Mediel Hove. Jadavpur Journal of International Relations. Volume 20, Issue 2. January 2017.
Introduction
Americans and Russians, including their respective leaders Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, have frequently rejected the existence of the outdated Cold War thinking. However, a reflection on many events in the post-Cold War era demonstrates the emergence of a new Cold War. Incompatible goals of the US and the West, on the one hand and Russia on the other, devoid of open conflict, have been on the increase between the competing parties since the early 2000s. Linked to this, Cohen (2006) noted that ‘US-Russian relations deteriorated so badly (that) they should now be understood as a new Cold War—or possibly as a continuation of the old one.’ In fact, a number of scholars in view of the growing conflicts in the world, including the Syrian and Ukraine crises and the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, have covertly or overtly concluded that the clashes signaled rekindling of the Cold War memories, if not a new Cold War (Dadak 2010; Hove and Mutanda 2015; Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015; Sadri and Burns 2010). However, the new Cold War is not identical to the earlier one that took place between 1945 and 1991. The conflicts in Syria and Ukraine have profoundly resulted in estranged relationships between Russia and the West, especially the US (Likhotal 2015: 83). Among other things the struggle for dominance by the two great powers both in vindictive speech and deed in Syria, among other conflicts, represent what the world once experienced prior to the collapse of the USSR.
Besides, it should be acknowledged that the new Cold War is taking place between the US and Russia, as opposed to the former USSR, and that Russia and the US are no longer at par in terms of both military and economic power, with the US dominating Russia in both (Dadak 2010: 89-107). These circumstances invigorated Russia to aspire to regain her Cold War position as the apparent successor state to the USSR, thereby effectively checking the US dominance. A comparison of the conflict that took place between the US and USSR after the World War II and before 1990/1991, with recent events in Syria, reveals a Cold War worldview notwithstanding the existence of some differences. In fact, the US’s unfettered power after the collapse of the USSR is being decisively checked by Russia. This is evident from the conflicting statements and speeches by Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, where accusations and counter-accusations, both overt and covert, were exchanged (Keating 2015). These strategies extend to so many actors in foreign policy communities, media and societies. In the next section I provide a brief insight into the Cold War (1945-1991) before focusing on the new Cold War.
A Brief Insight into the Cold War
The Cold War is a term widely acknowledged in historical writings as denoting the contest for global dominance between the two major superpowers, notably the US and the USSR, including their allies during the period between 1947-1948 and 1989-1990 (Conant 2014). According to Schmidt (n.d.), its nature, causes, effects, and reasons for lasting a long period are controversial. This is because some scholars argue that the term Cold War by the 1990s had increasingly come to resemble a convenient label (which is somehow misleading) for over 40 years of history characterized by various human affairs, fluctuating tensions, alliances and clients, summits and negotiations, ideological dogmas, nasty real wars, and underground resistance coupled with spies and border posts (Monaghan 2015: 7). Moreover, its meaning tends to exclude Asia due to the outbreak of wars (war-by-proxy) in Afghanistan, between the two Koreas and Vietnam different from its nature in Europe, where it was neither war nor peace. Bipolarity was the central feature and allies of either superpower depended for security on their respective superpower. In fact, Alexandrova-Arbatova (2015: 129) summarizes the four particular features of the Cold War as: an unmistakably distinct bipolar arrangement in global affairs; an austere ideological, economic, military, and political hostility between two systems; an unparalleled arms race; and lastly the world powers found themselves on opposing sides in local or regional conflicts and at times fought directly in opposition to the other power bloc’s ‘client’.
The dominant language in US foreign policy during the Cold War included containment, deterrence, and economic isolation (sanctions imposed on Cuba in 1962) (Charap and Shapiro 2015: 41). Additionally, mistrust, suspicion, and actions by both sides were determined by events instead of policies (Legvold 2014: 82-84). The issues, conflicts, the time, and the countries involved differed during the four decades of the Cold War. In this article, informed by the Cold War dynamics, I demonstrate that the US and Russia are involved in a new Cold War, which began after 2000 and became acute following the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts that have caused devastating effects on the local population, regional, and global security. As was the case during the old Cold War, in the new Cold War the maxim is still ‘mine is right and yours is wrong’, but what makes the current US-Russia confrontation most dangerous is the readiness of the two to engage in direct military clashes, thus, risking a World War III and even the use of nuclear weapons.
