New book: Richard Sakwa, The Lost Peace: How The West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2023)

Introduction

PART I: FROM COLD WAR TO COLD WAR

1. The promise of peace

The Charter international system; Origins of the system; Cold War I; Helsinki and human rights; New Political Thinking; Towards a positive peace

2. Time of great hopes

New thinking bears fruit; China’s communism of reform; The contested peace; Towards victory; When a promise is not a promise; The clash of new world orders

3. How the peace was lost

The arc of ambition; Hostages to geopolitics; World order inside out; Paradoxes of enlargement; NATO expands

4. The road to war

The logic of conflict; Fateful steps; The security dilemma; Two rights make a wrong; European Security Treaty; The Reset and beyond

PART II: GREAT POWER CONFLICT

6.  America between leadership and primacy

US grand strategy; Liberal hegemony and American primacy; Primacy becomes dominance; The Trump disruption; Business almost as usual; Warning signs; New challenges

7.   Global China

China comes of age; China and world order; China’s horizons; Power and purpose; China in the world; Sino-US relations; The logic of conflict; Decoupling

8.  The Russia question

Fortress Russia; Is Russia revisionist? Patterns of alienation; Russian post-Westernism; Russia looks East; Russia takes on the West

9.  Europe redivided   

Europe as a power; Power in practice; From Ostpolitik to consolidated Atlanticism

PART III: WAR AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

10. The world on fire

100 seconds to midnight; The end of arms control; The permanent storm; A world on edge

11.  War in Europe

 The Ukrainian impasse; European security at stake; Slide to war; Last chance; The Russo-Ukrainian war

12. Crisis of the international system

A perilous world; Is this a cold war?; Diplomacy and the Charter system; Parting of the ways

13.  Rise of the political East

Sanctions and extra-territoriality; Towards a post-Western world; The Global South finds its voice; India’s quiet rise

14. Conclusion

Back to basics; False hopes; Pathways to peace

The end of the Cold War in 1989 offered the prospect of an enduring and new kind of peace. No longer torn by the harsh ideological divisions that had divided the world in the twentieth century, peace and reconciliation seemed possible. Global politics uniquely aligned to create a new peace order. The Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev from March 1985 repudiated much of the ideology on which the Cold War had been fought, transformed domestic politics and encouraged political reform among its allies in Eastern Europe. The Western powers overcame early doubts and engaged with the changes. A flood of declarations and agreements proclaimed an era of cooperation and development.

The beneficial effects of peace in Europe were anticipated to spread worldwide. This became the era of globalisation, the view that time and space could be conquered by new communication technologies, a thickening web of personal and business contacts facilitated by cheap air travel, and the interdependence fostered by trade and financial ties. A global middle class was coming into existence, based on similar patterns of consumption, orientations to culture and even with shared views of democracy, accountability and the rule of law. There is no automatic correlation between rising living standards and demands for democracy, yet in the long-run consumerist lifestyles generate demands for personal autonomy and the protection afforded by independent courts. When the Cold War ended in Europe China was still in the early stages of its transformation and pursuing its ‘quiet rise’ philosophy, yet the question of its political transformation was posed even then.

Above all, the Charter international system created at the end of World War II in 1945, based on the United Nations and its institutions, created a framework for international law, global governance, and humanitarian engagement, and it was to this universal order that Gorbachev appealed. Soviet reformers believed that with the end of the Cold War this system could now come into its own, allowing multilateral cooperation to flourish while tempering traditional geopolitical and great power rivalries. Much was achieved. The threat of an atomic Armageddon had long forced prudence in international affairs, and now the imminent shadow of nuclear war was lifted. The ‘peace dividend’ allowed military budgets to be slashed and the militarism that characterised the Cold War to be tempered. Globalisation and economic interdependence moderated political divisions, giving rise to ‘third way’ ideologies. The mystery of progress looked as if it had been resolved. With the purported ‘end of history’, humanity would unite on the principles of international law and market democracy.

