3 January 2024
Martin Dewhirst reviews New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks, Scribe, Melbourne, London, Minneapolis, 2024, x + 511 pp. ISBN 9781915590817 £18.99
How many hundreds of times have I read and heard that the Cold War ended (not ‘was suspended’) in about 1989 and that Russia suddenly became post-Soviet (not neo-Soviet) in the autumn of 1991 or very shortly afterwards?! But who could be more Soviet than Yel’tsin and Putin – both of them, in their very different ways, almost caricatures of homo sovieticus as depicted so brilliantly and in such detail by Aleksandr Zinov’ev, who was himself such a brilliant representative of this type of human being and who voluntarily, with his wife, returned to neo-Soviet Russia after a few years in the West.
David Sanger’s brand-new book about America’s efforts to ‘defend the West’ could not have come out at a better time, shortly before one aged American President is replaced by another aged American President, both of whom, unlike Putin, seem to be unable to think and speak fluently in any but their native language. I do, of course, regret that this remarkable volume has only three, not four, main players. The European Union (E.U.) gets only six, and Britain gets only five, entries in the splendid Index. The absurd, but dangerous, organisation ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’, now closed down, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, are not even mentioned, let alone criticised. The ‘West’ as a whole, including the USA, does get several, but not very many, references in the Index, but not as a player who could attempt in part to replace the USA if President Trump makes what turns out to be a not very artistic deal with Moscow and/or Beijing.
That said, all four parts of this text, ‘Dreaming of One World,’ ‘The Arc of History,’ ‘Wars, Hot and Cold’ and ‘Fighting for Control’ should be read by anyone and everyone who really wants to know how difficult it has been and will be to avoid a real Third World War. I have room here to mention only a few of the points the author and co-author make that set me thinking.
The Prologue ends (p. 15.) with the suggestion that a U.S. General had ‘put his finger on one of the most unsettling features of the new geopolitical era: It is part 1914, part 1941, and part 2022. All at once.’ One of the dangers, to which I have already alluded, is the illusion (or delusion) that ‘Economics would ultimately trump nationalism and territorial ambition’ (p. 18). For far too long, Washington:
‘assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objectives. […] Republican and Democratic presidents publicly played down the mounting evidence that China had territorial ambitions that stretched throughout the Pacific, that its use of cyber tools to steal both industrial and state secrets was designed to serve a broader national agenda, and that its growing economic power would foster a commensurate desire for political influence – as it did for every other rising power across history.’ (p. 56.)
‘In a quarter century, Americans went from viewing China as an economic opportunity and diplomatic partner to wondering if our technology and political competition placed us on an eventual course toward war.’ (p. 57.)
(Incidentally, unless you are already really tech savvy, do check out ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘Microsoft and Russian cyberwarfare’ in the Index!)
I would question the authors’ view that ‘another’ difference between the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the illegal expanded reinvasion of Ukraine sixty years later ‘was that Khrushchev was not a lone decision-maker – he had to worry about the views of a collective Soviet leadership. Putin did not.’ (p. 316.) It’s strange that there’s no mention in this long book of the carefully cut and edited film of many of Putin’s closest colleagues, some of whom questioned his plans to re-invade Ukraine in 2022. Of course, they may have been ‘play acting,’ to give the false impression of ‘Putinist democracy,’ but it might also mean that some of his closest colleagues could some day soon turn against Putin(ism) once his demise is officially announced, roughly as happened after Stalin’s very timely death in 1953.
I am, however, in complete agreement with the authors when they write later:
‘To make up for his outsize mistakes, to justify a war going bad, Putin was trying to turn his land grab into a grand existential struggle. To hear him tell it, it was about more than territory. It was about Russia’s survival. Of course, it was about his survival too.’ (p. 374)
Naturally, Putin didn’t want to go down in history as the ruler of Russia who had ‘lost’ Ukraine for ever. It’s reassuring to read this sentence on page 387: ‘“We learned more from the first eighteen months of this war [against Ukrainian independence – m.d.] than from the past thirty years,” another Pentagon leader told me.’ Better late than never, no doubt.
Nonetheless, all ‘three superpowers – Russia, China, and the United States – appeared less focused on competing with each other than on managing fractures within’ (p. 410). ‘The overarching lesson, perhaps, was that none of the three major powers had as much influence and control – over their own populations, their neighbors, or the world order – as they thought’ (p. 411).
The Epilogue to this amazing book sums up the authors’ conclusions:
‘The post-Cold War era, named for what it wasn’t, was marked by such exponential wealth production and technological progress that no one could imagine reverting to a pre-networked, preglobalized age.’ (p. 435)
Although the authors misuse the word ‘collaboration’ to mean ‘cooperation’, their ‘take’ on the ‘outlines’ of the forthcoming era seems to me to be convincing:
‘Globalization is out; self-reliance and control of a nation’s own supply chains are in. Nationalism is back in vogue, and so are the strongmen who preach it. […] As that suggests, the addition of new players, acting sometimes independently and sometimes in tandem, makes the current era far more complex to manage than the old one.’ (p. 436)
‘Much of the money America once spent on missiles and fighter aircraft may well be better directed now to working on artificial intelligence techniques that help preserve the independence of our elections or halt crippling cyberattacks on our infrastructure.’ (p. 443)
‘For the next decade, the competition for supremacy will take place in many arenas, but three interlocking arms races will command the most attention: nuclear weapons, space, and artificial intelligence. All rely, at their core, on who can produce the most potent next-generation chips, which explains the struggle for semiconductor supremacy under way. But each race requires a different strategy, a different mindset, and different kinds of investment.’ (p. 444)
Can we continue to avoid a ‘direct conflict’ between the USA, the Russian Republic and mainland China? (p. 450)
I would add not only the E.U., but all the rest of the world to that ‘little list’. So far as Russia is concerned, I keep on thinking of Edward Gibbon and of a not so massive future work that someone somewhere will write on ‘The Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire.’ Perhaps she or he will compare Putin not to Stalin, Hitler, Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad but merely to Mussolini, after whose demise Italy took on another and better lease of life. But the book under review here is not merely a ‘must read’, but a ‘must read NOW and IN FULL.’