The New Cold War Traits 1991-2015
Legvold (2014) and Steele (2015) refute the existence of a new Cold War or the resurrection of the old one, whereas others both overtly and covertly acknowledged its presence (Dadak 2010; Hove and Mutanda 2015; Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015; Sadri and Burns 2010). Cohen (2006) argues that there is no possibility of a new Cold War between the US and Russia because the conflicts between the two ‘… are not global, ideological or clashes between two different systems; because post-Soviet Russia is too weak to wage such a struggle; and because of the avowed personal “friendship” between Presidents Bush and Putin’. Scholars such as Legvold (2014: 74) assert that the current confrontation between the West and Russia, especially with regard to Ukraine should not be seen as resembling anything near the Cold War. To Rojansky (2015: 173), the affinities between the Cold War and the present US/West-Russia tensions are superficial. Other scholars affirm that Ukraine just symbolizes a regional dispute and the stakes are entirely different from those of the Cold War because it is neither a global military contest nor an ideological struggle (Conant 2014). Furthermore, Russia no longer has the massive military might of the Soviet Union, making it significantly inferior to the US in both manpower and budgetary considerations.
Again, Russia no longer possesses key bases in many East European countries because the majority joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Above all, Marxism as an ideology that aided the Soviet Union to bring many countries across the world under its influence fell. Russia is integrated into the European economy and has become Europe’s major supplier of oil, natural gas, and coal (Conant 2014). However, Cross (2015: 152) observes that there are potentially enormous stakes in the relationship between the NATO allies and Russia and this relationship is bound to characterize the coming security construction and scene in Europe, Eurasia, and the world at large in the foreseeable future. Accordingly, scholars should not underrate the challenges and difficulties that lie in the way of mending the damage caused as a result of the Ukraine crisis (Cross 2015: 152).
Regarding the Syrian crisis, Ignatieff (2012) argues that it is not a new Cold War because of the absence of competing ideology to provide the Russian and Chinese leadership with an expansionary strategy to upset the existing order of states and alliances. On the contrary, the course of the conflict is epitomized by regional rivalry and various kinds of interventions making ‘… it a strategic lab for ideological, sectarian and ethnic cleavage and breeding ground for a new set of fault lines’ (Siddiqui 2016: 2). Against this backdrop, while there is no doubt that the new Cold War is not a typical replica of the previous one, because it is not worldwide and is different in both scope and range of the twentieth century one, any attempt to refute its existence is equally dangerous. In fact, the new Cold War is different in many ways from the previous one because:
[I]t is not deeply embedded in a system of opposing military alliances with a clearly defined frontier along the borders of various nation-states, what used to be called the Iron Curtain. Nor is it a confrontation between two ideological systems in which each side plans and hopes to replace the other. (Steele 2015: 22)
Supporting the existence of a new Cold War, Cohen asserts that the old Cold War:
… began regionally, in Central and Eastern Europe; that present-day antagonisms between Washington’s ‘democracy-promotion’ policies and Moscow’s self-described ‘sovereign democracy’ have become intensely ideological; that Russia’s new, non-Communist system is scarcely like the American one; that Russia is well situated, … to compete in a new cold war whose front lines run through the former Soviet territories, from Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia; and that there was also, back in the cold-war 1970s, a Nixon-Brezhnev ‘friendship’. (Cohen 2006)
Moreover, some scholars viewed it as a new competition and bipolarity between the West and East concerning liberal capitalism and authoritarian capitalism, which developed into centers of ideological struggle (Alexandrova-Arbatova 2015: 129-130; Dannreuther 2015: 79). Therefore, it is important to note that an ideological contrast exists, although it is not as sharp as during the Cold War (Chivvis 2015: 34).