These anticipations were disappointed, and not for the first time. The French Revolution of 1789 devoured its own and ended in military dictatorship. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 inspired millions to believe that revolutionary socialism would inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity, only to be drowned in an ocean of blood. Belief in renewal once again flowered in the late 1980s, this time not through revolution but precisely through the renunciation of violence. This was a genuinely ‘anti-revolutionary’ moment when the logic of domestic reconciliation and international cooperation appeared in prospect. Fundamental problems of poverty, inequality, under-development, neo-colonialism, neoliberal financialisation (delinking trade from the physical delivery of commodities and services), environmental degradation and much more remained, but the conditions for their resolution appeared unusually benign. A new dawn was in prospect.

Students of the Soviet Union, including me, earnestly described the transformative potential of Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring), the word he used from June 1987 to describe his programme of reform, and welcomed the easing of Cold War tensions. The achievements of that period were real, with the dismantling of the oppressive apparatus of state control, the efflorescence of debate and democratic aspirations throughout the region, and the liberation of the Soviet bloc states. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and by the end of the year the Communist systems were gone. Central and Eastern European countries were free to pursue their own destinies. The Soviet Union itself was torn apart by the forces unleashed by reform, and in December 1991 collapsed. The fifteen former Union Republics emerged as independent states with relatively little violence, although the suppressed tensions would detonate in later years. The dissolution of the Communist order and the disintegration of the Soviet Union were epochal events and continue to shape our ‘post-Cold War’ era.

The Cold War was described by George Orwell in October 1945 as a ‘peace that is no peace’. However, the concord that emerged after 1989-91 was at best uneasy and pregnant with new conflicts. This was a ‘cold peace’, in which fundamental questions of development and European security remained unresolved. The response of the French military leader Marshall Foch to the Versailles Treaty of June 1919 was unequivocal: ‘This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years’; and so it turned out. Europe and the world once again plunged into war in 1939. Equally, the post-1989 settlement became another Versailles peace, in the sense that it was partial and ultimately led to renewed conflict, described in this book as Cold War II. This struggle is now framed as one between liberal democracy and various types of authoritarianism, with great power contestation reinforced by cultural and civilisational mobilisation. The political West, created during and shaped by Cold War I, expanded, generating new boundaries between the enlarging liberal international order and outsiders. This was to be a democratic peace, which inevitably jarred with those who had other ideas about how best to achieve domestic development and national security. This was also to be a West-dominated peace, which added to the concerns of countries like Russia and China with great power ambitions of their own.

The Charter peace order is a moderated form of great power politics, with the lexicon of the balance of power and spheres of interest tempered by commitment to multilateral cooperation. At its core is the idea of ‘charter liberalism’, based on a pluralist idea of the international community. Gerry Simpson describes it as a ‘procedure for organizing relations among diverse communities’. This stands in contrast to ‘liberal anti-pluralism’, described by Simpson as ‘a liberalism that can be exclusive and illiberal in its effects’, above all in its ‘lack of tolerance for non-liberal regimes’. Liberalism thus divides into two traditions: ‘an evangelical version that views liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine or a social good worth promoting and the other more secular tradition emphasizing proceduralism and diversity’. This division took on sharper forms in the post-Cold War era. It underpins the tension between sovereign internationalism, in which respect for sovereignty is tempered by commitment to Charter values, and the more expansive view of international politics, described in this book as democratic internationalism, a radical version of liberal internationalism.

After 1989 the relatively structured bipolar Cold War I confrontation between the American and Soviet social systems shifted onto a different plane. Two peace systems – new world orders in the jargon of the time – were on offer, and it is the clash between the two that, paradoxically, generated conflict and ultimately war. The first is the sovereign internationalism to which Gorbachev appealed in launching his reforms. This is the system that the US, the Soviet Union, China and other victors constituted in 1945 in the form of the UN and its associated body of international law, norms and practices. The international system based on the UN Charter combines state sovereignty, the right of national self-determination (which facilitated decolonisation) and human rights. The UN Charter bans war as an instrument of policy and provides a framework for the peaceful resolution of international conflicts. Unlike the ill-fated League of Nations in the interwar years, the Charter peace order was given backbone by the creation of an internal ‘concert of powers’ represented by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the P5 group comprising the US, Russia, China, France and the UK. When the Soviet Union launched its reforms in the late 1980s, it appealed to the Charter system as its model for peace and development, promoting it as a universal model for humanity.

