Implications of Russian-American Cold War
DURING his election campaign, President Joe Biden repeatedly demonstrated his alacrity towards a sharp containment policy to deter Russian strategic intrusion into Eastern Europe and Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region.
This engendered a glimmer of hope among hawkish, pessimistic and power-centric realists in the US that their prediction on the direction of American foreign policy would prove correct.
Today, the dangerous war-mongering, brinkmanship and sabre-rattling between Russia and the West over Ukraine and those of China and the US in East Asia have the potential to bring the pandemic-stricken world to the precipice of a limited but nasty war.
Since Biden took power, the powerful US Security Establishment has radically changed his worldview by showing him Russia’s increasing footholds in the Baltic region, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon believes that such a meteoric rise of Russia could spell a threat to the waning US influence in these regions.
So, to curb Russian assertiveness in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the Biden Administration has evolved a harsh policy: It has slapped some stringent economic sanctions on Moscow over Russian deployment of troops on the Ukrainian border and seems hell-bent upon heavily punishing Russia with even more crippling sanctions if Moscow masses more forces on the Ukrainian border.
But Uncle Sam is grossly mistaken in this regard; punitive sanctions to persuade a resurgent Russia to agree to negotiations are not likely to attain the desired result.
The US appears to have conspicuously failed to grasp the fact that President Putin has pulled Russia out from the debris of its crushing defeat in the late 1980s.
Now Moscow is predisposed to challenge the diminishing US influence in the Pak-Afregiona and the Middle East by assisting the Afghan Taliban, the Assad regime in Syria and invigorating Russian ties with major Middle Eastern powers.
What appears certain from these geopolitical divergences between Russia and the US is that the world is, once again, being plunged into the dangerous politics of the Cold War.
Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been intently watching the steady expansion of NATO in its immediate backyard.
Since the disintegration of the (erstwhile) Soviet Union, the trans-Atlantic security bloc has expanded its membership to 28, having added 12 more countries, including the strategically important three Baltic States.
And at its 2008 summit in Bucharest, Romania, NATO even promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia.
As a result, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and has widely deployed about 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine this year.
The West has been supplying arms to the beleaguered Ukrainian government to deter Russia from launching a war against Ukraine.
Many Russian political and military leaders consider the US largely responsible for orchestrating regime changes during the so-called Colour Revolutions in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s.
Moreover, Moscow sees a US secret hand behind the ousting, in 2014, of pro-Russian former Ukrainian President, Victor Yanukovych.
NATO’S expansionist posturing and the US policy of regime change in Eastern Europe propelled Russia to invade the strategically important Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.
Rather than resolving the Ukrainian issue diplomatically under the auspices of the UN, the US has been providing military hardware to the Ukrainian Army to be employed against the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
It is imperative to mention that till 1917 when the Communist revolution toppled the Czarist system in Russia, Czarist Russia had long cherished the grandiose dream of economically and militarily dominating the Mediterranean and the Baltic regions.
During that period, Great Britain effectively played the role of a balancer by capitalising on its naval supremacy to prevent Russia from posing a threat to British economic interests in the region.
British India blocked Russian attempts at spreading its tentacles to the Persian Gulf via Afghanistan.
Now Russia considers it an opportunity to count on the annexation of Crimea to actualise its hitherto unaccomplished dream of carving out its special sphere of influence in the region around the Mediterranean Sea.
This has made the US apprehensive of an increasing Russian presence in the region.
Therefore, Washington has been deeply engaged in lending a military hand to anti-Russian forces in Ukraine to push Russia back.
The more the US-led West funnels weapons to anti-Russian forces in Ukraine, the more Moscow tightens its firm hold over Crimea.
The Baltic region has also become a major flashpoint between the US and Russia on account of their massive military build-ups in the region.
Under its ‘advanced forward presence,’ NATO has deployed battalion-size units in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, and is inclined to further entrench its military presence in these countries.
Furthermore, American rockets have been placed in the Czech Republic and Poland.The Kremlin considers NATO’s military build-ups as aggressive posturing and the security bloc’s systematic encirclement of Russia.
NATO’s militarized strategy in the Baltic States will compel Russia to further increase its military presence in the region, thus escalating the chance of confrontation there.
Due to its potential energy resources, both, the former Soviet Union and the US fiercely contested against each other for special spheres of influence in the Middle East during the Cold War.
In recent years, the US pivot to East Asia against China and its dismal failure to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria have opened the door for Russia to extend its military influence in the region.
Russia fostered its military ties with Egypt by sending some 500 troops to the country for joint military exercises when President Trump was in charge of the Oval Office.
The Biden Administration deems such growing Russian engagement with the major Middle Eastern countries as a deliberate bid to outweigh the US economic and military presence in the region.
For Washington, Russian dominance of the Middle East also means increasing Chinese military and economic engagement with the top regional powers.
If the energy-exporting Arab countries tilt towards Russia, this will compel European powers to lift their economic sanctions on Moscow to import energy resources from Russia.
—The writer is former senior researcher at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) and now an editor and commentator based in Karachi.
