A New Cold War? Assessing The Current US-Russia Relationship 3030206742, 9783030206741

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A New Cold War? Assessing the Current US-Russia Relationship

Nicholas Ross Smith

A New Cold War? “This book offers a timely assessment of the current US-Russian relations by addressing the most pressing question confronting international relations scholars: What is the prospect of renewed great power competition and rivalry? Utilizing the richness of neoclassical realism (Type III), Smith skillfully identifies four key dimensions to compare the Cold War and the current state of US-Russian relations, giving us a much better picture of the potential for a new cold war, and making it essential reading.” —Steven E. Lobell, Professor of Political Science, University of Utah, USA “‘Concise’, ‘to the point’, ‘clearly written’, and ‘effectively argued’ are among the reactions after reading A New Cold War?, Nicholas Ross Smith’s brief, but incisive, comparison of the Cold War with current Russian-US relations. He demonstrates that, ‘when the structural, the ideological, the psychological, and the technological dimensions of the Cold War are compared with the current US-Russia relationship significant differences are observable.’ This questions the validity of using the term ‘Cold War’ as a framework for analysis of the current situation.” —Roger E. Kanet, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, USA

Nicholas Ross Smith

A New Cold War? Assessing the Current US-Russia Relationship

Nicholas Ross Smith University of Nottingham Ningbo China Ningbo, China

ISBN 978-3-030-20674-1    ISBN 978-3-030-20675-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20675-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Jess and Xander

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank a number of people and institutions that were instrumental to the writing of this book. First of all, this book is an evolution of an idea originally inspired by Jean-Jacques Courtine, a friend and former colleague of mine at the University of Auckland. JJ, thanks for challenging me and pushing my research into new areas. To my close academic confidants, Zbigniew Dumienski, Patrick Flamm, and Nicolas Pirsoul, I am grateful for the camaraderie I share with each of you. Even though we now live far apart, I appreciate that we are able to keep the dialogue up and continue to bounce ideas off one another. To my colleagues at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, thank you for welcoming me and making my first year both enjoyable and productive. I am extremely proud to call you colleagues and friends. To the neoclassical realist community, particularly Alex Reichwein and Steven Lobell, thanks for keeping me intellectually stimulated and providing me with ideas for new research. Although I don’t like to call myself a neoclassical realist as such, I am a grateful that we have a group of people with common aims and drive which helps push us to new heights. To Roger Kanet, your comments on this book, and on previous articles, were not only constructive and helpful, but were delivered with a real passion and enthusiasm. I can only hope that I have such a thirst for academia later in my career. To Martin Holland (University of Canterbury) and David Capie (Victoria University of Wellington), thanks for allowing me the opportunity to give talks on this topic at your institutions. The audiences at both talks vii

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were engaged and critical, which helped me to work to better articulate my arguments in this book. Lastly, to my wife Jess and son Xander, I am appreciative that you are both very supportive of my work and tolerate the long hours I put into writing. Coming home to you guys is always a treat after a long day in the office.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 A Four-Dimensional Neoclassical Realist Framework 9 3 The Structural Dimension of US-Russia Relations25 4 The Ideological Dimension of US-Russia Relations39 5 The Psychological Dimension of US-Russia Relations53 6 The Technological Dimension of US-Russia Relations67 7 Conclusion81 Index85

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Ripsman et al.’s Type III neoclassical realist model 15 Fig. 2.2 A Type III NCR-inspired four-dimensional framework for examining the bilateral international political outcome of a given period20

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  The introduction starts with an observation that characterizing the current cooling of the US-Russia relationship as a ‘New Cold War’ has become extremely popular in both mainstream media and academia in recent years. However, it is noted that few theoretically-informed comparisons exist between the Cold War and the current state of the US-Russia relationship. This book aims to rectify that. An overview of what the Cold War was is given, identifying four key dimensions: the structural, the ideological, the psychological, and the technological. Keywords  Cold War • New Cold War • Chapter outlines A fascination with characterizing the current relationship between the United States of America (US) and the Russian Federation as something akin to a New Cold War, or a Cold War II, has emerged in both the mainstream media (Legvold, 2014; Osnos, Remnick, & Yaffa, 2017; Shuster, 2014; Stavridis, 2016) and academic literature (Black & Johns, 2016; Kalb, 2015; Legvold, 2016). This is, in part, because ‘sensationalist’ analogizing has long been a popular tactic of argumentation in both journalism and academia, but also because the US-Russia relationship has indeed been experiencing a notable cooling since the early 2000s, a cooling which has accelerated over the past five years. The current state of the ­relationship

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is alarming, for a number of reasons. First, the US and Russia have clashed over a number of international crises, ranging from the crisis in Ukraine, to the civil war in Syria, to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The Ukraine crisis has led to tit-for-tat sanctions between Russia and the US, while in Syria something of a proxy war has emerged between Russia and the US, with both backing alternative sides in the ongoing civil war. Second, Russia’s ambitious modernization of its military, scheduled to be completed in 2020, is raising fears in Europe and the US, especially regarding its purported nuclear weapon advancements. Related to this, the military projection currently occurring in Eastern Europe between NATO and Russia has reached levels not seen since the Cold War. Last, Russia has been accused of interfering in the 2016 US presidential election by utilizing an array of tactics—monetary support, intelligence sharing, and cyber weapons—to help Donald Trump’s campaign. As more revelations emerge from the Mueller investigation, the US’s trust of Russia is reaching new lows. Consequently, few are confident that the US-Russia relationship can be mended in the short term and many are predicting the potential for further cooling, even to the point of potential military confrontation (Fisher, 2015). Indeed, the US-Russia relationship has been on an exponentially worsening trajectory over the past five to ten years, which portends further issues in the coming years. However, to what extent this current ebb warrants a characterization of being a New Cold War is highly contentious. Importantly, proper theoretically-based comparisons between the Cold War and the current US-Russia relationship have been scarce. This book aims to remedy that by utilizing a new version of neoclassical realism (NCR), called Type III NCR, to drive a theoretically-informed comparison. It will argue that despite significant cooling of the US-Russia relationship, with the potential for further cooling, calling it a New Cold War betrays the reality of the current  situation. To make this argument, the book identifies four theoretically-informed key dimensions of the original Cold War: the structural dimension; the psychological dimension; the ideological dimension; and the technological dimension. The Cold War became a contest of global significance because the underpinning geopolitical structure allowed it along with the presence of clear ideological differences and strong threat perceptions on both sides, while the technological dimension—especially the nuclear weapons arms race—significantly affected how international politics was conducted at that time. However, this book will develop an argument that when the criteria are applied to the current relationship, key differences emerge. Structurally,