While the roots of the new Cold War are debatable, the deterioration in relations between Washington and Moscow has its roots in attitudes and policies adopted by the Clinton administration in the 1990s and continued by the Bush administration toward post-Soviet Russia (Cohen 2006; Steele 2015: 23-24). This was caused by the failure of the US officials to unequivocally perceive the ‘end of the cold war’ not as Russian defeat by the US (Steele 2015: 23). The triumphalist narrative and perception led the US to revert its relations back to the old Cold War times via two unwise decisions made by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s. On the one hand, post-Communist Russia has been treated as a defeated nation and anticipated to duplicate America’s domestic practices and be submissive to its foreign policies under the guise of the Clinton-Yeltsin ‘partnership and friendship’ (Cohen 2006). It is this triumphalism that generated the ongoing involvement in Moscow’s domestic affairs coupled with the erroneous notion that Russia has no sovereign rights, both at home and abroad (Likhotal 2015: 83; Steele 2015: 23). On the other hand, President Bill Clinton’s disregard of the Bush senior administration’s promises to Soviet Russia in 1990-1991, not to spread out NATO ‘one inch to the east’ constituted another unwise decision because this petrified the Russians so much that they started to rebuild their weaponry and military. From such profound acts of bad faith came the precarious and confrontational military encirclement of Russia and increasing Russian uncertainties of US goals (Cohen 2006; Gardner 2014: 2). According to Deudney and Ikenberry (2010: 39), with the non-existence of the formerly held promises and arrangements, the bond between Russia and the West has developed gradually discordant and conflictual. A sense of objection, disenchantment, and ruined prospects now characterize both sides and instead of realizing a future based on supportive partnership there is somewhat renewed competitiveness and geopolitical conflict. To this end, Sakwa (2008: 242) aptly notes that during the two years after the fall of communism, there was no satisfactory balance between integration and autonomy as the new found relationship was supposed to be. This took place in the form of the remilitarization of US-Russian relations through military encirclement of Russia by US and NATO bases, in not less than 14 of the former Soviet republics, including the Baltics, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and some new states in Central Asia (Rutland 2015: 132).
In addition, the Russia-Georgia conflict represented a replay of the old Cold War or the melting of the twentieth century Cold War which did not end, but just froze (Papava 2009: 98). It is also believed that the Cold War never ended, but was simply suspended because one of the conflict parties did not have the capacities to continue for a certain period (Papava 2014: 3). However, Sadri and Burns (2010) contend that the Russia-Georgia war gave the impression of a return to older forms of transnational rivalry. The Russia-West tensions in the wake of the Georgia crisis should not be interpreted within a Cold War paradigm because it disregards the complexities of that conflict. While employing the Cold War is an easily comprehensible and adoptable paradigm for the West, particularly the US during such conflicts, it conversely ‘… ignores that Tbilisi had a significant role to play in defining the 2008 war’ (Sadri and Burns 2010: 126). At the moment, ‘Russia versus West tensions can no longer be characterized by the ideological rivalries of the Cold War’ (Sadri and Burns 2010: 126). By and large, Tsygankov (2015: 280) holds the view that as in Georgia, the Ukraine crisis should be viewed in the framework of a combination of considerations of power and values as observed by Russia in dealing with its neighbors and the Western nations. In this regard, in Georgia the Kremlin wanted to protect what it perceived as genuine security interests in the Caucasus and was infuriated by lack of acknowledgment by the US and NATO. Thus, Russia’s actions were carried out on the basis of a professed duty to safeguard a previous Soviet constituency. It was, therefore, resolute to prove that it has not overlooked those as a devotion to its beliefs and securities in the Caucasus. The Kremlin also wants to protect its security interests in Ukraine by making sure that the country remains out of NATO and defending Russia’s longstanding historic and ethnic ties with its neighbor (Tsygankov 2015: 280-281).
By the mid-2000s, evidence of the existence of a new Cold War thinking included:
… a torrent of official and media statements denouncing Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, vowing to bring more of its neighbors into NATO and urging Bush to boycott the G-8 summit to be chaired by Putin in St. Petersburg in July; a call by would-be Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain for ‘very harsh’ measures against Moscow; Congress’s pointed refusal to repeal a Soviet-era restriction on trade with Russia; the Pentagon’s revival of old rumors that Russian intelligence gave Saddam Hussein information endangering US troops; and comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, echoing the regime-changers, urging Russians, ‘if necessary, to change their government’. (Cohen 2006)
In light of the above, among other examples, it is not doubtful that a new Cold War is in our midst. The new Cold War between Russia and the West is about international power and influence, as opposed to territorial or ideological rivalry as in the old one (Steele 2015: 22). It is more threatening because hitherto it has no established rules leaving the terrain of struggle fluid, less foreseeable and more unstable, and more dangerous (Gardner 2014: 1; Steele 2015: 22).
