Is Cold War II in the offing?

PERRYSCOPE
Perry Diaz

On December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union resigned, declared his office “extinct,” and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching code to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.  That same evening, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time and the Russian tricolor was raised.  The dissolution of the Soviet Union also marked the end of the Cold War.  

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the only superpower on Earth.  Earlier that year, the Gulf War ended and the victorious Americans went home in peace.  In the ensuing decade, the world experienced relative peace.  It was Pax Americana all over again.   

But all that changed on September 11, 2001, when terror struck America. The decade that followed was one bloody period.  The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government and put in its place a democratically elected government.  On March 20, 2003, the U.S. and her allies invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The Iraq War is now over after almost nine years of warfare and the war in Afghanistan is winding down.   

               

While the U.S. was preoccupied in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia was slowly – and quietly -- building her military forces.  With the election of Vladimir Putin to a new six-year term as president – his third -- on March 4, 2012, the geopolitical game changed dramatically.  Unlike his predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin put in motion an aggressively assertive agenda.  He wants to restore Russia to the superpower she once was.   He became more involved in Middle East politics.

               

Last June, Obama and Putin met on sidelines of the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland to discuss issues, particularly the Syrian problem.  The Guardian reported: “Russia’s failure to respond positively to US claims of chemical weapons use in Syria and its hostile response to Obama's plan to give military support to rebel groups means the two leaders remain deeply divided.”  And divided they are, not just on Syria but also on a slew of issues including cyber warfare.  However, they agreed to put up a “cold war hotline” to deal with outbreaks of cyber attacks.

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On August 1, 2013, Russia granted whistleblower Edward Snowden temporary asylum of one year.  He had been holed up at the Moscow Airport for several weeks waiting for a country to give him asylum.  

Within a few days, Obama canceled his summit meeting with Putin in Moscow ahead of the G20 economic summit in St. Petersburg.  The White House said that Russia’s decision to “defy the U.S. and grant Snowden temporary asylum only exacerbated an already troubled relationship.”

But it did not end there.  Obama immediately went on the offensive.  A few days ago, he appeared on the Jay Leno Tonight Show and said, “There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality. What I continually say to them and to President Putin is that’s the past.”

But who says that a new Cold War couldn’t happen in the future?

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As a matter fact, during a White House press conference last August 9, Obama said: “I think there's always been some tension in the US-Russian relationship after the fall of the Soviet Union.” He said that Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in May 2012 had cast a chill over thawing ties. “There's been cooperation in some areas. There's been competition in others. It is true that in my first four years in working with President Medvedev, we made a lot of progress,” he said. “What's also true is, is that when President Putin... came back into power, I think we saw more rhetoric on the Russian side that was anti-American, that played into some of the old stereotypes about the Cold War.”  (Source: “Putin’s Cold War stance chilling ties,” The Nation, August 10, 2013)

The question that keeps popping up in my mind is: With a stockpile of 8,500 nuclear warheads, would Putin make a move to withdraw from the New START Treaty (for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that Medvedev and Obama signed on April 8, 2010 and which took effect on February 5, 2011?

Under the terms of the treaty, the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers will be reduced by half.   A new inspection and verification system will be established, replacing the SORT mechanism. It does not limit the number of operationally inactive stockpiled nuclear warheads, that remain in the high thousands in both the Russian and American inventories.(Source: Wikipedia)

When Xi Jinping ascended to China’s presidency in March 2013, his first trip outside China was to visit Putin. At their summit in Kremlin last March 22, they agreed to form a “strategic partnership” to advance their countries’ interests.     

In my article, “New World Disorder” (March 26, 2013), I wrote: “At a joint press conference, Xi told the media: ‘China’s friendship with Russia guarantees strategic balance and peace in the world.” But what he presumably meant to say was that the new China-Russia military-economic alliance would be so formidable that it would establish a new world order never seen before.  In Xi’s mind, only a China-Russia military-economic alliance could stop the United States’ ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy. And one of Xi’s concerns was the United States’ building of an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system, which could tilt the balance of power towards the U.S.’ ”

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Last July 8-10, Russian and China conducted a joint naval exercise off the coast of Vladivostok.  It was the largest between the two countries. American strategists view it as an attempt to counter the U.S.’s “pivot to Asia,” which would shift 60% of America’s air and naval forces to Asia-Pacific by 2020.

               

In anticipation of China becoming a rival naval power in Western Pacific waters by 2020 (“China raises the ante,” July 31, 2013), the Pentagon has put in place a strategy known as Air-Sea Battle. The goal is “to neutralize the ability of enemies to keep U.S. forces at bay with so-called Anti-Access and Area-Denial (A2/AD) defenses.”

According to the Air-Sea Battle plan, US forces would launch physical attacks and cyber attacks against the enemy’s “kill-chain” of sensors and weaponry in order to disrupt its command-and-control systems, wreck its launch platforms (including aircraft, ships, and missile sites), and finally defeat the weapons they actually fire. The sooner the kill-chain is broken, the less damage US forces will suffer - and the more damage they will be able to inflict on the enemy.  (Source: “How Pentagon strategy could trigger war with China,” Foreign Policy.com, August 2, 2013)

Many experts believe that the U.S. and China are headed to an armed confrontation – or war -- by 2020.  With a China-Russia military-economic alliance in the works, it won’t be long before they’d become belligerent toward America, which makes one wonder if Cold War II is in the offing? (PerryDiaz@gmail.com)