An excellent review of The New Cold War

An excellent review of The New Cold War

I am thankful to Daniel Egan (Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts Lowell) for his very thorough reading of my book, published in Socialism and Democracy. The review is behind a wall, but the author kindly authorized me to publish below the final version of his manuscript. GA

Gilbert Achcar, The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China from Kosovo to Ukraine. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2023. 356 pp.

Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London, has written an invaluable book for understanding the ‘new cold war’ pitting the United States against Russia and China. The book is divided into two parts: Part I consists of two previously published chapters, one addressing the global balance of forces in the aftermath of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the other the significance of the 1999 NATO war in Kosovo, while Part II contains two new chapters, one on Russia and one on China. It is striking just how much of Achcar’s earlier analysis presented in the Part I chapters has been confirmed by more recent events.

What makes, for Achcar, the current global balance of forces a ‘new cold war’? He defines the Cold War as a “singular period” (1) – this in contrast to those like Fred Halliday who saw a ‘second Cold War’ emerge in the 1980s following the 1970s period of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union – from the end of the Second World War to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. ‘Cold war,’ Achcar argues, “designates the active preparation for a real war, with the economic implication of maintaining war readiness with a constant effort either to secure potential superiority over the adversary or to preserve an equilibrium of military force” (19). What made the postwar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union ‘cold’ was the threat of nuclear war and its inevitable mutually assured destruction, which kept open warfare between the two from breaking out. In making this argument, Achcar is suggesting that what makes the contemporary global balance of forces a ‘cold war’ is less the presence of an ideological conflict and more the escalation of war preparedness amongst the major global military powers that carries the potential to break out as nuclear war. Some may argue that this argument is more appropriate for a geopolitical analysis than a class one, although I do not think that this must be necessarily so.

It is in this context that Achcar identifies the United States as the principal driving force of the ‘new cold war.’ The one place where he addresses the internal relations contributing to this dominant role comes in his discussion of the permanent war economy, to which the US “has become addicted…as a key feature of its overall economy” (25). I would have liked to see him discuss in greater detail how the US drive for a ‘new cold war’ has been shaped by the neoliberal policies that became entrenched around the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as its subsequent crises (e.g., 2001, 2008). For the most part, Achcar examines the essential contribution of the United States to the ‘new cold war’ as expressed by US policy directed at Russia and China.

Achcar highlights how US/NATO policy has been to expand its power in Europe at the expense of a post-Soviet Russia. He argues that efforts to strengthen collective security, most notably expressed in the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation, came to naught in the face of a “vicious spiral of actions and counteractions” (232). For a country with a long history of foreign invasion (Napoleon in 1812, Allies after the Russian Revolution, Germany in the First and Second World Wars), the eastward expansion of NATO, first into formerly Warsaw Pact allies of the Soviet Union (a unified Germany in 1990; the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria and Romania in 2004) and then into former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2004), and the declaration as ‘aspirant countries’ of Georgia in 2011 and Ukraine 2014 was seen an intolerable provocation. So too was Western support for the so-called ‘color revolutions’ in the former Soviet republics of Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. These actions called forth increasingly aggressive responses by Russia, such as its 2008 invasion of Georgia and its 2014 seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine. Achcar is clear that such actions, including Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cannot be justified and that they reflect a combination of “imperial revanchism with imperial aggrandizement” (233). This is most powerfully reflected in Putin’s 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, which denied the legitimacy of a Ukrainian nationality independent of Russia. At the same time, though, he argues that they must be understood as responses, whether legitimate or paranoid, to the existing global balance of forces. Achcar also makes the case that Russia’s role in the ‘new cold war’ has been determined by the internal balance of forces that came to define post-Soviet Russia. The divestment of formerly state-owned property initiated by Boris Yeltsin was, in Achcar’s slightly exaggerated (I believe) terms “arguably the most intensive case” (142) of primitive accumulation, and this, combined with Yeltsin’s 1993 assault on the Russian parliament and the concentration of executive power expressed in the new 1993 constitution, produced an increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic capitalism. Achcar argues that Vladimir Putin “is a direct product of this rotten process” (147), a process that was cheered on unequivocally by the US and its NATO allies at the time.