Putin in 2007 bluntly blamed the US for a ‘unipolar world’ on account of its roughly unrestrained use of military force in international relations, pushing the world into a gulf of unending conflicts (Dadak 2010: 89). Essentially, in some kind of a replay of the 2007 speech, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, Putin blamed the US (although without specifically referring to the US) for helping sponsoring terrorism and extremism in the Middle East, its failure to generate reforms and its belligerent foreign intrusion (Keating 2015). Therefore, to avert the growing hostilities between Moscow and Washington, there is need to acknowledge that
a US recognition that post-Soviet Russia is not a defeated supplicant or American client state (as seems to have been the prevailing view after 1991) but a fully sovereign nation at home with legitimate national interests abroad equal to our own; and an immediate end to the reckless expansion of NATO around Russia’s borders. (Cohen 2006)
Recognizing and respecting the above would be a good step to end the new Cold War. Putin made this clear between 2000 and 2008 that he wants his country to be just treated as a ‘normal’ great power not a supplicant of the US (Sakwa 2008: 243). Russia’s actions in the Middle East, which unfolds in line with Moscow’s global agenda, is simply a quest to be treated as an equal partner in the conflict resolution club as opposed to an alternative player (Bagno 2009: 91-92). The same has been said of Russia’s actions in Eurasia (Tsygankov 2015: 280). Therefore, the ongoing confrontation between the US and Russia representing a new Cold War is an attempt by Russia to reverse the US dominance globally and the quest to have Russia treated as another power in the international system, which the US cannot dominate willfully.
Contrary to the above views, some scholars and political analysts solely blame Putin’s domestic and foreign policies for the rekindling of the Cold War. In Putin’s view, the above failure to respect Moscow’s interests and views by the West led him to respond by invoking ‘… a more nationalistic domestic and foreign policy course that replaces the remnants of Russian liberalism and internationalism’ (Trenin 2014: 1). Hence, Russia views the elimination of all foreign political influences in its domestic affairs and borderlands as essential to win its full sovereignty together with conservative values in line with Orthodox Christianity (Trenin 2014: 1). However, Putin is blamed for meddling in the former Soviet Republics and supporting Iran, conflicts with NATO, politics of energy resources, and the ‘rollback of Russian democracy’ (Cohen 2006). These scholars blame Putin’s urge for a Soviet-era containment strategy and ‘selective cooperation’ and ‘selective opposition’ based on the US interests (Alcaro 2015: 14; Cohen 2006). They fail to observe that Russia through Putin is simply responding and trying to shake off the defeated and American client state tag, which the US portrayed since the fall of the Soviet Union.
To worsen matters, more Western intervention in Russia’s political affairs is advocated for on the basis that it is the West that certifies elections and leaders in Russia as legitimate or illegitimate. Besides, these scholars anticipate the quick attainment of nuclear supremacy by the US with the aptitude to extinguish the far-off nuclear arsenals of both Russia and China with a first strike (Cohen 2006). Such thinking has been bemoaned by Cohen noting that
Military encirclement, the Bush Administration’s striving for nuclear supremacy and today’s renewed US intrusions into Russian politics are having even worse consequences. They have provoked the Kremlin into undertaking its own conventional and nuclear build-up, relying more rather than less on compromised mechanisms of control and maintenance, while continuing to invest miserly sums in the country’s decaying economic base and human resources. The same American policies have also caused Moscow to cooperate less rather than more in existing US-funded programs to reduce the multiple risks represented by Russia’s materials of mass destruction and to prevent accidental nuclear war. More generally, they have inspired a new Kremlin ideology of ‘emphasizing our sovereignty’ that is increasingly nationalistic, intolerant of foreign-funded NGOs as ‘fifth columns’ and reliant on anti-Western views of the ‘patriotic’ Russian intelligentsia and the Orthodox Church. (Cohen 2006)
This could be the reason why Russia has been accused of influencing the 2016 US presidential elections by hacking and leaking documents against a Democratic Party candidate, Hilary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump, a Republican (Sciutto, Gaouette and Browne 2016). However, some scholars have attempted to downplay the fundamental differences between the West and Russia, terming it a ‘clash of Europes’ signifying an emergent contention between the more liberal, Western-oriented part of Europe personified by NATO and the EU, and the other ‘Russian Europe’ taking shape to counter it (Monaghan 2015: 6).