Sovereign internationalism formally respects the interests of all powers, great and small, while committed to the multilateral resolution of the problems besetting humanity. This is the ideal of course, and the practice of international politics typically falls far short. Nonetheless, the Charter system and its principles remain the framework for the conduct of international affairs. Although in recent years it has come under unprecedented strain, no-one has come up with a serious alternative. Gorbachev appealed to this model of sovereign internationalism in putting an end to the Cold War, in the belief that it provided a common framework for a transformation in international affairs. It did not happen, but the idea of some sort of cooperative sovereign internationalism was at the core of the thinking of the Non-Aligned Movement from the 1950s and remains at the heart of various post-Western alignments today. This model of international politics eschews the creation of military alliances and blocs, and (formally at least) rejects the view that global order requires some sort of hegemon to take the lead. Commitment to the UN Charter and subsequent protocols entails allegiance to principles of human dignity and human rights, but state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states are prioritised.

The second ‘new world order’ is the more narrow liberal international order created and led by the United States in the postwar years. In the nineteenth century Great Britain acted as the champion of free trade and open navigation, a role assumed by the US after 1945. Liberal internationalism has a history reaching back at least to the Enlightenment and its views on progress, rationality, free trade and cooperation. Drawing on this tradition, postwar liberal internationalism was premised on a community of liberal democracies based on two key elements: the open trading and financial system created within the framework of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944; and the military arm that took shape as the Cold War intensified, culminating in the signing of the Washington Treaty on 4 April 1949 to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The term ‘liberal’ in the Cold War largely signified ‘anti-communist’ rather than ‘liberal democratic’, yet it provided a powerful and ultimately successful normative framework to overcome the Soviet adversary. The interweaving of liberal internationalism with American geopolitical power and ambition meant that this was a ‘hegemonic’ peace order dominated by the US and its allies. Hegemony means the ability of a specific political community to exercise leadership over others and to order relations between the subordinate elements. Hegemony is achieved through a combination of coercion and consent, with the most successful establishing a common framework of beliefs and policy in which consent is genuine and freely given, with coercion applied only as a last resort.

With the end of Cold War I liberal internationalism not only proclaimed its victory but also its universality – there could be no separate ‘spheres of influence’ since the leadership of the US-led peace was proclaimed as a global project. Cold War bipolarity was gone and in the subsequent unipolar years there was no-one left to contest the assertion. In the absence of serious competition, liberal internationalism turned into something more radical and expansive. This is described as liberal hegemony, embedding American leadership globally through democratic internationalism while entrenching its geopolitical predominance. The US emerged as a colossus bestriding the globe, fuelling hubristic illusions of omnipotence. This was couched in the benign language of human rights, democracy and open markets, but some ill-advised and unsuccessful projects of regime change in recalcitrant countries demonstrated the limits to US power and its transformative potential. The political West presented itself as a universal model for all of humanity, superior to all possible alternatives. There was much that was attractive in this model of liberal order, as long as it remained within the framework of the Charter international system. The progressive aspects of liberal internationalism won it adherents from across the globe. However, the more ambitious agenda of liberal hegemony exposed unilateral and coercive features, especially when expressed in terms of American exceptionalism. Concern turned into disquiet and ultimately resistance. In the early years a much-weakened Moscow grumbled and insisted on the priority of Charter universalism, but was in no position to challenge US leadership, but on completing its quiet rise China became a more serious challenger. 

