The new book by David E. Sanger, assisted by Mary K. Brooks, analyzes New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’ Struggle to Defend the West (Crown, April 16, 2024), portrays a global shock that took the US and most of Europe by surprise: the sharp revival of superpower conflict.
Sanger, national security expert at The New York Times, underscores the political-military challenges facing the United States and its partners in world affairs now and for years to come.
It took years and much bitter experience for many politicians and political experts to realize that, contrary to some forecasts, history did not “end” in the late 1980s. Yes, communist ideology withered but not Russian and Chinese ambitions to weaken and displace the world’s reigning superpower and the order it had created.
The United States and its allies welcomed first China (2001) and then post-Soviet Russia (2011) into the World Trade Organization, hoping their leaders and publics would see the advantages of cooperation in a rules-based world order. But some leaders in Beijing and Moscow looked at economic distress and domestic upheavals in the US and Europe and calculated that conditions were ripe to push Washington off the pedestal constructed by its victory in 1945.
Putin’s Russia, to be sure, is a declining power. Partnered with the GDP and dynamism of China, however, the world’s largest territory might someday operate as an authoritarian superpower. Skeptical realists point to deep tensions with Russia that are likely to generate friction as China becomes more powerful. But that contingency is unlikely to weaken Sino-Russian cooperation for some years. Prudence demands the West prepare for the worst.
It is only in the past few years that the erstwhile faith in the power of globalization has come to be regarded as a fantasy of early 21st-century American foreign policy. It was a bipartisan assumption that the post-Cold War age would last indefinitely. But “every assumption across different administrations was wrong,” one of President Biden’s advisers told Sanger. A lot of wishful thinking contributed to US policy — that the internet would bring political liberty; and that international trade would liberalize China and Russia.
In the first Cold War, “containment” meant preventing other countries from becoming communist. Now it means starving American competitors of key technologies. Such policies antagonized Putin as well as Xi Jinping. Sanger quotes Russian analyst Anatoly I. Utlin: “For five centuries Russia never paid tribute to anybody. Now for the first time, we became a minor partner. You are boss; we are partners.”
As the war in Ukraine dragged on, Russian officials have talked about using nuclear weapons. Some talk has been mere “chatter,” a US official told Sanger. But intercepted conversations revealed senior Russian military commanders explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.
The Putin regime threatens to use nuclear weapons against a state that gave up nuclear weapons on its territory nearly 30 years earlier and turned the weaponry over to Moscow in accord with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine thought that, in return, it was receiving an assurance of protection. Instead, it got a threat of annihilation.
Russia ignored nuclear risks. In 2022, it sent troops into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone where the soil was still radioactive, and without protective gear. In Ukraine’s southeast, a war has raged on the perimeter of a giant nuclear power plant, where six nuclear reactors have been occupied by Russian forces to gain battlefield advantage. For Putin, Zaporizhzhia is not a war trophy; it is part of his plan to exercise control over all of Ukraine, and intimidate or blackmail much of Europe.
Hopes for an end to history have ended. The post-Cold War era, named for what it wasn’t, was marked by such wealth production and technological progress that no one could imagine reverting to a pre-networked, pre-globalized age.
The key to keeping it was cooperation among the major nations. So, whenever they seemed to row in the same direction–agreeing to slow climate change or limit the spread of nuclear weapons–each stroke was celebrated.
Yet instead of becoming more frequent, these bursts of collaboration grew increasingly fleeting. It took longer than it should have for the US to realize what that decline portended.
Walter C. Clemens is an Associate, at Harvard Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Jinping Owe Their Victims (Westphalia, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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