Putin did not start his term of office in 2000 by opposing the US, but he resolved to pursue such a policy following a failure to sustain good Russian-Western relations (Steele 2015: 25-26). According to Bagno (2009), with reference to the Middle East, ‘since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000, Russia’s relations with the Arab world have been marked by self-interested pragmatism, without any predetermined pro-Arab sentiments, but free of the inferiority complex towards the West that developed in the aftermath of the Cold War’ (Bagno 2009: 91). Putin wanted to join NATO and after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he was instrumental in supporting the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in an alliance with the US (Trenin 2014: 7). Putin appeared overwhelmingly alienated by the US invasion of Iraq and the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was designed to limit the missile warheads of both countries to strengthen nuclear deterrence (Trenin 2014: 7-8). Misconstruing Putin’s change of policy from cooperation with the West to autonomous maneuvers, some scholars erroneously hold that there are ‘two Putins’ (Sakwa 2008: 249). Nevertheless, it is the same and one Putin who only changed his policy of accommodating American unilateralism cognizant of the fact that the US’s application of hegemonic power was not ending soon, but intensifying, especially after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Sakwa 2008: 249).
Besides, it should be emphasized that even amid growing estrangement between Russia and the US, some significant achievements of cooperation have been witnessed. For instance, in 2013, Russia prevented a US attack on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by diplomatically persuading him to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons (Dannreuther 2015: 78; Rutland 2015: 132). Other developments include
the US-Russian agreement on the reduction of strategic nuclear weapons known as the New START (the only relevant nuclear disarmament agreement struck in twenty years); Russia’s greater cooperation on curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, particularly thanks to its agreeing to tough sanctions against Tehran in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in June 2010; and Russia’s agreement to let key military supplies for the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan transit its airspace, an important development given the growing difficulty NATO was experiencing in keeping open its supply lines through Pakistan. (Alcaro 2015: 12)
At present, there is failure to build on the above significant achievements and move toward improved West-Russia relationship founded on mutual respect and cooperation. This is evident in increased mistrust, verbal threats, and essentially different views of how international security issues should be managed (Alcaro 2015: 12).
Putin’s goal in Russia’s foreign policy is to accomplish full sovereignty of his country. This is pursued, first, through eliminating any foreign influence in Russia’s domestic politics and policies and consolidating Russians around a revived national philosophy. Second, it is also done via the realization of some degree of freedom of action on the global arena to protect and promote Russia’s national interests at both the international and regional level (Trenin 2014: 4). In addition, Russia interpreted the US-backed ‘color revolutions’ (Rutland 2015: 132) as well as the role of the US and the West during the Arab Spring (Cohen 2012: 1) as a search for military outposts by the US on Russia’s borders and areas of its strategic interests. This prompted Russia to fervently oppose any pro-democracy movement in the former Soviet Republics, in support of the region’s most authoritarian regimes, from Belarus to Uzbekistan. To Putin, the color revolutions in Ukraine (both in 2004 and 2005), Orange Revolution and the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan were conceived, funded, organized, and directed by the US (Rutland 2015: 132; Trenin 2014: 12). In the case of Ukraine, they were aimed at turning away Ukraine from Russia to NATO and making it its military base with a long-term aim of causing regime change in Moscow (Manoli 2015: 121).
Russia’s concern to check the US domination of world politics is a reaction to the US’s 2006 National Security Strategy document that was designed to counter Russia’s sale of weapons to dubious regimes (including the quality of democracy in Russia) and to pressure ex-Soviet Republics, whose prospects the US overtly linked to ‘color revolutions’. As a result, the US assisted Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova to progress toward Euro-Atlantic institutions (Sakwa 2008: 262). In response, Moscow formed a political, economic, and military ‘strategic partnership’ with China and supported Iran among other anti-American governments in the Middle East (Cohen 2006; Thakur 2013: 71; Tisdall 2014). As a result, ‘as in the Cold War, both Moscow and Washington have courted support for their positions from other States, sometimes achieving international alignments or coalitions that are disturbingly reminiscent of Cold-War geopolitical “blocs”’ (Rojansky 2015: 172). In this regard, Weitz’s (2003) observation that China and Russia did not cooperate vigorously to counter the US’s geopolitical superiority in the wake of the Cold War was overtaken by time and events. This is so because the US and China are not in good books as a result of the US’s determination to thwart Beijing’s efforts to seize the disputed Senkaku Islands, known in China as Diaoyu Islands and located in the East China Sea, from Japan (Legvold 2014: 78) and US-China antagonism in the South China Sea. More so, by 2007 Russia had already started redeploying surface-to-air missiles on Russia’s western border with NATO in Belarus (Cohen 2006) and a cyber war was experienced in Estonia, gas war in Ukraine, as well as a real war in Georgia (Charap and Shapiro 2015: 42). This was necessitated by the US’s plans to build missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic targeted at Russia and this further worsened US-Russian relations into a new Cold War mode (Cohen 2006). In October 2016, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said ‘Russia is exercising its military forces and its nuclear force more offensively than it used to do’, when Russia deployed nuclear-capable missiles to its territory in the Baltic Sea.