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the world is transitioning toward multipolarity (with a period of US-China bipolarity likely) with Russia very much a declining power, while the ideological differences are nowhere near as stark or rigid and the threat perceptions are not as bleak, and the technological aspect has shifted the type of competition to new frontiers, especially cyberspace. Indeed, the potential for a New Cold War of global significance remains, but the source of this will not be the US-Russia relationship but rather, potentially, the Sino-US relationship.

1.1   What Was the Original Cold War? Despite near unanimity among scholars that the period of US-Soviet relations ranging from the early post-Second World War setting up until the collapse of the Soviet Union is best termed the ‘Cold War,’ much debate exists as to what the Cold War actually was. There are some scholars— especially historians—who emphasize the ideological nature of the Cold War (Hopf, 2012; Mueller, 1993; Westad, 2007). For John Gaddis (2006, p. 7), ideology was key because “both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.” Other scholars—especially ‘realist’ International Relationists—stress the importance of the structure of the international system for enabling a Cold War to emerge (Cox, 1984; Rapkin, Thompson, & Christopherson, 1979; Waltz, 1979). For Kenneth Waltz (1988, p. 628), writing in 1988, the Cold War was “firmly rooted in the structure of postwar international politics, and will last as long as that structure endures.” Another branch of scholarship—especially undertaken by cognitivist Political Scientists—argues that there was a psychological aspect of the Cold War (Gamson & Modigliani, 1971; Larson, 1988; Wohlforth, 1993). For Urie Bronfenbrenner (1961, p.  46), the Cold War was, in essence, the product of a mirror image of distorted perceptions on both sides: a “mirror image in a twisted glass.” A further, albeit smaller, group of scholars examine the importance of technology to the Cold War (Adas, 2015; Harrison, 2003; Stites, 1988). For Odd Arne Westad (2000, p. 553), because technological advancement was an important component of the two ideologies at the heart of the Cold War and manifested itself in numerous technological races (especially nuclear weapons), “the interplay between technology, politics, and social development forms one of the most useful prisms through which to view the East-West conflict.”

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This book does not aim to provide a definitive answer to the question ‘What was the original Cold War?’ In fact, it is argued that pursuing a hard and fast answer to this question is a fool’s errand because, in reality, international political outcomes like the Cold War are a product of multiple variables interacting together. To this end, it is argued that looking at the four aspects of the Cold War identified above—all of which had undeniable importance in shaping the particular nature of the Cold War—as an interconnected set of dimensions is a constructive way to shed new light on the Cold War and how the current US-Russia relationship compares to it.

1.2   Outline of the Book In order to compare the Cold War with the current US-Russia relationship, this book looks broadly at two specific medium-to-longer-term time periods in its comparison. For the Cold War, it examines the initial 15 years of the Cold War, from its ostensible beginning in 1947 to the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. For the contemporary US-Russia relationship, it examines the 15 years that have passed since Russia and the US disagreed over the war in Iraq up until the current cooling over issues such as Ukraine, Syria, and North Korea. Thus, each chapter, save for Chap. 2, will examine both periods. Of course, such a comparison is not without limitations, especially as the Cold War lasted much longer than this initial 15-year period while also changing significantly in its scope and nature in the 1970s and 1980s. However, given that the aim of this book is to produce a crude comparison in order to derive policy-relevant insights, such limitations are seen as acceptable. Chapter 2 is dedicated to generating a framework to compare the US-Soviet relationship during the Cold War with the contemporary US-Russia relationship. First, a discussion on the evolution of NCR and the emergence of Type III NCR to explain international political outcomes is offered. Building on this, a Type III NCR framework is developed which identifies four key dimensions to international politics: the structural dimension, which represents the independent variable; the psychological dimension, which represents an intervening process; the ideological dimension, which represents the intervening variable; and the technological dimension, which is a component of the dependent variable. It is argued that using a multi-dimensional Type III NCR framework can add insight into comparing international political outcomes from different periods.