Achcar argues that China, relative to the United States and Russia, “has hitherto been the least belligerent in both words and deeds” (243) and has been “much less prone to adventurism” (270). This significant difference was a product of the pragmatic turn away from ‘bureaucratic anticapitalism’ toward ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ beginning in the late 1970s following the death of Mao Zedong. Peaceful conditions were necessary for the successful development of China’s productive forces a) to ensure access to Western foreign direct investment and technology, and b) to minimize the allocation of resources to unproductive military expenditure. Despite its overblown claims to the contrary, Chinese military spending has not come close to that of the United States in either absolute terms or as a percent of GDP. China also lacks the dense network of military bases and alliances and the war-fighting experience – its last war being its 1979 invasion of Vietnam – that characterize US military power. Nonetheless, following the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States has pursued “a highly provocative course” (265) toward China as part of what the Chinese see as the pursuit by the United States of global ‘hegemonism’. This has taken the form, among other things, of more aggressive military support for Taiwan, and the creation of military alliances (the Quad, AUKUS) designed to contain China, and the proclamation at NATO’s 2022 summit of a new ‘strategic concept’ expanding its reach into the Asian-Pacific region, an action which appears to Achcar as “a major step toward the constitution, de facto or formally, of a single global military alliance under US hegemony” (301). While acknowledging China’s national oppression of Tibet and of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, as well as a “renewed autocratic tendency” (247) associated with Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012-13, Achcar argues that “China’s rulers have hitherto shown acumen in containing their ‘big-nation chauvinism’ within limits that have allowed their nation to grow economically to its greatest benefit” (286). He is unconvinced that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is in the offing, suggesting instead that “Beijing is unlikely to cross the Rubicon – in this case, the Taiwan Strait – unless it is provoked to do so by Washington and/or Taipei beyond its limit of tolerance, or unless China’s social and economic situation deteriorates so badly that the permanence of CCP rule comes under threat, prompting its leadership to seek salvation by whipping up nationalism to the point of going to war” (286). This argument would have been stronger if Achcar had engaged more directly with the debate over whether China is an imperialist country. I am still struggling with this question, so I was disappointed that he rejects much too quickly the suggestion that Xi’s leadership is an expression of “China’s moment of imperialist mutation” (268). I would think that this is an especially relevant question for understanding the ‘new cold war.’

The one major question that Achcar leaves unaddressed in this book is how the Left should respond to the ‘new cold war.’ The current war in Ukraine has caused a major schism within the Left between those who see the war as one of national self-determination by Ukraine against Russian imperialism and others who see it as a US/NATO proxy war against Russia. While Achcar’s focus on relations between the United States, Russia and China might suggest that he tends toward the latter position, this is not so. First, at no time does he subscribe to the argument that Russia and China serve as a kind of anti-imperialist pole contesting US imperialism. This is especially clear from his analysis of Russia, and while he too readily dispenses with the argument that China is already or is in transition toward becoming imperialist, he most certainly does not claim that it represents an anti-imperialist alternative. It is a shame that Achcar did not use his book as an opportunity to examine more closely arguments about ‘multipolarity’ that appear to lie at the center of the ‘proxy war’ position on the Left. In addition, Achcar has elsewhere very clearly expressed his support for Ukrainian resistance to the invasion (see, for example, “A Memorandum on the Radical Anti-Imperialist Position Regarding the War in Ukraine,” International Viewpoint 565, February 2022). Given this, I would argue that it is possible to see the war in Ukraine as two simultaneous wars: an imperialist attack against national self-determination that is taking place in the broader context of a ‘new cold war’ led by the United States to maintain its global dominance through military means – especially given its crisis of global economic dominance. To see it simply as a proxy war waged by the US/NATO against Russia is to ignore or minimize the imperialist nature of post-Soviet Russia, and to see it simply as a Russian violation of Ukrainian national self-determination is to ignore or minimize how Russia’s decision to invade was shaped by over two decades of US/NATO efforts to make the most of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Achcar does not make this ‘dual war’ argument in an explicit way, but his book can be, I believe, of considerable value for efforts to understand the war in Ukraine in a more complex, dialectical manner, one that could help to repair the current divide in the Left over the war.

Daniel Egan

University of Massachusetts Lowell