Winning the new Cold War: Roberto Rabel suggests that lessons from the old Cold War can help in dealing with intensifying geopolitical competition between the great powers.

• Author: Rabel, Roberto

Talk of a new Cold War has been given dramatic impetus since Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Yet such a prospect has been grist to the mill for commentators on international relations for some years--albeit usually focused more on geopolitical tensions between a rising China and the United States as a fading hegemon.

A commentary in 2019 by historian Niall Ferguson was typical of the trend:

When did Cold War II begin? Future historians will say it was in 2019. Some will insist that a new Cold War had already begun--with Russia--in 2014, when Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine. But the deterioration of Russian-American relations pales in comparison to the rise in Sino-American antagonism that has unfolded over the past couple of years. And though the United States and China can probably avoid a hot war, a second Cold War is still a daunting prospect. (1) If the outpouring of books, articles and media coverage along similar lines is to be believed, there are far-reaching implications for all countries because of global and regional geo-strategic environments being reconfigured along Cold War lines of bipolar competition, confrontation and coercion. For New Zealand, it threatens the benign Asia-Pacific era of peace and prosperity we have thrived in over the last three decades and obliges policy-makers to prepare for navigating the stormier seas of a geopolitically contested Indo-Pacific region.

Clearly, then, there is much at stake if Ferguson's 'daunting prospect' is imminent or already upon us. But to assess the utility and applicability of the trending trope of a new Cold War, it is important first to recall what history tells us about the old Cold War as a way of ordering an international political system and its significance.

What 'we now know', as magisterially summarised in his book of that title by leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, is that the Cold War was fundamentally an ideological confrontation--as shown by evidence from former communist bloc archives and underscored by the Cold War's unexpectedly abrupt ending with very little violence. (2) An ideology collapsed. States or nations were not losers per se: the Soviet Union disappeared but not Russia; Poland endured but not the Warsaw Pact.

Contrasting visions

While the Cold War lasted, international politics were dominated by competition between two contrasting visions of world order. Washington and Moscow effectively served as corporate headquarters for competing ideological franchises locked in a 45-year struggle for greater market share. But the franchise-holders of the 'Free World' and the communist bloc were more diverse than General Motors or Lada dealerships. In the end, relations proved more brittle between Moscow and its satellites; but it did not always seem that way, with nationalism and national interests playing key roles on both sides of the ideological divide.

Echoes of the Soviet-American confrontation reverberated regionally in different ways. The Cold War's impact was generally more deep-seated in Europe than in the United States. It defined national political cleavages in countries like France and Italy for decades--as well as dividing a continent. In Latin America, too, Cold War preoccupations intertwined with domestic politics, with the threat of communism regularly used to justify repressive regimes of the right, while the opposite tack prevailed in Cuba. In Asia and Africa, the Cold War was entangled with decolonisation, especially in Vietnam, which proved disastrous for Washington's collaborators in Saigon, though not for their counterparts in Seoul, Singapore or Jakarta. Thus, the Cold War was ideological in character, but the dynamics of that ideological contest were inflected locally.

Notwithstanding regional variants, the Cold War provided an ordering framework for international politics for almost half a century. It was essentially bipolar, with terms like 'the Third World' and 'non-alignment' referencing that bipolarity. It spilled over into culture and other aspects of national life--more in Soviet bloc countries and less in countries...