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Chapter 3 outlines the underpinning structural nature of the Cold War, arguing that the bipolar international system (and accompanying bipolarization) which emerged at the end of the Second World War was crucial to the development of the Cold War because it helped engender an obsession between the US and the Soviet Union. The chapter then overviews the current international system, finding that the current structural setting is significantly different to the bipolarity that characterized the Cold War as the system is experiencing a transition from US unipolarity to something more multipolar, with Russia a power in decline and fighting hard to position itself as a pole in the future multipolar architecture. This makes the prospect of a globally significant Cold War between the US and Russia, structurally at least, extremely unlikely. Chapter 4 assesses the role of ideology in the Cold War, arguing that the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and the US’s Democratic-­ capitalist ideology played important roles in framing their foreign policy-­ making, and, subsequently, causing ideological dissonance which helps drive conflicting policy outcomes. The chapter then examines the current US-Russia relationship, arguing that while both Russia and the US have identifiable ideologies which impact their foreign policies, they are neither as conflicting nor as ingrained as during the Cold War. This therefore makes the potential for a Cold War-style relationship far less likely. Chapter 5 examines the psychological dimension of the Cold War, arguing that threat perceptions on both sides were extremely anxious and pessimistic, which was crucial to the looming fear that the Cold War could turn hot. The chapter then examines the current psychological state in the US-Russia relationship, arguing that Cold War-style threat perceptions are indeed emerging, leading to greater power projection, which, in turn, increases the perceived threat. While this makes worsening relations more likely, it still has not reached anywhere near the levels of the Cold War, particularly regarding the perceived threat of a nuclear war. Chapter 6 evaluates the importance of technology to how the Cold War developed early on, arguing that the development of nuclear weapons by both the US and the Soviet Union led to a new type of international politics: a relationship built on the back of mutually assured destruction. The chapter then examines the impact of changing technology on the current US-Russia relationship, arguing that the incredible developments in the realms of telecommunications and computers (including artificial intelligence) have shifted international politics to cyberspace, a new frontier with unknown effects and repercussions for international politics. This, it is argued, makes the current cooling of the US-Russia relationship its own unique animal, and is something on which the Cold War can offer little feedback.

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The concluding chapter compiles the four dimensions of the theoretical framework and argues that, when weighed in unison, it is clear that the current US-Russia relationship does not match the Cold War in terms of geopolitical sensitivity, threat perceptions, or conflicting ideologies, although it does represent something new with regard to the technological aspect of international politics. Therefore, the book strongly concludes that the New Cold War moniker is misleading and not appropriate in this context. Rather, the relationship is described as a traditional rivalry which is mainly geographically centered on areas where the two have overlapping spheres of influence, which is nowhere near as global in scope as the Cold War, apparent only in Eastern Europe, and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East. In addition to this, the relationship also potentially represents something new altogether: the conduct of international political competition (potentially war) in cyberspace—and whether this seeps into the more traditional aspects of the relationship—remains to be seen. Ultimately, the conclusion argues that despite a cooling of the relationship and the unknown quantity that is the changing technological face of international politics, US-Russia rapprochement is a real possibility in the future, particularly if the liberal international order erodes and China and India continue to rise. To that end, the conclusion ends with a warning about the Sino-US relationship, and how that, not the current US-Russia relationship, represents a better candidate for a potential New Cold War.

References Adas, M. (2015). Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Black, J. L., & Johns, M. (2016). The Return of the Cold War: Ukraine, The West and Russia, The Return of the Cold War: Ukraine, The West and Russia. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684567 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1961). The Mirror Image in Soviet American Relations: A Social Psychologist’s Report. Journal of Social Issues, 17(3), 45–56. Cox, M. (1984). From Detente to the “New Cold War”: The Crisis of the Cold War System. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 13(3), 265–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298840130030401 Fisher, M. (2015). How World War III Became Possible. Vox. Retrieved March 10, 2019, from https://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war Gaddis, J. L. (2006). The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin. Gamson, W., & Modigliani, A. (1971). Untangling the Cold War. Boston: Little, Brown.

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Harrison, M. (2003). Soviet Industry and the Red Army Under Stalin: A Military-­ Industrial Complex? Cahiers du Monde Russe, 44(2–3), 323–342. https://doi. org/10.4000/monderusse.8612 Hopf, T. (2012). Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalb, M. (2015). Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Larson, D. W. (1988). Problems of Content Analysis in Foreign-Policy Research: Notes from the Study of the Origins of Cold War Belief Systems. International Studies Quarterly, 32(2), 241. https://doi.org/10.2307/2600629 Legvold, R. (2014). What Moscow and Washington Can Learn from the Last One. Foreign Affairs, 93(4), 74–84. Legvold, R. (2016). Return to Cold War. Cambridge: Polity. Mueller, J. (1993). The Impact of Ideas on Grand Strategy. In R. Rosecrance & A. A. Stein (Eds.), The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (pp. 48–62). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Osnos, E., Remnick, D., & Yaffa, J. (2017). Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War. The New  Yorker. Retrieved March 10, 2019, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war Rapkin, D. P., Thompson, W. R., & Christopherson, J. A. (1979). Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the Cold War Era. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 23(2), 261–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200277902300203 Shuster, S. (2014). Cold War II: The West is Losing Putin’s Dangerous Game. Time. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from http://time.com/3028057/in-russiacrime-without-punishment/ Stavridis, J. (2016). Avoiding the New Cold War with Russia. Foreign Policy. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/20/ avoiding-the-new-cold-war-with-russia/ Stites, R. (1988). Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of International Politics. New York: Random House. Waltz, K.  N. (1988). The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18(4), 615–628. Westad, O.  A. (2000). The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms. Diplomatic History, 24(4), 551–565. Westad, O. A. (2007). The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohlforth, W. C. (1993). The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 2

A Four-Dimensional Neoclassical Realist Framework

Abstract  This chapter develops a specific Type III neoclassical realist theoretical framework for the analysis of the two compared international political periods: the first 15 years of the Cold War (1947–62) and the most recent 15 years of the US-Russia relationship (2003–18). After offering a discussion of the evolution of neoclassical realism, an examination of how international and regional systemic stimuli (the independent variable) drive state action is offered. Thereafter, the intervening roles of perceptions, ideology, and technology—all of which work to mediate and distort the systemic stimuli—are evaluated. Last, an examination of long-term international political outcomes as the dependent variable—a new development offered by Type III neoclassical realism—is provided. Keywords  Neoclassical realism • Type III NCR • IR theory NCR is the theoretical engine that drives the research in this book. In a nutshell, NCR approaches attempt to combine the structural focus of structural realism (as an independent variable) with the domestic and ideational focus of classical realism (as intervening variables) into an elegant analytical framework which offers rich, theoretically-informed arguments as to why certain foreign policy decisions or international political outcomes (when two or more states are considered) occurred.

