By GILBERTO LOPES*
The Birth of a New World: The Cold War Has Not Ended and Will Not End Peacefully
Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his allies in the George H. W. Bush administration had achieved everything they wanted: a swift and peaceful unification of Germany, the promise of the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces, and the incorporation of a unified Germany into NATO. Their victory seemed complete. The global balance of power was peacefully tilting in favor of the West. It was the 1990s.
George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote to the president earlier this year warning that the move would come to nothing unless Washington found a way to perpetuate its power on the continent.[I] The United States did not want to let the situation go to waste.
As the process of German unification accelerated, so did American efforts to secure its position in Europe and its role in NATO. “The Cold War is ending,” said Brent Scowcroft, and when it is over, “NATO and the United States’ position in Europe must remain the vital instrument for peace and stability that we inherited from our predecessors.”
It was then that Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would cease to be a military threat to the Soviet Union and would be transformed into a political organization, much more than a military one. Gorbachev replied that NATO's eastward expansion remained unacceptable.
Economically dependent and militarily occupied since the end of the Second World War, the countries of Eastern Europe, faced in the 1980s with the difficulties of the USSR in continuing to supply them with the subsidized oil with which they financed their imports, and unable to pay their bills, gradually fell into the hands of international financial institutions. Later, after being freed from Soviet occupation and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, they were gradually incorporated into the structures of their old enemy, NATO.
Bills to receive
The same was not true of Russia. Helmut Kohl had made it clear that any move toward German unification could occur in conjunction with efforts to overcome the division of Europe, to build something like Mikhail Gorbachev suggested when he spoke of a “common European home.”
Helmut Kohl told Bush that, given the financial situation of the USSR, the question of Germany's membership in NATO was a question of "money." That West Germany should assume the GDR's commitments to Moscow, but now paid in marks. That is, how much Germany was willing to pay for the Soviet troops to withdraw and Moscow to accept its incorporation into NATO.
Brent Scowcroft suggested that paying $20 billion to secure an end to the Cold War on Washington's terms was a good deal.
But Washington, accustomed to imposing drastic economic reforms on indebted countries (including those in Eastern Europe), was not entirely convinced. They were also demanding economic reforms in the USSR, which Mikhail Gorbachev resisted. A project that included the privatization of the main Russian state-owned companies, with the progressive expansion of neoliberal principles throughout the world. A bill that (at least until now) they have not been able to pay in full, despite the progress made during the corrupt years of Boris Yeltsin's government (1991 and 1999).
A country with immense resources and a powerful victor in the Second World War, Russia was able to resist the offensive of a West that, after all, was not attracted to the “common home” suggested by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The truth is that the political nature of the conflict between the capitalist West and Soviet socialism after the Second World War obscured its geopolitical dimension, which emerged more clearly after the first was resolved.
After a chaotic transition period, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been regaining its place in the world. Instead of the “common European home”, the West (United States and NATO) has chosen to try to encircle it, to push NATO’s borders eastwards, without heeding any of the many warnings that this was unacceptable for Russia. The results are quite visible and are unfolding before our eyes, without the West heeding Moscow’s warnings about the dramatic consequences of trying to militarily defeat a nuclear power.
Other circumstances
A weakened Mikhail Gorbachev had said in other circumstances that NATO's eastward advance was unacceptable to the USSR. Thirty-five years later, the situation is different and the consequences of the West's miscalculations are evident.
The victorious Germany of just 35 years ago contrasts with its current situation, as demonstrated by the economic analysis of the QNB financial group. An example of high productivity, the German economy was the driving force behind the European economy after the Second World War and the unification of the country. It was then that Helmut Kohl imposed on Mikhail Gorbachev the conditions for the Soviet withdrawal from Germany.
The German economy is currently considered the “sick man of Europe”. It is expected to grow by 0,9% per year in the period 2022-2026, well below the already weak 2% growth seen before the Covid pandemic. Since its peak in 2017, industrial production has fallen by 16%. These are disappointing results for an economy that, in addition to negative trends in the industrial sector, faces significant obstacles arising from inadequate infrastructure and a loss of competitiveness, as highlighted in the QNB report.
In turn, Washington's triumph in the Cold War was built on the financial policy adopted by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker during the Ronald Reagan administration. A shock policy that bankrupted thousands of companies. But high interest rates flooded the United States with new capital, the basis of a debt that is now a metastasizing cancer.
The final act of the Cold War, which was thought to have occurred in 1990, is in fact unfolding before our eyes. The two main victors of that time – the United States and Germany – are now two giants with feet of clay, confronted by a very different world from the one they defeated 35 years ago.
Although Moscow has not confirmed this news, the German daily Time and patience announced on October 1 that Chancellor Olaf Scholz wanted to speak by telephone with the Russian president before the G20 Summit, scheduled for mid-November in Brazil, interested in supporting a diplomatic initiative to end the war.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the changing landscape more clearly than the nature of the talks between Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 – as the Eastern European regimes were crumbling and the Soviet Union itself was falling apart – and that of the eventual talks between Olaf Scholz and Vladimir Putin today.
the red line
The two sides have different goals in this conflict: Russia is trying to secure a secure environment, which it sees as threatened by Ukraine's NATO membership. It is not fighting thousands of kilometers from its territory, but on its border.
This seems to be an essential element in the analysis of the situation. Especially when the most aggressive sectors of the West claim that a victory in Ukraine would be just the beginning of new conquests. An expectation that is impossible to sustain in the current scenario – be it political or military.
The only “red line” between the West – specifically between Washington and Moscow – is something that forces one of the parties to drastically escalate the conflict, estimated Sergey Poletaev, an analyst specializing in Russian foreign policy, in an article published on the Russian website RT, on September 30th.
For the United States Undersecretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Celeste Wallander, a Russian victory in Ukraine would call into question the global position of the United States.
For former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who represents the most extreme anti-Russian positions and who will replace the Spaniard Josep Borrel as head of foreign policy at the European Commission, “Ukrainians are not just fighting for their freedom and territorial integrity. They are fighting for the freedom of Europe. If the Russians succeed, they will come back for more, because nothing will stop them.”
For former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was instrumental in rejecting any peace agreement before the war began, “the West is benefiting enormously from the war in Ukraine.” “Kiev is fighting for our interests, at a relatively low cost,” he added. A cost that has already exceeded 200 billion dollars, which economies such as the British, French or even the US, deeply in debt, can only bear at the cost of deepening these imbalances.
As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of the Donald Trump administration said, the expectation is that if the United States can defeat Moscow, it should convince the Russians to join it in confronting China together.
This does not seem to be a realistic expectation. In September, the Russian president announced his new doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons. “We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus. Nuclear weapons may be used if an enemy poses a critical threat to the sovereignty of either state, even through the use of conventional weapons.”
Meanwhile, the West dreams of finally incorporating Russia into its world and thus completing a task that seemed finished with the end of the Cold War, but today this is an aspiration that seems totally impossible.
However, considering the military capabilities at stake, it cannot be ruled out that the result will end up being – now yes – a final solution…
It is up to the rest of the world to make the necessary efforts to prevent this madness.
*Gilberto Lopes is a journalist, PhD in Society and Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Author, among other books, of Political crisis of the modern world (uruk).
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Note
[I] The details of these stories are told in Fritz Bartel's remarkable book, The triumph of broken promises. HarvardUniversityPress, 2022.
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