However, in the West’s perception, a new Cold War logic has been perceived as a result of Russia’s growing authoritarianism plus growing anti-Western rhetoric. This was evident in Putin’s 2007 speech in Munich and in the events leading to Moscow’s one-sided recognition or acknowledgment of the two republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which split from Georgia in 2008 (Dannreuther 2009). More so, Putin ridiculed the US’s claim that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. During the Arab Spring in 2011, Putin threatened military retaliation if the US attacked Iran or Syria (Faal 2013). He took this position because he was enraged by NATO’s intervention and consequent regime change in Libya; thus, he was pressurizing the US to rethink its strategy (Hove and Mutanda 2015: 562-563). The intervention had far-reaching consequences for peace, both in the country and region (Hove 2015: 1; Zambakari 2016: 44). In fact, Russia in the period 2007-2009 agreed on a deal with Iran to transfer the S-300 air defense system aimed at immediate Israeli strikes (Charap and Shapiro 2015: 43). These were delivered in 2016. Again, the Georgia issue provoked Russia to talk about the need to expand its naval base and naval forces in Syria. This was also in response to the US and West’s deployment of missile defenses in Poland (Cordesman 2015). To this end, the new Cold War is meant to challenge the unipolar world order dominated by the US since the end of the old Cold War (Trenin 2014: 4).
In addition, Russia expressed outrage in 2012 over NATO’s anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe, which Putin felt were deployed against his country (Richard 2014: 43-44). It is therefore apparent that, ‘Soviet aspirations to world leadership are gone, but Russia’s almost visceral aspiration to be taken seriously in world affairs is not’ (Sakwa 2008: 246). This is notwithstanding the observation by Crosston (2014) that we should guard against conflating Russian and Iranian support for the Assad regime as determined non-cooperation against US policy and interests because a nuanced analysis points to two agendas unconcerned with the US. To Crosston, ‘Russia’s support of Syria is motivated by global positioning, while Iran’s support is influenced by concerns for regional hegemony vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)’, revealing that the feeling against the US policy is not the motivating factor that is pushing Russian and Iranian strategies (Crosston 2014: 95). In fact, a regional Cold War is believed to exist between Iran and Saudi Arabia and is manifested in their leading conflictual roles in the weak states in the region, especially in Syria (Gause III 2014: 1) and Yemen, but this does not exclude the manifestation of a new global Cold War in that country. In the next section, the author focuses, first, on Syria and, second, on Ukraine.
The Syrian Case
Russian presence in Syria dates back to 1946 just before Syria’s formal independence. The relations between Syria and the Soviet Union were from the outset hinged on political and diplomatic concerns (Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015: 45). The Soviet Union during all the Arab-Israeli conflicts supported Syria economically, politically, and militarily in a Cold War standoff. Assad fought Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and bankrolled the Palestine Liberation Organization in its move to realize the Palestinian State (Trenin 2013: 7).
As in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, many Syrians during the Arab Spring in 2011 went into the streets demanding democratization, including an end to Assad’s Baathist regime (Hove and Mutanda 2015: 560). It is an undeniable fact that the Syrian conflict has an international dimension (Sharp and Blanchard 2012: 10). Moreover, Syria is home to heterogeneous ethnic and religious groups (Richard 2014: 39) and these attract regional and global attention. It is in this light that the Syrian civil war came to resemble a new Cold War because apart from regional member countries’ involvement on both sides of the conflict, efforts by the UNSC to decisively intervene and find a solution in Syria were stillborn, largely due to the endless debates and acrimony between the permanent members of the UNSC (Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015: 44; Thakur 2013: 68-69). The international community was divided over Syria with the US, the European Union (EU), Turkey, and the Gulf States, especially Qatar and Saudi Arabia, openly backing the armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad and Russia and China heatedly opposing any pressure on Damascus together, with Iran (Hove and Mutanda 2015: 561-564; Trenin 2013: 3). Some scholars believe that Russia demonstrated its ability to check the Western and the US hegemony in the Middle East by supporting anti-Western forces (Dannreuther 2009) whilst others disagree. It is highly likely that Russia was successful in Syria, partly because Obama wanted to avoid an Iraqi-style intervention, with its consequent implications for American casualties. Otherwise, Obama could have stopped Putin, if he had chosen to do so.
