A New Cold War?

Russian and Chinese hostility toward the United States creates a New Cold War, but treating the two adversaries differently can make things break our way. US strategists should pick the bigger long-term threat, Russia or China, and treat it firmly and the smaller one flexibly, avoiding the rigid diplomatic and military policies that prolonged the old Cold War. The New Cold War will be long and deep only if the current Sino-Russian entente turns into an alliance. A hostile Russia alone can & cause mischief but, compared to the old Soviet Union, is weak and sufferable. Russia and China together are a much tougher challenge. The Sino-Soviet split--Nixon must be given credit for utilizing it--marked the beginning of the end of the original Cold War. By avoiding rigid diplomatic and military policies that push Russia and China together, we can make the New Cold War shorter and less dangerous. The original Cold War ended not with a nuclear bang but with an economic whimper. Starting under Brezhnev's long reign, the inefficient Soviet economy fell further behind until Gorbachev, in desperation, attempted a clumsy perestroika that achieved little but inflation. Capitalism, it turns out, really is better than socialism, something any good American capitalist should know. Marxists, misled by their ideology, bet that the US economy would collapse, and lost. (The United States is not immune to economic collapse; we got a whiff of it in 2008.) Panicked US responses did not win us the Cold War--economics and patience did. After 1991, the United States was marked less by triumphal strutting than by satisfied indifference. But during this time, little noticed by Americans and well before the Crimea Crisis, a New Cold War percolated. Even under Yeltsin in the 1990s, Russian foreign policy showed nationalistic hardening. In 1996, Russia, China, and three Central Asian states signed the Shanghai Five agreement and turned it into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2001 to oppose "US hegemony." SCO members occasionally practice amphibious operations, a warning to Taiwan. The SCO is not, however, a formal military alliance. Russian President Putin called the 1991 Soviet breakup "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and does not hide his aim to reassemble the Soviet Union by incorporating the "near abroad" into his Eurasian Economic Union, first signed in 2011 and due to begin in 2015. Putin's 2008 invasion of Georgia to "protect" the South Ossetians was really Moscow's warning to Tbilisi not to join NATO. His 2014 occupation of Crimea to protect ethnic Russians (and the Russian Black Sea fleet) also warned Ukraine not to join NATO, an improvised heavy-handed move that may push Kiev to do precisely that. Bad as Crimea is, it is not another 1938 Sudetenland crisis, and we should stop painting it as such. China's commonality with Russia: how to recover from weakness and humiliation. In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed China's "century of humiliation" over, and the term is standard today. (Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek felt the same, writing daily in his diary, "avenge humiliation.") Soon after Nixon took office in 1969, Chinese and Soviet forces skirmished on their Manchurian border. What was really at stake was leadership of the world communist movement and an independent Chinese nuclear force. Territorial questions, ostensibly settled, still lurk in Siberia. China, for a few years after Nixon's 1972 visit, looked like a reasonable partner to balance Soviet power. Americans supposed that we had "opened" China and set it on the path to capitalist democracy--an unrealistic thought. Deng Xaioping decreed the ancient wisdom of "hide your strength and bide your time," a policy that received little publicity or US notice. We were living in a bit of a dream world. China still claims Taiwan and could seize it. The 1999 "accidental" US bombing of a Chinese embassy building in Belgrade---used as a communications relay by the Serbian military for fighting in Bosnia--demonstrated China-US hostility. …