The Russian invasion of Ukraine has created tremendous uncertainty for tens of millions of people, but there is one thing we can be sure of: Russia and the West are now at war.
US and European leaders will continue to say they want to avoid direct military conflict between NATO and Russian fighters, but the severe economic sanctions imposed on Russia, the supply of sophisticated and deadly weapons to Ukrainian fighters, plus the US and European effort to isolate the Putin regime in the longer term, all this amounts to a declaration of war.
This is a turning point for the world. Assuming that NATO and the Russians manage to avoid a direct military confrontation, and excluding the possibility of a Putin pullback, an increasingly difficult hypothesis to imagine, Russia and the West now face a new Cold War.
This confrontation will be in many ways less dangerous than the 20th century version was, but in other ways the risk to these countries and the entire global economy is much greater.
A new confrontation between Russia and the West will be less dangerous because Russia is not the Soviet Union. Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of the US state of New York, and sanctions will make its already stagnant economy shrink by 10% or more over the next 12 months.
The country’s banking system is in danger of collapsing. In a globalized world, this is important. The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were largely isolated from Western economic pressure by the lack of connection between their respective economic systems.
Today Europe is united and firmly (if not always completely) aligned with the US, while the former Soviet republics struggle to resist rapprochement with Putin.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union exerted a genuine ideological attraction on people and politicians in all regions of the world. Without any particular ideology, Russia today has no allies with whom it shares political values. It has client and dependent states.
When, on March 2, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn the Russian invasion, only Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea voted in favor of Russia (Venezuela is in arrears with the UN and could not vote) . Even Cuba refrained from supporting Putin’s test of strength.
But what about China? Western leaders and media have worried about strengthening ties between Russia and the emerging giant. Even here, however, Russian options are less than ideal. Russia and China share a desire to limit US international influence and the risk of a more confrontational European approach towards the two countries.
But Russia is decidedly the junior partner in this partnership of convenience. China’s economy is ten times the size of Russia’s, and while China is happy to help support Russia by buying oil, gas, metals and minerals it can no longer sell to the West, Beijing knows it will be the only important friend from Moscow and will want discounts on all these commodities.
More importantly, China’s future depends on its growing economic strength, which will depend on continuing pragmatic ties with the US and EU to protect long-term commercial interests. Beijing will not condemn the Russian invasion, but it will likely respect at least some of the sanctions against Russia, in the name of supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty and its own interests.
However, in the 1970s and 1980s, US, European and Soviet leaders were able to erect some protective barriers that prevented many wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America from triggering a catastrophic crescendo in Europe. There was, in particular, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It will take years to build new diplomatic infrastructure and confidence-building measures between the West and Putin’s Russia.
Meanwhile, Cold War weapons have gotten more dangerous. It is impossible to know the true scale and depth of cyber capabilities on either side, but we do know that they have increasingly sophisticated digital weapons they have not yet used, including some that can attack financial systems, electrical grids and other critical infrastructure, with devastating effects.
Cyber ​​weapons will not kill as many people as a nuclear warhead can, but they are much more likely to be used as instruments of open warfare. They cost less, are easier to design, more readily available, and easier to conceal than the heavy weaponry that cast shadows over the second half of the 20th century.
These weapons also make it possible for Russia to practice forms of information warfare that were not within the reach of Soviet-era spies. The April elections in France will offer an upcoming opportunity to put new strategies to the test.
The US parliamentary elections in November, in addition to the 2024 presidential election in that country, will be longer-term targets that will be critically tempting.
For now, all eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops and artillery will continue the effort to bring the country under the control of President Putin. He is showing no willingness to back down.
But millions of Ukrainians will continue to fight, even as Russian soldiers take over the entire territory of their country, and Western leaders will continue to support them. The toughest sanctions in history will continue and even increase. Today there is no turning back on the path to a new Cold War.
