Its not Cold War II
Writing by abuhatem on Sunday, 24 of August , 2008 at 1:45 am
I don’t know how many times I have heard the phrase “Cold War II” in the past few days, as if the Russia-Georgia conflict is re-starting the Cold War between Russia and the West.
The debate is re-emerging on whether or not our age is one of a perpetual democratic capitalist great power peace based in international norms or simply a short break from great power conflicts of the world wars and the Cold War. The debate began in 1991 with the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History which argued that democratic capitalism was now seen - for the most part - as the best and most just system of governance, and that we are entering a globalized capitalist world order which will be more peaceful and less marked by great power conflict. John Mearsheimer’s 2003 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics argues that capitalism will only cause more and more powers to get rich and thus powerful and this will mean more security competitions, cold wars, and even world wars in the next century. This is the debate between Idealism and Realism.
Whatever your stance on the debate, Russia’s invasion of Georgia certainly does not signify another Cold War against the bear. Even if Washington and Moscow were to soon come into some sort of international tensions, this is far from a return to those days.
Um… hello, the Soviet Union is gone. Communism is dead. While Putin’s Russia is not extraordinarily democratic, it certainly is very capitalist. Russia’s economy is 1/13th of the U.S., Russia’s annual defense budget is less than 1/14th of the U.S.’s and 1/21th of NATO’s. Moroever, even if you combined Russia and China’s GDP they would only account for 1/3rd of the U.S.’s GDP - not including the EU, NATO, and other Western allies.
With the absence of an actual peer competitor, or an ideological conflict, there is no cold war. Russia may be asserting its geopolitical sphere in the caucuses, and there may be more great power conflict in the next decade, yet the U.S. and its Western allies in NATO have so surpassed China, Russia, and any other combination of countries in the world in military and economic might that American hegemony is still the international system of the day.
Nevertheless, great power conflict is not fatalistically foreordained. An international system based in cooperation and commerce is indeed possible, and free markets have truly pacified the world. While hubristic imperialism and paranoid preventative war are currently American foreign policy, there has been a notable absence of actual great power war since 1945. No matter what happens, America does not want war with Moscow - even though it would eventually win - because the cost is just too high. And Moscow does not want war with the U.S. because the costs are too high. Nuclear weapons and the increase of aggregate defensive power among great powers has made great power war too big of a loss for rational actors - that is governments - to want to go through with them no matter the cost. And markets are just so globalized and thus states interdependent, that realpolitk although still certainly a major part of international affairs is much less apparent.
Francis Fukuyama himself reflected on recent events and himself still holds his End of History thesis. In a Washington Post article yesterday Fukuyama said:
Various writers have suggested that we are now witnessing a return to the Cold War, the return of History or, at a minimum, a return to a 19th-century world of clashing great powers.
Not so fast. We are certainly moving into what Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria labels a “post-American” world. But while bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors.
What is interesting is how the founding father of modern foreign policy neoconservatism is now endorsing Barack Obama, against the war in Iraq, and opposed to an overtly Utopian militant neoconservatism, and how neoconservative Bob Kagan - John McCain’s foreign policy adviser - is now writing about the “Return of History” and debunking Fukuyama’s old thesis! Check out this week’s Weekly Standard for a mawkish article entitled “History’s Back”
While Fukuyama is certainly much, much better nowadays - the man is still a Straussian Nietzchian atheist interventionist - and I wouldn’t really give his words much creedance. Nevertheless, I find myself agreeing with him that its not Cold War II!
Category: International Relations
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