Why the Cold War is Still Dead

In early August, Russian tanks rolled into Georgia and IR students the world over started celebrating the return of their field of study to mainstream relevance. Then, I thought for about two seconds and realized that was a very twisted version of wishful thinking. First of all, none of us should wish the return of the Cold War, it would be miserable (doing missle drills during the middle of your work day would be very annoying). Second and more importantly, it just is not realistic. Reason being–and I will use a quickly tiring cliche here–is that the world is too interconnected.

I cite as my principle evidence what has happened to the Russian economy post-Georgian invasion. In this recent article, FT reporters list a number of disheartening statistics if you are a Russian investor. The main statistic is that the Russian stock market has plunged 45% since May. While this slide predates the invasion of Georgia, its hard to say that the Russian economic slide and bellicose Russian behavior are not related. It may also be true that the correlation is the reverse of what you would expect, that the economic slide precipitated the Russian invasion because politicians wanted to show national strength amidst economic weakness. I highly doubt that to be the case, but if that was their strategy, then they only accomplished further weakening their economy and putting themselves further into a corner politically. Regardless of what they may have thought, sabre-rattling is not an effective course of action anymore.

The difference between now and the pre-1989 world is economic inter-connectedness. The USSR could behave the way it did because it actually had control of a sphere of influence both politically and economically. In those days, its satellite countries traded within the Soviet bloc and their currencies were not traded on open markets. Now, even the Ruble is traded on an open market and former Soviet countries of all shapes and sizes (Russia included) are joining the free trade regime. Ukraine and Georgia may not be members of NATO but they are members of the WTO. Then there are the EU members from the former Soviet bloc like Poland. Russian wealth is also largely dependent on Europe buying Russian oil. In short, these economic ties preclude any swift turn backwards in time or allegiance to the Cold War.

What does this have to do with the impending presidential election? Well, from the Republican side we have a man with a wealth of foreign policy knowledge and experience who professes to be an economic novice. On the Democratic side we have a very intelligent yet untested man who seems to understand the way the world works. Because of his inexperience (yes, I said it but I don’t mean it like that) it is hard to say if Mr. Obama would be capable of handling foreign policy’s complexities but he has given every indication that he is intelligent enough to understand it fully. However, I view Mr. McCain’s foreign policy record as detrimental. He has foreign policy experience but his views were cemented during a truly bygone era when communists were communists and foreign policy entailed blockades and nuclear buildups. Now, the so-called “communists” are better capitalists then we are and blockading just about anyone hurts someone’s pockets that we do not want it to. The fact is that economics is foreign policy and foreign policy determines the prevailing economics. Having a rudimentary understanding of either, or even claiming that the two are separate, is simply unacceptable.

Response: Know the reality behind the words

This post started as a comment to “John Bolton’s farcical ‘realism’”, but I think it’s worth considering separately.

Oddly enough, I agree with part of Mr. Bolton’s quote:

…’walls’ exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict.

However, I would argue that the “walls” are clearly metaphorical and the “human conflict” that results is not necessarily “conflict” per se, but can (and must) result in the positive recognition of differences and the discussion that can perhaps lead to mutually shared values. Recognizing these differences is essential, provided that we realize that very few differences between people are truly intractable.

The rest of his quote seems ridiculous. Having an English teacher for a parent, I almost never correct grammar because I find it annoying, but I think in this case correcting Mr. Bolton’s grammar reveals a major flaw in his thinking. He claims that the Berlin Wall was a result of the “hostility of communism toward freedom”. The flaw in this statement is that communism is an idea, not a thing, and it, on its own, cannot have any hostility toward anything. It is the people who hold certain ideas who can be hostile, not the ideas themselves. The reason I bring this up is that it is a prevalent flaw of politicians, particularly current ones, and it has real implications. The most obvious example is the “war on terror”, which led the US (and NATO, in one case) into wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, not “terror”, because that would be impossible. The problem with this is that we will never rid the world of terror or people who would like us to suffer from it. Attacking the idea, and not those who hold it or the conditions which drive them to take those positions, is precisely what leads us into incoherent policy and inescapable military commitments.

To be fair about it, Obama’s use of the word hope is, I fear, equally dangerous. “Hope”, on its own, cannot be audacious, the people who are hopeful are. But people have real goals and real aspirations, hope does not. The worry about Barack Obama is that this talk of hope allows him to gain the favor with the American public without anyone familiarizing themselves with what “hope” actually stands for. Once he starts enacting policies, people may realize that the kool-aid they drank during the campaign tastes a little more bitter than they thought.

The root of this problem is the citizen. It is our responsibility to know the true nature and policy of these ideas and make sure that we don’t just blindly accept the ideology. So how do we sift through the semantics? Moreover, how do we start to change the behavior of our leadership so they actually provide information and not just empty statements? That’s our challenge. Its time to get informed.

John Bolton’s farcical “realism”

Republicans have always laid claim to some sort of realism in foreign policy. Meet force with force, they say, because that’s the only way to deal with bullies. Usually Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler is mentioned, as well as John Kennedy’s disastrous meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. For reference take a look at John Bolton’s June 5 opinion in the LA Times.

The public has bought in to Republican “realism”. John McCain, for example, believes he would make a better commander in chief than Barack Obama and polls exist to show that the public agrees. Democrats, like Obama and John Kerry before him, are easily stereotyped by media pundits as wishy-washy pansies who think we can all just get along.

Nowhere has this depiction of Republicans and Democrats been made more clearly, or unfairly, than in John Bolton’s most recent opinion, again in the LA Times. Bolton not only claims that Barack Obama’s vision of the world is “radical”, “naive”, and “dangerous”, but also that Obama’s so far from the mainstream that he’s “on another planet”.

The crux of Bolton’s argument comes towards the middle of the article in a discussion of the Berlin Wall:

But beyond the incoherence [of Obama's foreign policy], there is a deeper problem, namely that “walls” exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.

The distinction Bolton seems to be making is between realism and idealism. But Bolton, perhaps unknowingly, aligns himself with the idealist position. How so? Realism holds that conflict in international relations is owed to either the quest for power or the quest for security. For a realist, then, the Berlin Wall was either the consequence of two states struggling for power (irrespective of ideology), or of a failure of communication that spiraled out of control into the infamous security dilemma (often recognizable as an arms race or, in this case, as the building and militarizing of the Berlin Wall). But Bolton is not a realist.

Bolton’s position is deceptively idealist. He sees the Berlin Wall, and no doubt the Cold War, as a confrontation between two ideologies: communism and liberalism (although Bolton prefers the term freedom, which isn’t associated with effete senators from Massachusetts). He even anthropomorphizes communism, assigning it qualities like “hostility” and perhaps ‘evil’. In Bolton’s vision of the world ideas drive interests, not the other way around.

That said, let’s drop the semantics game and address the more practical implications of Bolton’s so-called “realism”. Should we agree with him that conflict between countries is best described as a titanic collision of competing and intractable ideologies, or might it be more realistic to acknowledge that cooperation is possible on the basis of shared interests? Is the Homo sapiens species really so different in France or Germany or Iraq or Iran that there isn’t any profit in confronting some challenges together? Bolton facetiously claims that Obama’s from another planet, but I’m more inclined to believe that Bolton’s from another planet. His “realism” is a farce; it can’t be realism if it has little or no basis in reality.