A Comment on Andreas Bieler’s Review of The New Cold War

A Comment on Andreas Bieler’s Review of The New Cold War

Gilbert Achcar

I am very grateful to Andreas Bieler (AB) for reviewing my book, The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and Ukraine, From Kosovo to Ukraine, on his blog. I had not seen his review published on 17 July until he sent it to me today by way of Twitter/X, for which I thank him too.

I am glad that AB found the book to be “an extremely entertaining, fascinating read”. He summarizes some of the book’s content in the first part of his review and discusses it in the second. In guise of transition, he writes that “as entertaining a read Achcar’s book is without any doubt, conceptually it is rather troubling”. I thank him again for reiterating his praise and will here duly engage with his discussion of the book, as he certainly expects. So, what is it that is conceptually “troubling” about my book?

AB blames me for relying “implicitly” on “a state-centric, realist theoretical framework”. I wonder how he would rate Karl Marx’s writings on the international politics of his time. For there is obviously a necessary convergence between the “state-centric, realist” and the historical materialist perspectives. The difference between them is not, as some may believe, that the “realists” see states as central actors in world politics whereas the Marxists see classes in this role. The difference is that for “realists”, states as such have interests whereas Marxists believe that the action of states are guided by the interests of the dominant classes within them. We may even add that for non-simplistic Marxists, state power can become detached to a certain degree from the collective interests of the dominant class – the more so the more it is concentrated.

AB blames me for “often counting and comparing the amount of guns, tanks and bombs or military budgets”: I confess that this criticism puzzles me, especially that the counting and comparing are related in the book to the size of each country’s economy (its GDP). Even more surprising is AB’s reproaching me for narrating history “as being made by ‘great (male) leaders’ especially Putin in the case of Russia and, although to a lesser extent, Xi Jinping in the case of China”. Should I have depicted the recent history of state relations as having been made by ordinary men and, especially, women? That, I’m afraid, would be a fantasy world. International relations (my book is not about social struggles) are a field in which “great (male) leaders” have alas been the main actors, occasionally seconded by women in crucial roles, such as Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, who are duly present in my book (don’t rely on its index, which has been completely botched). The fact that the three women here mentioned were all US Secretaries of State and that there is no equivalent of them in either Russia or China is indeed an indication of the degree of patriarchal authoritarianism in each of the three global powers.

Fortunately, AB noticed my use of what are, for him, unmistakably Marxist concepts in my discussion of the “permanent war economy” and the “military-industrial complex”. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that this discussion is part of a broader assessment of the economic interests driving each of the three main protagonist states from the perspective of a Marxist understanding of imperialism. AB thus oddly blames me for ignoring “the real dynamics underpinning global developments”. “There is”, he says, “no reflection on the internal relations between the global crisis of overaccumulation and heightened geo-political tensions.” He then adds: “Capitalist crises and contradictions are referred to on occasions, but not systematically related to inter-state rivalries.” Well, my book does not pretend to be an economic treatise on inter-state/inter-imperialist rivalries.

The above criticisms may sound as rather far-fetched. They prelude, however, to a political critique at the end of the review. AB blames me for what he calls “a rather unmotivated endorsement of Western arms for Ukraine in the current war against Russia”. This issue is just hinted at in my book, whereas I have written several articles and engaged in several debates about it that AB doesn’t seem to know. Fair enough. He quotes the single sentence in the book where I state that: “It is also proper and just for governments to arm victims of foreign aggression or crimes against humanity in their fight against their oppressors – as Moscow and Beijing armed the Vietnamese, and Washington and its NATO allies are arming the Kurds and the Ukrainians – as long as the aggression or massacre cannot be stopped by non-violent means.”

AB then comments: “Having outlined pages after pages how NATO’s aggressive, unilateral stance vis-à-vis Russia had decisively contributed to the war in Ukraine, Achcar suddenly sees no problems with a continuation of precisely this kind of policy through Western arms exports. The reader is left confused by such a turn of assessment.” Well, I hope that the confusion can be lifted if I assure AB that, were the United States tomorrow to invade Mexico or Cuba, I would certainly assert likewise that it is “proper and just” for the Russian government to arm these victims of foreign aggression, despite everything I wrote about Putin’s expansionist drive, Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine, and the very harmful impact that the latter has had on global politics and global military expenditure.

For, in the absence of any alternative to help the victims fight back against the aggression of a more powerful state, standing against their right to get weapons from whichever source is available to them amounts objectively to supporting their defeat and the aggressor’s victory. To be sure, there are limitations in this regard that stem from the specific character of NATO and of the inter-imperialist war by proxy that mingles with the just war of national liberation waged by the Ukrainian side. These qualifications have been discussed in my articles available on my own blog. I deliberately left this discussion out of my book, like some of the issues that AB found missing, for it was already close to 300-page thick. Had I done otherwise, I doubt that AB would have found the book “extremely entertaining”! 😊