Russia opposed any UNSC resolution on Syria fearing that it would be misused as was the case on resolution 1973 on Libya, which was violated (Hove 2015). Furthermore, Russia’s response to the Arab Spring events, particularly Syria, had a combination of ideational and ideological dimensions (Dannreuther 2015: 77, 79). Therefore, similar to what Israel is to the US, Syria (since the coming to power of Putin in 2000) has remained an ally of Russia to this day, getting economic and military help (Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015: 46). Syria is also home to Russia’s Mediterranean fleet.
For the US and the West, their interests in Syria range from expanding democracy to the establishment of a pro-US and pro-Western regime for the defense and furtherance of their interests (Sharp and Blanchard 2012: 7). This is in light of Syria and Iran’s enduring opposition to Israel and propping up terrorist groups fighting against it and American interests (Gelbert 2010: 36). To this end, the US interests in the Syrian crisis include, but is not limited to:
… limiting civilian casualties, preventing jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda from establishing safe haven in Syria, countering Iranian influence and containing its support for Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah and other militant networks, arresting the proliferation of Syria’s chemical weapons, preventing the use of chemical and biological weapons and limiting regional instability. (Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015: 49)
That is the reason why the US allies in Europe and the region, namely France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Britain jointly called on Russia to stop bombing the Syrian rebels (Nemtsova 2015) they recruited, armed, and deployed to fight Assad. Added to this, relations between the US and Russia were at their lowest in October 2016 following Russia and Assad regime airstrikes on the rebel-held part of Aleppo. Relations were also tainted because of the conflict over Ukraine. Russia deployed the air defense missiles into Syria after Turkey shot down a Russian jet on November 31, 2015 and also moved more warships to the Mediterranean Sea as a show of force in October 2016. In addition, ‘nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles were moved into the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad’, in response to increasing the US threats to Russia and NATO’s movement ‘of military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders’ (Worley 2016).
Russia’s interests in the Middle East embody: undermining Western influence by exploiting the Arab-Western and Arab-Israeli tensions; acquiring a foothold in the Mediterranean (which they have accomplished), Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf; disrupting Arab-Western oil bond to weaken Western Europe; and taking part in the resolution of Middle Eastern conflicts (Richard 2014: 40). Up to the present day, Russia and China have vetoed four UNSC resolutions against Assad (Siddiqui 2016: 2). Countries in the former Soviet bloc support the Russian stance on Syria and they include China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Tanzania, and Pakistan (Richard 2014: 45). Accordingly, while China’s support to the Russian position in Syria has been vital for Russia, in light of the veto power of the UNSC five permanent members, Russia still had the power to take the position it had taken without Chinese support, especially at the UNSC. Undoubtedly, the Syrian conflict has had profound regional and global repercussions (Olanrewaju and Joshua 2015) amid the major power tensions and diplomatic deadlock regenerating twentieth century Cold War memories.
The Ukrainian Case
The Ukrainian crisis occurred in a context of a struggle for influence between Russia and Europe in what they considered their ‘common neighborhood’ (Charap and Shapiro 2014: 268). The crisis was singled out as undeniably the most serious crisis in Europe after the end of the Cold War (Burns 2015: 63). As a result of the Ukrainian crisis,
Relations between Washington and Moscow are arguably already worse than U.S.-Soviet/Russian relations at any time since 1986, when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev established the practice of wary but constructive cooperation that steadily improved during Reagan’s remaining years in office and throughout the George H.W. Bush administration. Moreover, mutual expectations between 1986 and 1992 were cautious yet positive, while today they are cynical and negative. (Saunders 2014: 2)
Thus, Ukraine represents the geographical locus and symbol of the rivalry between Russia and the EU (Trenin 2014: 3). Among other things, competing offers to Ukraine have been witnessed. Brussels on the one hand, wanted the country to sign an Association Agreement with the EU, while on the other, Moscow wanted it to join the Eurasian Economic Union (Haukkala 2015: 33). This undoubtedly turned the Ukraine crisis into a violent crisis which had far-reaching global implications (Allison 2014: 1256). Putin used the Ukrainian crisis to boost his popularity against a backdrop of urban protests in 2011 and 2012 by appealing to Russian nationalism in the face of a supposed threat from abroad in his effort to return to the presidency (Trenin 2014: 3).
