatics. Outmaneuvered and publicly
exposed, all that is left for Mr. Obama seems to be to pick up the
pieces and save some face by accepting Mr. Putin’s offer to join a
united front against terrorism in Syria. But such a step seems
unthinkable in this ongoing Cold War between Russia and the US. Instead,
the most powerful man on earth talks about climate change as the most
pressing problem of our times. When it comes to ISIS, he has said he
wanted to “contain” them. Meanwhile, tensions are rising as Turkish
president Erdogan, on an power trip after his surprising landslide
victory in November’s general elections, apparently collaborated with
ISIS and risked provoking an NATO Article 5 response by downing a
Russian Su-24. On the other side of the equation, Russia’s decision to
intervene on behalf of the Syrian government reveals a twofold strategy:
On the one hand, trough its direct action it positions the Putin
government as being opposed to the fatal logics of proxy warfare. On the
other hand, it simultaneously exposes the catastrophic flaws of Mr.
Obama’s strategies in Syria and the Middle East.
All these developments do not necessarily mean that we are heading for World War III—although logic dictates that it will happen
at some point in the future. In reality, though, a full-on nuclear
confrontation would require a massive unraveling of the still
sufficiently functional channels of political cooperation and interstate
diplomacy. International security and economic communities as well as
overlapping alliances like the United Nations, NATO, OSCE, and BRIC all
indicate a high level of international integration.
Nonetheless, the geopolitical decisions
of the last years herald the start of a new period in political history
that indeed corresponds to a Cold War constellation. Particularly US
foreign policy is currently undergoing the revival of a more offensive
realism, visible in recent demonstrations of power in NATO’s Eastern
border states, pushing of the TPP agreement in the Pacific economic
area, and aggressive patrolling of
the South Chinese Sea. In fact, the avoidance of superpower
confrontation at all costs seems to increasingly take a back seat these
high-risk maneuvers.
In
the late 1940s the first Cold War began as a war of the words when the
powers who had together defeated Nazi Germany started to level criticism
at their respective global policies. With the help of their media and
propaganda sources, their different stances and perspectives solidified
and eventually developed into monolithic ideologies. These in turn
spawned the geopolitical doctrines that warranted the replacement of any
open (i.e., nuclear) confrontation with confined proxy wars as in
Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. A similar erosion of mutual trust,
respect, and solidarity is taking place now as the outsourced US-Russian
conflicts in Ukraine and Syria remain unsolved. Again, the second Cold
War arises as a war of the words while negative sentiments are allowed
to petrify and the glacial rhetorics of mistrust and veiled threats
gradually begin to replace talk about common interests and cooperation.
The influential and policy-shaping Foreign Affairs magazine already struck the right chords of the passive-aggressive Cold War parlance by titling, “Putin’s Game of Chicken: And How the West Can Win.”
At
the end of the day, this exact attitude could be one of the reasons why
the US might come out on the losing side of this conflict. Because they
have not yet realized this is not a “game of chicken” anymore. In fact,
this is no longer the same easy game of manipulation that the US played
during the 1990s by throwing cheap shots at a collapsing state. The
deployment of its air force in Syria is not least a signal to the
American establishment that Russia in 2015 no longer stands at the
sidelines and watches begrudgingly as the US and its allies commence
their disastrous policies in the Middle East.
When
Mr. Obama asserted that “this is not some superpower chessboard
contest,” he therefore either told a lie or he demonstrated his
government’s utter cluelessness with regard to the actual situation and
consequences of their actions in Ukraine, Syria, the South Chinese Sea,
and other hotspots of the second Cold War. Both possibilities do not
bode well for the future.
Steffen A. Wöll is
currently enrolled in the American Studies Master’s program at Leipzig
University. His research interests include foreign policy, the Middle
East, popular culture, as well as radical millennialist and
environmentalist movements in the US.
Copyright © Steffen A. Woll, Global Research, 2015
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