The Charter system remains the only legitimate framework for international law and intervention, yet the radical and expansive version of the political West encroached on its prerogatives. A type of ‘grand usurpation’ took place, with the autonomy of the Charter system subverted by Western powers when it suited their purposes. This was accompanied by false universalism. Instead of the transformation of international politics envisaged by leaders in Moscow and anticipated by various ‘progressive’ movements in the West, notably peace organisations and church movements, as well as by the Eurasian powers and some countries in what is now known as the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America), the Western alliance system created during the Cold War (the political West) advanced globally, and in particular to Eastern Europe. This responded to the demands of the now free former Soviet bloc and some former Soviet states, but reflected the structure of choices shaped by Washington. Instead of charter liberalism, liberal anti-pluralism predominated to the exclusion of sovereign internationalism – which later returned in the form of populist challenges.

The dominance of democratic internationalism and its hegemonic institutions generated an increasingly bitter sense of betrayal and exclusion in Russia, culminating in a prolonged conflict over Ukraine. Fuelled by the commodities boom of the early 2000s, Russia reconstituted itself as an authoritarian state with the will and resources to challenge the hegemony of the political West. For Moscow, the ‘grand usurpation’ was considered both illegitimate and unacceptable. Instead of the impartiality and inclusivity of the Charter international system, the political West (presumptuously calling itself the ‘rules-based international order’) presented itself as the arbiter of the rules. Russia’s resistance was stiffened by an increasingly close alignment with China. By 2014 China in comparative pricing terms became the world’s largest economy, and increasingly flexed its new power. In Europe the security order created at the end of the Cold War gradually disintegrated, accompanied by intensified conflicts along the emerging frontline on its Eastern marches. The arms control architecture painstakingly built during the Cold War was largely dismantled, various wars of choice and necessity were launched, and in the end great power contestation returned.

The two orders – the sovereign internationalism of the Charter international system and the liberal internationalism of the US-led order – had much in common. They were both established as a response to the catastrophe of World War II and were generated by many of the same principles and aspirations. The Charter international system was broader and accommodated a diverse range of regime types (Communist, Muslim traditionalist, monarchist and others). However, despite their common origins the two were not the same. Confusion between the two entwined but separate post-Cold War orders bedevilled the post-Cold War era, and will be explored in this book. Russia openly and then China with gathering force challenged what they considered to be the usurpation of the Charter framework by US-led hegemony, which at its most expansive became the ideology of primacy. This was accompanied by a democratic internationalism that challenged the fundamental notion of sovereignty in pursuit of the undoubtedly virtuous belief in freedom and the rule of law. Two representations of international affairs, each appropriate in its own terms, clashed.

The dilemma is not a new one. Robert Kaplan refers to the Greek definition of tragedy ‘not as the triumph of evil over good but the triumph of one good over another good that causes suffering’. To navigate between these takes leadership of a rare quality, which has been sorely lacking since the end of the Cold War. It also takes wise statecraft, which has also been found wanting. Max Weber distinguished between an ‘ethics of conviction’, in which leaders pursue noble goals irrespective of consequences, contrasted to an ‘ethics of responsibility’, in which statecraft is tailored to achievable benefits. In our case, powers defined as revisionist condemned the perceived replacement of international law and the autonomy of Charter internationalism by America’s claim to international leadership and global primacy. We describe this as the ‘great substitution’, and is one of the central themes of this book. In response, the US and its allies, understandably, doubled down in defence of the liberal order, against the illiberal autocratic powers. This epic confrontation reproduced the logic of cold war. The global battle for supremacy was fought through proxy wars, information campaigns and the mobilisation of material and intellectual resources.

