70 years after, the world obsessing over Cold War legacy
By Alex Raufoglu
“We don’t want to return to the Cold War” Andrzej Duda, President of Poland, told an audience gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC early this week.
“Were we ever out of it,” a whisper was heard from the crowd, and everyone giggled but the speaker.
As the world is marking the 70 years anniversary of the Cold War this month, some newspaper headlines suggest that it feels “less safe today than it has been since the end of the Cold War.”
Historians date the beginning of the Cold War from a speech by Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt, on 16 April 1947, in which he used the term to describe the specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the West and the USSR.
This followed just a year after former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” he declared in March 1946.
Churchill’s “iron curtain” phrase immediately entered the official vocabulary of the Cold War and was considered by historians to be the declaration that pushed the U.S. into it.
Throughout the Cold War, Europe was a central focus of American foreign policy as Washington closely supported the creation of a European family — whole, free, secure and at peace — including through the enlargement of NATO.
President Duda, who visited Washington this week to participate in an international event on nuclear security, is preparing to host the next NATO summit back at home, this summer.
Prior to his trip to the US, he publicly accused Russia of “fomenting a new Cold War” through its actions in Ukraine and Syria. “If someone is bolstering his military presence near his neighbors,” he told Reuters, “… then we have an unequivocal answer regarding who wants to start a new Cold War.”
If It’s Not a Cold War, What Is It?
President Duda’s concerns were echoed by many other European politicians and columnists as well.
As we witness new old-fashioned, Cold War-type crisis escalate in the wider Eurasia region, such as the one in Ukraine two years ago with Russia’s intervention in Crimea, one might wonder if it isn’t a war, what is it?”
The Cold War was a very specific, ideologically-framed moment, an unusual time. The Crimean crisis has undoubtedly created new tensions between Russia and the West, but in essence this is an old-fashioned geopolitical struggle more like the 19th century.
Russia, at the moment plays, as President Duda puts it, “new war game” in its neighborhood. And the question it, just how cold (or hot) is it going to get and how far Moscow will go without facing real challenge from the international community in its policy.
Should Kremlin decide to extend its operations in the wider neighborhood and allow Russian troops to cross the borders of its neighbors, apart from the currently occupied Crimea, it will certainly come dangerously close to a replay of the Cold War.
If we are not already in a new Cold War, today’s crises, challenges and opportunities are growing in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, could signal the start of a new Cold War.
What’s the U.S. position in all of this?
Is there much the United States can do to prevent the world from a new Cold War?
Like their European colleagues, US politicians, military leaders also don’t foresee the need to return to a Cold War-style military posture, but the era of trying to make a partner of Russia “is over,” according to Gen. Philip Breedlove, top US commander, who is also NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe.
Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee early this month Breedlove said that Russia “does not want to challenge the agreed rules of the international order… It wants to rewrite them.”
“Just as the Soviet Union dominated the nations of the Warsaw Pact, Russia coerces, manipulates, and aggresses against its immediate neighbors in a manner that violates the sovereignty of individual nations, previous agreements of the Russian government, and international norms,” he said.
Yet even as the rest of the world has grown more challenging, crises in and around Europe have also grown: the Eurozone financial crisis, the worsening refugee crisis, civil war in Syria, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and continued occupation of parts of Georgia, changing borders by force for the first time in a generation.
In this changed global environment, is more U.S. leadership required to help get Europe back on its feet?
Or should America “lead from behind” in Europe, focusing on other more important regions, while encouraging Europe to sort out its own problems?
The following video provides a glimpse at the earliest days of the Cold War…