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NCR represents arguably the most dynamic strand of “realism” in contemporary International Relations (IR) literature. NCR’s genesis has its roots in the perceived inability of structural realism to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Structural realism’s rigid presumption of systemic determinacy was perceived by many as being degenerative and, ultimately, incapable of explaining international politics to the same degree as competing research programs which focused more on domestic-level or ideational variables, such as liberalism or constructivism (Kratochwil, 1993; Legro & Moravcsik, 1999; Vasquez, 1997). While some realists—such as Mearsheimer (1994), Mastanduno (1997), and Waltz (2000)—were unwavering in their conviction that structural realism remained a useful theory of IR for explaining international outcomes, others—such as Schweller (1996), Sterling-Folker (1997), and Zakaria (1999)—began to include an additional focus on domestic-level variables (and, to a lesser extent, ideational variables) in their realist analyses. Gideon Rose (1998) noticed this emerging realist trend and coined the term NCR, elaborating that NCR scholars were bound by an agreement that: the scope and ambition of a country’s foreign policy is driven first and foremost by the country’s relative material power. Yet it contends that the impact of power capabilities on foreign policy is indirect and complex, because systemic pressure must be translated through intervening unit-level variables (Rose, 1998, p. 147).

Thus, NCR was a marriage between IR theory and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). By bringing in FPA (largely from a classical realist angle—hence the classical in ‘neoclassical’), NCR was adding to the preliminary structural focus the assessment of “those [domestic] factors that influence foreign policy decision making and foreign policy decision makers” (Hudson, 2005, p. 2). NCR’s research agenda has therefore focused on either explaining anomalous outcomes or explaining specific state behavior. This, of course, contrasted with the typical structural research agenda, which, according to Waltz (1979, p. 121), was not to explain “why state x made a certain move last Tuesday” or why a state made an anomalous decision, but merely to explain “the [external] constraints that confine all states.” NCR’s dual external-internal focus also represented new ground for FPA too because most studies within that tradition, at that time, had not ventured far beyond the domestic setting (Hudson, 2005). A further contrast between

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NCR and structural realism arose in the scope of research, with NCR works generally favoring the more FPA objective of undertaking “close examination of the contexts within which foreign policies are formulated and implemented” over the more parsimonious and generalizable scope of structural realism (Rose, 1998, p. 147). Hitherto, most NCR studies have tended to try to explain an anomalous foreign policy, Type I NCR, or why a specific state undertook a particular foreign policy decision, Type II NCR.  This has elicited much criticism from both the realms of IR and FPA. On the one hand, other IR theories have often typecast NCR as an addendum to structural realism and have argued that mixing and matching structural and domestic variables is incommensurable. Kevin Narizny (2017, p.  188), for example, argues that, over time, while NCR works assert “the analytic priority of systemic pressures” they make “few claims about the nature of those pressures, and it opens the door for societal preferences to undermine the survival motive” that Rose maintained. On the other hand, other FPA approaches have criticized the way NCR operationalizes the domestic setting while also questioning the usefulness of factoring in the structural setting. Juliet Kaarbo (2015, p. 204), for instance, argues that NCR’s limited understanding of the domestic setting (and subordination to structure) conflicts with “FPA research, which sees domestic political and decision-making factors as, at times, equal to or more important than international factors” while also being less prone to the ad hoc selection of variables. With these criticisms in mind, this book uses the recent theoretical advancements in NCR offered by Norrin Ripsman, Jeffrey Taliaferro, and Steven Lobell (2016) to develop a multi-dimensional theoretical framework for the purpose of comparing the Cold War with the current US-Russia relationship. Ripsman et  al. (2016, p.  1) are conscious in addressing the shortcomings of both Type I and II NCR through offering a more coherent framework, what they call Type III NCR, that they argue can “explain political phenomena ranging from short-term crisis decision-­ making, foreign policy behavior, and patterns of grand strategic adjustment of individual states, to systemic outcomes, and ultimately to the evolution of the structure of the international system itself.” To achieve this, Type III NCR blends “both the nature of systemic stimuli that have causal importance (the independent variable) and the domestic political factors that can affect the intervening processes of perception, decision-­ making, and policy implementation” (Ripsman et al., 2016, p. 32).

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Thus, unlike Type I and II, not only is Type III NCR conscious about being more coherent, particularly with how the domestic setting works to filter systemic stimuli into eventual foreign policy decisions, it is also aimed at explaining international political outcomes, not just specific foreign policies. Consequently, for the purpose of this book, which aims to understand and explain the broad trends of the current US-Russia relationship over a 15-year period, and whether it is comparable to the early Cold War period from 1947 to 1962, Type III NCR represents a logical theoretical foundation. To expand on how this book intends to use Type III NCR, sections on the role of structure in NCR, the intervening role of perceptions and ideology, and the impact of technology are offered.

