Is new cold war between West, Russia called for? Opinion by South China Morning Post

South China Morning Post has published an opinion piece arguing that what is needed now is not a new cold war but wise Western leadership on how to treat Russia. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War” in a 1945 article, written after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He argued that “the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy”.

He counted the United States and Western Europe as one, the Soviet Union as the second and China as the third. He concluded that the atomic bomb “is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’”.

I think he got it nearly right – or so it seems as a new cold war erupts between the West and Russia, and China spars with the US over the South China Sea and Taiwan. In reality, it’s more complicated than that.

China and Russia have a fair relationship. China and the US are perhaps doing nothing much more than annoying each other and the bonds of commerce still bind both populaces close together.

To me, a new cold war is a nonsense on stilts.

George Kennan, the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union and the author of the containment doctrine towards Moscow, insisted that Stalin had no intention of rolling his tanks into Western Europe. Robert Legvold summarises Kennan’s views on the Soviet Union in his book, Return to Cold War, “The threat it posed was political … a threat requiring a political and economic response, not a military one.”

In 1948, Kennan wrote, as he observed the creation of Nato, “Why did [the proponents of a military alliance] wish to divert attention from a thoroughly justified and promising program of economic recovery by emphasising a danger which did not actually exist but which might indeed be brought into existence by too much discussion of the military balance and by the ostentatious stimulation of military rivalry?”

It was Kennan who warned that expanding Nato would be the worst of mistakes after the end of the Cold War. Now NATO’s membership has expanded up to Russia’s border. This has provoked the dastardly Russian invasion and the Ukraine war.

We forget that Russia supported the US in Afghanistan and allowed supplies for American forces to be carried on its railways. We forget that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first international leader to call US President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks. We forget that Putin considered Nato membership.

We forget that Russia returned to being a Christian-inspired nation that also gave religious freedom to Islam and others. We forget the time under President Boris Yeltsin when he pushed hard to remove barriers to human rights.

We forget the progress made under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Dmitry Medvedev and Putin in reducing the amount of nuclear arms. With the Americans, the Russians have helped reduce worldwide stockpiles from 70,000 to around 13,000.

We forget that when Medvedev was president he published a multidimensional plan to enhance European security. In Ukraine, the EU self-defeatingly walked away from a compromise arrangement with President Viktor Yanukovich that could have avoided further political upheaval.

Rodric Braithwaite, the former British ambassador to Russia, wrote that “for a decade Westerners lectured Moscow on where its real interests lay, and expected it to follow where the West led” and that they “rarely listened to what the Russians said in response, because Russian concerns seemed unimportant, misguided or unacceptable”. The West did not listen to Russian fears on the expansion of Nato. Nor did it listen to Russian anger at US plans to bring Ukraine and Georgia into Nato.

Is a new cold war called for? Definitely not. What is needed is just some wise Western leadership on how to treat Russia. We haven’t had it since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s time.

Today, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the wise old man of foreign policy (he is 100), is not listened to. Indeed, the mainstream media only occasionally report his conciliatory and sensible thoughts on the Ukraine war.

If we want to head for Orwell’s awful denouement, we should carry on in the current direction. If not, we should wake up and turn our policies towards Russia right around.