GHOSTS OF HISTORY

Gwynne Dyer

“The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some say that it has already begun,” said Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and the man who inadvertently administered a mercy killing to communism in Europe. He’s 83 years old, he played a leading role in ending the last Cold War, and he’s practically a secular saint. Surely he knows what he’s talking about.

No he doesn’t. Not only has this new Cold War not begun already, but it’s hard to see how you could get it going even if you tried. The raw material for such an enterprise is simply unavailable. You can summon the ghosts of history all you want, but they are dead and they can’t hear you.

Gorbachev was speaking in Berlin, now once again the capital of a united Germany, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even he would agree that it turned out to be, on balance, a good thing, but he is a great deal more ambivalent about the collapse of European communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev was and is a romantic, and he undoubtedly agrees with his rather less cuddly successor as president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” So he ends up defending Putin’s actions and blaming the United States of America and Nato for this alleged drift into a new Cold War.

It’s all nonsense. Nothing could have saved the old Soviet Union. It was the last of the European empires to fall, mainly because it was land-based rather than sea-based, but only half its population was Russian. When it finally dissolved, 15 different nations emerged from the wreckage, and its collapse was no greater a loss to civilization than the fall of the British or French empires.

Local problem

And the main reason you can’t have a new Cold War is precisely because the “evil empire” (as Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union) no longer exists. There is only Russia, a largely de-industrialized country that is run by a kleptocratic elite and makes its living by exporting oil and gas. Russia has only 140 million people (less than half of the US, less than a third of the European Union), and its armies are no longer based around Berlin and all through eastern Europe. They are 750 km further east, guarding Russia’s own frontiers. They occasionally grab a bit of territory that isn’t covered by a Nato guarantee (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk), but they dare not go any further. Which leaves the question: who is to blame for this regrettable hostility between Russia and the Western powers? The West, in Gorbachev’s view. In fact, he had a whole list of complaints about Western threats, crimes and betrayals.

Nato broke its promise and let all the eastern European countries that had been Soviet satellites during the Cold War join Nato. It let Kosovo declare its independence from Russia’s traditional friend, Serbia. It launched wars of “regime change” in the Middle East that Moscow disapproved of. It even planned a missile defence system that allegedly threatened Russia’s nuclear deterrent.

Yes, Russia has been invaded a lot in its history, but the license to be paranoid expires after 50 years. Of course the eastern European countries all clamoured to join Nato; they’re still terrified of Russia. But nobody is going to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. The Ukrainians were told years ago that they couldn’t shelter under Nato’s security blanket, and they have chosen to defy Moscow anyway. They may pay a high price for that, and the Western alliance’s relations with Russia may go into the deep freeze. But it will be just a little local difficulty, not a huge event that defines an entire era.