2.1   The Independent Variable: Systemic Stimuli Type III NCR, like structural realism, posits that the international system precipitates a struggle for power among units within the system. However, it is important to note that NCR diverges from structural realism with regard to how it sees power in international politics in three key ways. First, NCR eschews the overwhelmingly ‘hard power’ focus of structural realism and reconnects with the classical realist understanding of power in international politics as being a multifaceted concept (Gilpin, 1983; Juneau, 2015; Waltz, 1979). Hans Morgenthau (1969, p.  221) argued that “while military strength and political power are the preconditions for lasting international greatness, the substance of that greatness springs from the hidden sources of intellect and morale, from ideas and values.” Thus, in the scope of Type III NCR, both harder and softer sources of power are taken seriously. Second, NCR does not limit its examination of power to the structural level (this will be demonstrated in the following three chapters, which look at how power is influenced by other factors emergent at the state level). Type III NCR, more so than Type I or Type I NCR, makes an explicit effort to understand the sources of power—both material and ideational—at all three of the so-called levels of IR analysis: the international system, the state, and the individual. Indeed, the individual level is often overlooked or minimized (which is the case in this book also), but it still remains a source of power which, in exceptional circumstances, can exert significant influence in foreign policy-making (Devlen & Özdamar, 2009).

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Third, NCR scholars, unlike structural realists, generally hold that states (and researchers for that matter) cannot concretely calculate power. Although military and economic resources at a state’s disposal surely impact the power it can wield internationally, William Wohlforth (1993, pp.  306–307) argues that “the relation of perceived power to material resources can be capricious; the mechanics of power are surrounded by uncertainty.” Thus, rather, it is how states interpret their place in the international system, through analyzing long-term trends and receiving feedback, which has the greatest impact on driving foreign policy. For instance, states try to anticipate other states’ behavior and the likely future power trends through predicting action within the parameters of the system as they see it. Thus, it is systemic incentives and threats as perceived by decision-­makers, although ambiguous and hard to assert, that are important in guiding how a state interacts with other states in the international system (Rose, 1998). With these three important distinctions in mind, the structural dimension, from the perspective of NCR, manifests itself in the shape of systemic stimuli: trends or events occurring in the international system that provoke a specific functional reaction in a state’s foreign policy-making. It is argued in this book that systemic stimuli emerge at both the international and the regional level. Internationally, the structure of the international system—whether unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar—and a state’s position within that order are important because they help, although crudely, determine what action a state can “realistically” undertake. Of course, debates around which types of international systems are more stable and which are more unstable have been occurring for many decades. While there is nothing like a consensus on this question, the balance of the realist literature is that unipolarity is the most stable and multipolarity the most unstable, with bipolarity somewhere in the middle (Layne, 2012; Posen, 2009; Wohlforth, 1999). This is because the stability of a system rests on the contentedness of the important powers, and clearly a system with more important powers is prone to having such a power potentially discontented (Ikenberry, Mastanduno, & Wohlforth, 2009). Importantly though, instability can often arise during systemic transitions, and because the international system is always evolving, no one system can be said to be perpetually stable. Undeniably, the rise (or fall) in material power of a state not only has repercussions for how it will act but also for how other states, in turn, will adjust. Thus, ultimately what provides stability is not the type of polarity per se—and as

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John Mearsheimer (2013) argues, multipolar systems have been stable in the past—but rather achieving a balance of power (Rynning, 2015). When a balance cannot be found, or a weak status quo is challenged by a revisionist power, then systems tend to become less stable. Structural realists have tended to limit their studies to considering the broader international distribution of power and how this affects international politics. However, recent NCR works have included a focus on structural dynamics at the regional level too (Fulton, 2018; Smith, 2016). This is because, as the non-realist work of Barry Buzan (2003a, p. 141), among others (Acharya, 2014; Wæver, 2017), has demonstrated, “most political and military threats travel more easily over short distances than over long ones” so “insecurity is often associated with proximity.” As David Lake (2009, p. 35) notes, “the members are so interrelated in terms of their security that actions by any one member, and significant security-­ related developments inside any member, have a major impact on others.” Indeed, the regional structural dynamics a state finds itself in are closely tied to the broader international structural setting because, in some settings, the regional security dynamics become more prominent. Certainly, multipolar international systems tend to be more chaotic and prone to producing more securitized regional settings while bipolar or unipolar settings can pacify regional dynamics somewhat (Buzan, 2003b). For instance, at the height of US unipolarity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, regional dynamics across much of the globe were constrained by the US’s ability to act as an omnipresent sheriff in international politics (Cox, 2001). Ultimately, the argument that NCR makes is that systemic stimuli act as independent variables in a state’s foreign policy-making, and are therefore also the independent variables in understanding international political outcomes (Ripsman et  al., 2016). Consequently, any NCR analysis of international politics—such as the Cold War or the current US-Russia relationship—should start first by accounting for the systemic stimuli and how they affect each of the actors involved in the international political outcome being examined. Of course, analyzing the relevant systemic stimuli alone is reductive and produces flawed analyses—which is the main reason structural realism receives much derision from many corners of IR, including NCR. NCR’s solution is to open up the black box of the state to provide important depth and richness to their analyses of international politics—this book adds ideology, psychology, and technology as intervening variables.