The failure by the EU to attract Ukraine was tactical victory for Putin over the EU because its success could have recorded the West’s institutional enlargement (Mearsheimer 2014). Similarly, Walker (2015: 142) asserts that the post-Cold War security structural design and the expansion of NATO played a central role in generating the conditions for and aggravating the Ukraine crisis. Additionally, Rutland (2015: 130) notes that without negating the crucial role of the domestic factors, Ukraine’s geopolitical position and the involvements of contending external powers pursuing their own self-interests culminated in the Ukraine crisis. It was Putin’s pressure on the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych which resulted in the latter’s last minute reversal of his plan to join the Eastern Europe Partnership at a pending EU summit and the decision to accept a Russian counteroffer of US15 billion dollars (Mearsheimer 2014). This prompted unrest by peaceful and unarmed protesters with the EU flags against their president’s decision. The decision to use force against protesters increased their numbers to about 500, 000 on December 1, 2013 and they demanded the overthrow of the corrupt Yanukovych regime (Charap and Shapiro 2014: 268-269). To this end, the root cause of the Ukraine crisis was NATO expansion with the dominant aim to usurp Ukraine from Russia’s side and incorporate it in the EU (Mearsheimer 2014). Added to this, the eastward enlargement of the EU and the West’s support of those calling for democracy in Ukraine, dating back to the 2004 Orange Revolution, were also important factors. In fact, the Russian leaders stubbornly opposed NATO expansionism as early as the mid-1990s. Even in contemporary times, they made it unequivocal that they would not watch while their vital neighbor became a Western fortress. This is why Putin could not stomach what he viewed as a US-West driven coup d’état of Ukraine’s constitutionally elected and pro-Russian leader. He responded by annexing Crimea, an isthmus, he was afraid would become a host to a NATO naval base. Again, this made him work vigorously to undermine Ukraine in anticipation of its abandonment of the determination to be part of the West (Mearsheimer 2014). In this light, the actions by Putin to stop Ukraine to slip into the hands of the EU leaving Russia should not have come as a surprise because Russia had core interests in Ukraine, which were threatened (Allison 2014: 1257; Likhotal 2015: 85; Miller 2014).
According to Steele (2015: 28), ‘… Ukraine has deep historical, cultural, linguistic, economic and political ties with Moscow and any effort to pull it into an anti-Russian alliance would be playing with fire.’ Likewise, Tsygankov (2015: 281) notes that Ukraine was more important to Russia in many respects compared to Georgia, where it had also been militarily involved in 2008. Among other things, Russia and Ukraine share an extensive physical border and Slavic values and have strictly co-dependent economies, demonstrated by half (50 percent) of energy exports of Russia to the EU passing through Ukrainian pipelines, formerly constructed by the Soviet state as a combined energy system (Tsygankov 2015: 281). Russia’s long-term interests in Ukraine embody cultural (many Russian speakers live in Ukraine), economic (Russia’s heavy industries, particularly the military-industrial complex, have close ties with firms in Ukraine’s east), and strategic (Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based in Crimea) considerations (Miller 2014).
In this light, Russia suspected that Western powers were seeking to empower a hostile government in the western part of the country with the intention of preventing its integration efforts (Allison 2014: 1257). Joining Ukraine to the EU was perceived as likely to permanently limit Russian prospective as a European regional power apart from being used as a launchpad to contest the correctness of the Russian political system.
Conclusion
The US-Russian relations were strained again after 1991 demonstrating that a new Cold War is in our midst. As this study has shown, Russia in both cases has displayed its will and power to intervene in external conflicts using real and perceived threats of both hard and soft power in a drive to check the hitherto unchecked US influence in the global arena. To this end, while others do not view the actions and counteractions and threats by the US and Russia in Syria and Ukraine as representing a new Cold War, the two conflicts do, in actual fact, represent a new Cold War. However, mindful of the global canvas of the twentieth century Cold War, it can also be argued that what we see today is at best a limited Cold War between Moscow and Washington. Today’s Russia is at best a Eurasian great power rather than a global superpower, which the Soviet Union in the twentieth century was. She is ill-equipped, unlike the former Soviet Union, to take the US head-on in an all-out confrontation because of the lack of strategic parity. Therefore, Russia is simply taking advantage of the US’s other constraints (which are well known and too numerous to discuss here) and also desperately trying to safeguard, in the face of its isolation, its geostrategic interests in Ukraine and Syria. However, we should not ignore the fact that the US-Russia confrontation has reached alarming levels, which risks sliding the world into a dangerous World War III. Therefore, the two should be encouraged to dialogue and return to the art of diplomacy in a drive to maintain lasting peace and international security.