The relative open-endedness of the cold peace gave way to a second cold war. The use of the term has been questioned, and for good reason. If it suggests a return to the prior pattern of relationships and a rerun of earlier contests, then it is inappropriate. The world has moved on, new concerns have emerged, innovative technologies predominate, new ideas contend and the balance of power between states has changed. Use of the term obscures what is new and distorts analysis. These criticisms are valid, yet something akin to a cold war – a permanent and entrenched great power conflict over matters of fundamental principle, accompanied by old-fashioned but enduring struggles for power and status, unremitting information wars, the attempt to divide the world into competing ideological blocs, militarism and arms races, all overshadowed by the nuclear threat – certainly returned. Just as Cold War I did not cover everything that mattered in international politics in the early postwar decades, Cold War II certainly does not encompass the whole spectrum of global affairs. Yet, it provides not only a comprehensible framework for analysis, identifying the elements of continuity while acknowledging what makes the second conflict different from the first, but it also identifies the factors that generated renewed conflict and lost the peace.

This brings us to a fundamental question: what do we mean by peace? The Institute for Economics and Peace based in Sydney, Australia, issues the ‘Global Peace Index’ which scores 163 nations according to their level of peacefulness. The Index applies the concept of Negative Peace, the absence of violence or fear of violence. However, peace does not simply mean the absence of war. Sustainable peace is described as Positive Peace, which refers to the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Unless robust structures and principles are in place to undergird a peace order, there will always be the possibility of a relapse into war. The Middle East and West Asia have been prone to conflict for decades, yet despite the dense network of peace agencies in Europe it was here that the potential for a positive peace was dissipated and from 2014 turned into open confrontation. The distinction will be applied in this work.

A positive peace order in our case is one in which the actors cooperate within the framework of the broader international system guided by the principles of sovereign internationalism and international law. This accords with the point made by president John F. Kennedy in his visionary commencement address at the American University in Washington, DC, in June 1963, a speech that still has the power to move. We will return to the unfulfilled potential later, but his core argument was that ‘peace is a process – a way of solving problems’. The tragedy of the post-Cold War peace is that the ‘process’, in which genuine dialogue takes into account the concerns of all parties, never really started. This was really a tragedy, in the classical sense of the term, where one good is in conflict with another. On what scale can justice and freedom be measured against peace and security? All parties were convinced of the rightness of their cause, and it was logical for them to do so, yet the mutual sense of righteousness only intensified the conflict. A negative peace took hold, focused on conflict management, the classic condition of cold war. Even cold war-style conflict management proved wanting in the end.

Every game of chess is different, yet each is played according to the same rules. Just as World War II differs from the first yet stems from the way that World War I ended, so Cold War II diverges from the earlier one yet it, too, is shaped by the way that the first Cold War ended. Many of the earlier institutions, issues and practices remained, accompanied by new actors and new lines of division. The old conflict between capitalism and socialism purportedly gave way to one between democracy and autocracy, although it can also be seen as a struggle between charter and anti-plural liberalism. Conflicts over fundamental models of societal development, human freedom, hierarchy and status in international affairs once again shape international affairs. However, unlike the earlier struggle, the second Cold War in 2022 turned into a proxy war between Russia and the political West over Ukraine. A proxy war is an armed conflict fought over the territory of a third party in which a state contributes finances, arms, materiel, advisers and everything except its military. The ‘proxy’ character of the Ukraine conflict was ambiguous from the outset, since Russia was a direct participant. It initially tried to limit its engagement to what it euphemistically called a ‘special military operation’. On the other side the Ukrainian Armed Forces were supported with arms, funds and intelligence by the Western powers. Both sought to avoid crossing boundaries (redlines) that would escalate into direct armed confrontation and nuclear annihilation in World War III.

This is a story that begins in hope but ends in unmitigated tragedy, in both the classical and modern senses. There was a positive peace to be had after 1989 but it was squandered. This work provides an interpretive analysis, combining empirical and theoretical investigation to explain developments in these years. It is not a detailed international history, although diplomacy is part of the broader analysis, and instead seeks to explain how and why the peace was lost. On that basis the work may indicate how it can once again be found.

Richard Sakwa is emeritus professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian, and post-communist affairs and is the author of Frontline Ukraine and Russia against the Rest.