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2.2   The Intervening Role of Perceptions, Ideology, and Technology In order to supplement the overarching assumption that foreign policy decision-making, and thus international political outcomes, stems, first and foremost, from systemic stimuli found in the international system, NCR introduces state-level intervening processes and variables which work to “channel, mediate and (re)direct” systemic pressures into unique foreign policy outcomes (Schweller, 2004). Opening up the black box of the state is important because while the basic structural realist scope is useful for charting long-term international trends, it is clearly insufficient in providing detailed explanations for either foreign policy decision-making or international political outcomes. Thus, NCR attempts to add value by bringing in the state. Types I and II NCR did not clearly articulate, or systematize, what the state-level intervening transmission belt exactly looked like, leading to ad hoc selections by researchers (Smith, 2018). Type III NCR, on the other hand, aims to improve this reliance of ad hoc selections by presenting a clearer intervening transmission belt. To this end, they introduce a three-step intervening process (see Fig. 2.1)—comprising of a chain that starts with perceptions, then decision-making, and finishes with policy implementation—which translates systemic stimuli into foreign policy outcomes. Influencing this process are four variable clusters: leader images, strategic culture, domestic institutions, and state-­ society relations (Ripsman et al., 2016, p. 34). For this book, which aims to understand the broad international political relationship between two actors (the US and Russia), the interaction

Fig. 2.1  Ripsman et al.’s Type III neoclassical realist model

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between perceptions, as the first stage of the intervening process and ideology, a variable from the strategic culture cluster is deemed the appropriate starting place (technology, later is factored in as a key component of the implementation of policy). For Type III NCR, perceptions of decision-­ makers are important to gauge because, as Rose (1998, p.  158) states, “the international distribution of power can drive countries’ behavior only by influencing the decisions of flesh and blood officials.” Flesh and blood officials (i.e. ‘decision-makers’), “whether politicians, military personnel or bureaucrats, make decisions that are based on their perceptions and calculations of relative power and other states’ interests and motivations” (Taliaferro, 2006, p. 485). Thus, perceptions work in Type III NCR as the bridge between the systemic stimuli affecting a state and the foreign policy-­making process of that state. Perceptions also help explain why states often undertake different responses to similar situations as interpretations of systemic pressures can vary significantly. Nicholas Kitchen (2012, p.  134) cites Morgenthau’s assertion that the “uncertainty of power calculations is inherent in the nature of national power itself ” as illustrative of the basic NCR standpoint on how perceptions of power are more important to policy-making than any tangible calculations of power at any given time. Furthermore, given that a state’s perceptions stem from collective cognition, they are understandably prone to human error. Robert Jervis (1988) observed that misperceptions are common in foreign policy decision-making, arguing that “errors are inevitable” when technological, organizational, psychological, and social factors are accounted for. Therefore, due to the wide margin of error of decision-makers’ perceptions, factoring them in as potential swing factors in foreign policy-making is extremely important when assessing broader international political outcomes (Juneau, 2015). However, it is important to note that perceptions do not exist in a vacuum as they are not only influenced by systemic stimuli but are also heavily influenced by ideational factors, such as strategic culture and leader images. For NCR, ideology can be important at both the strategic culture and leader images level—it tends to depend on the level of centralization in a given state as to which one matters more—and therefore can influence perceptions, and, ultimately, foreign policy and international political outcomes. Malcolm Hamilton (1987, p. 38) defines ideology, in the context of more general policy-making, as:

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a system of collectively held normative and reputedly factual ideas and beliefs and attitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relationships and arrangements, and/or aimed at justifying a particular pattern of conduct, which its proponents seek to promote, realize, pursue or maintain.

When a dominant state ideology has a specific international component it takes on even more importance in the context of foreign policy-making as it helps define a role that the state envisages for itself in international politics.1 In the context of NCR, what constitutes a state’s international role has tended to be, more or less, seen as a mélange of a state’s culture, norms, values, and rules, all of which interact to create parameters of a specific international role. Given that a strong ideology is usually a confident expression of what a regime believes a state’s culture, norms, values, and rules are—and not to mention usually defined against an “other” (Wendt, 1992)—when a state adopts a dominant ideology  which has a particular international role then it can significantly influence foreign policy outcomes (Hunt, 2009). However, it is important to note that ideology, unlike perceptions which can swing policy options, tends to play a constricting role in foreign policy formation as it acts as a cognitive framework that narrows the appropriate policy options available to decision-­ makers (Juneau, 2015). Therefore, in conjunction, perceptions and ideology interact to create a framework from which systemic stimuli are transferred downstream in the foreign policy-making process. To this end, ideology adds parameters of appropriate behavior, inside which decision-makers develop perceptions (which can swing) of systemic stimuli (Smith, 2017). This leads, eventually, after the rest of the intervening process is completed, to concrete foreign policy decisions. Technology, as a component of foreign policy-making, is undoubtedly multi-dimensional in its own right as it impacts an array of areas relevant to foreign policy and international politics. For structure, technological capabilities, particularly military but also increasingly economic and even cyber, is an important component in adjudicating power distribution, and technological change and technological diffusion can be key drivers in precipitating structural change (Gilpin, 1983). Ideology, too, can have a 1  Role theory deals more explicitly with how ideational factors impact a particular state’s foreign policy-making (Flamm, 2019).

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strong technological focus, especially as technological advancement is often seen as a sign of a progressive and strong society (Deutsch, 1959). However, in the scope of this research, although technology does permeate this book’s analysis of the other dimensions, the demarcated technological dimension of international politics refers specifically to the tools and means by which foreign policy is executed. Technology, to this end, is vitally important to policy implementation and, more broadly, therefore, to how international politics is conducted between states. Technology has been a key component in the interaction of different units since the dawn of humanity. Iver Neumann (2018) argues that a crude form of diplomacy first emerged in prehistoric times due to the technological developments—namely advances during the Stone Age— which enabled big game hunting. While the technological advancements were obviously an important precursor, the success of the hunt was nevertheless predicated on the cooperation of groups—thus necessitating a kind of diplomacy (Neumann, 2018). As Sai Felicia Krishna-Hensel (2010) argues, technological advancement “increases the options available to policymakers in their pursuit of the goals of the state, but also complicates their decision making.” To this end, could the Westphalian system have emerged without the advent of the printing press (Philpott, 2000)? Or could the First and Second World Wars have occurred without the Second Industrial Revolution (Stearns, 2018)? Although counterfactuals should be avoided beyond being used as basic thought experiments, the impact of technology, and technological change, on the conduct of international politics is unquestionably important. Thus, although technology has been generally avoided in NCR studies to date, it is argued that when the aim of NCR is expanded to international political outcomes, factoring in the role of technology—and its “reciprocal effects” on other variables and dimensions (Drezner, 2019)—is an important addition which broadens the potential insights NCR can offer.

2.3   The Dependent Variable: International Political Outcomes Once the systemic stimuli are translated through the intervening state-­ level system, the process is completed with a foreign policy decision. Thus, for Type I and Type II, NCR is the dependent variable. However, for this book’s Type III-inspired version of NCR, the international political out-

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come which is born from the foreign policies of two different states (the US and Russia) is the dependent variable. As Ripsman et  al. (2016, p. 82) argue: Over the medium-to-longer term, international outcomes are affected by the interaction of the grand strategic choices of the great powers. Since these strategic choices are themselves products of not only international structure, but also domestic political arrangements within the great powers, neoclassical realism can shed more light on them than a purely systemic theory of international politics.

This book looks broadly at two specific medium-to-longer term time periods in its comparison. For the Cold War, it examines the initial 15 years of the Cold War, from its ostensible beginning in 1947 to the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. For the contemporary US-Russia relationship, it examines the 15 years that have passed since Russia and the US disagreed over the war in Iraq in 2003 up until the current cooling over issues such as Ukraine, Syria, and North Korea in 2018. It is argued that the above developed Type III NCR can shed important light—by identifying and expanding on key dimensions of international political relationships—on both the Cold War and contemporary US-Russia relationships. To recap the main theoretical arguments, this Type III NCR framework (see Fig. 2.2) assumes that structure is, first and foremost, a key determinant of international political outcomes because the international (and regional) environments a state finds itself in create incentives and disincentives for action. However, perceptions are important to gauge because it is only through the cognition of flesh and blood officials that structure(s) can have an impact on foreign policy-making. Yet, perceptions do not exist in a vacuum and are heavily influenced by ideology, especially regarding how an ideology can shape a state’s perceived international role. In conjunction, ideology and perceptions shape foreign policy-making greatly, but technology is still an important factor to consider as the conduct of international politics is ultimately guided by the technology of a given time. Consequently, in order to evaluate and compare the two identified international political outcomes, this book will examine the structural, ideological, psychological, and technological dimensions of these relationships in the forthcoming chapters.

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Fig. 2.2  A Type III NCR-inspired four-dimensional framework for examining the bilateral international political outcome of a given period

References Acharya, A. (2014). Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds. International Studies Quarterly, 58(4), 647–659. Buzan, B. (2003a). Regional Security Complex Theory in the Post-Cold War World. In F. Söderbaum & T. M. Shaw (Eds.), Theories of New Regionalism: A Palgrave Reader (pp.  140–159). London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781403938794_8 Buzan, B. (2003b). Security Architecture in Asia: The Interplay of Regional and Global Levels. The Pacific Review, 16(2), 143–173. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0951274032000069660

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Cox, M. (2001). Whatever Happened to American Decline? International Relations and the New United States Hegemony. New Political Economy, 6(3), 311–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563460120091333 Deutsch, K. W. (1959). The Impact of Science and Technology on International Politics. Daedalus, 88(4), 669–685. Devlen, B., & Özdamar, Ö. (2009). Neoclassical Realism and Foreign Policy Crises. In A.  Freyberg-Inan, E.  Harrison, & P.  James (Eds.), Rethinking Realism in International Relations: Between Tradition and Innovation (pp. 136–163). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Drezner, D.  W. (2019). Technological Change and International Relations. International Relations. Online first. https://doi. org/10.1177/0047117819834629. Flamm, P. (2019). South Korean Identity and Global Foreign Policy: Dream of Autonomy. Abingdon: Routledge. Fulton, J. (2018). China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies. Abingdon: Routledge. Gilpin, R. (1983). War and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, M.  B. (1987). The Elements of the Concept of Ideology. Political Studies, 35(1), 18–38. Hudson, V.  M. (2005). Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations. Foreign Policy Analysis, 1(1), 1–30. Hunt, M.  H. (2009). Ideology and US Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ikenberry, G. J., Mastanduno, M., & Wohlforth, W. C. (2009). Unipolarity, State Behavior, and Systemic Consequences. World Politics, 61(1), 1–27. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S004388710900001X Jervis, R. (1988). War and Misperception. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18(4), 675–700. Juneau, T. (2015). Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kaarbo, J. (2015). A Foreign Policy Analysis Perspective on the Domestic Politics Turn in IR Theory. International Studies Review, 17(2), 189–216. Kitchen, N. (2012). Ideas of Power and the Power of Ideas. In A. Toje & B. Kunz (Eds.), Neoclassical Realism in European Politics: Bringing Power Back In (pp. 79–95). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kratochwil, F. (1993). The Embarrassment of Changes: Neo-Realism as the Science of Realpolitik Without Politics. Review of International Studies, 19(1), 63–80. Krishna-Hensel, S. F. (2010). Technology and International Relations. In R. A. Denemark & R. Marlin-Bennett (Eds.), The International Studies Encyclopedia (pp. 6947–6959). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Lake, D. A. (2009). Regional Hierarchy: Authority and Local International Order. Review of International Studies, 35(S1), 35–58. Layne, C. (2012). This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana. International Studies Quarterly, 56(1), 203–213. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00704.x Legro, J. W., & Moravcsik, A. (1999). Is Anybody Still a Realist? International Security, 24(2), 5–55. Mastanduno, M. (1997). Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War. International Security, 21(4), 49–88. Mearsheimer, J.  J. (1994). The False Promise of International Institutions. International Security, 19(3), 5–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2539078 Mearsheimer, J. J. (2013). Structural Realism. In T. Dunne, M. Kurki, & S. Smith (Eds.), International Relations Theories (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morgenthau, H.  J. (1969). A New Foreign Policy for the United States. New York: Praeger. Narizny, K. (2017). On Systemic Paradigms and Domestic Politics: A Critique of the Newest Realism. International Security, 42(2), 155–190. Neumann, I. B. (2018). A Prehistorical Evolutionary View of Diplomacy. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 14(1), 4–10. Philpott, D. (2000). The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations. World Politics, 52(2), 206–245. Posen, B.  P. (2009). Emerging Multipolarity: Why Should We Care? Current History, 108(721), 347–352. Ripsman, N.  M., Taliaferro, J.  W., & Lobell, S.  E. (2016). Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, G. (1998). Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy. World Politics, 51(1), 144–172. Rynning, S. (2015). The False Promise of Continental Concert: Russia, the West and the Necessary Balance of Power. International Affairs, 91(3), 539–552. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12285 Schweller, R. L. (1996). Neorealism’s Status-Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma? Security Studies, 5(3), 90–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419608 429277 Schweller, R. L. (2004). Unanswered Threats: A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing. International Security, 29(2), 159–201. https://doi. org/10.1162/0162288042879913 Smith, N. R. (2016). EU–Russian Relations and the Ukraine Crisis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Smith, N. R. (2017). What the West Can Learn from Rationalizing Russia’s Action in Ukraine. Orbis, 61(3), 354–368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis. 2017.04.001

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Smith, N.  R. (2018). Can Neoclassical Realism Become a Genuine Theory of International Relations? Journal of Politics, 80(2), 742–749. https://doi. org/10.1086/696882 Stearns, P.  N. (2018). The Industrial Revolution in World History. Abingdon: Routledge. Sterling-Folker, J. (1997). Realist Environment, Liberal Process, and Domestic-­ Level Variables. International Studies Quarterly, 41(1), 1–25. https://doi. org/10.2307/2600905 Taliaferro, J. W. (2006). State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource-Extractive State. Security Studies, 15(3), 464–495. https://doi. org/10.1080/09636410601028370 Vasquez, J. A. (1997). The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative Versus Progressive Research Programs: An Appraisal of Neotraditional Research on Waltz’s Balancing Proposition. American Political Science Review, 91(4), 899–912. Wæver, O. (2017). International Leadership after the Demise of the Last Superpower: System Structure and Stewardship. Chinese Political Science Review, 2(4), 452–476. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-017-0086-7 Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of International Politics. New York: Random House. Waltz, K. N. (2000). Structural Realism after the Cold War. International Security, 25(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228800560372 Wendt, A. (1992). Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391–425. Wohlforth, W. C. (1993). The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wohlforth, W.  C. (1999). The Stability of a Unipolar World. International Security, 24(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228899560031 Zakaria, F. (1999). From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Structural Dimension of US-Russia Relations

Abstract  This chapter begins with an examination of the structural factors which underpinned the development of the Cold War in the first 15 years. It is argued that the emerging bipolar structure (and accompanying bipolarization) was an important precursor to the development of the Cold War because it pitted the US and the Soviet Union against one another—by forcing them to face one another. Importantly, key differences emerge when the Cold War is compared with the structure underlying the current US-Russia relationship. The current state of the relationship is that the US represents the (fading) unipole while Russia is in decline, much different from the superpower competition of the Cold War. Furthermore, where the two sides mainly conflict is geographically confined to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, far different from the truly global struggle of the Cold War. Keywords  Bipolarity • Unipolarity • International structure • Regional security complexes The emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s occurred at a time of immense structural change in the international system. The defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied Powers—spearheaded by the US and the Soviet Union—in the Second World War represented an epochal moment, a recalibrating of the international system on a level that had not been © The Author(s) 2020 N. R. Smith, A New Cold War?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20675-8_3

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e­xperienced since the beginning of the “Westphalian” system in 1648 (Mearsheimer, 2013). Such immense short-term structural transitions are rare and usually can only come about due to war or societal collapse—the collapse of the Soviet Union, although not as sudden, was similarly epochal in its ushering in of a transition from bipolarity to unipolarity. This chapter examines why the bipolarity that emerged from the epochal structural change at the culmination of the Second World War was crucial to the onset of the Cold War, particularly in driving the unhealthy fixation that developed between the US and the Soviet Union. Thereafter, the underlying structural dimension of the current US-Russia relationship is compared, with an argument being forwarded that the significantly different structural dynamics in the current relationship portend a very different outcome.

3.1   The Structural Dimension of the Early Cold War The tripolarity that preceded the Second World War, according to Randall Schweller (1993, p. 86), was extremely unstable because it involved two revisionist poles (Germany and the Soviet Union) that were incentivized to “put aside their competition temporarily so as to make substantial gains.” This was evident in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a pact of neutrality (sometimes referred to as a non-aggression pact) along with a jointly-managed invasion of Poland. Of course, the cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not even last two years as Nazi Germany—via its Operation Barbarossa—invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, forcing the Soviet Union to, eventually, cooperate with the Allied Powers against the Nazis. Undoubtedly, domestic factors in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—and the US for that matter—were important to how the Second World War played out and cannot be eschewed in any serious analysis of the Second World War. However, the point made by Schweller (1998), which is relevant to this chapter, was that the underlying “equilateral tripolar” system was instrumental in creating an environment which made this catastrophe structurally possible. Nazi Germany’s annihilation at the hands of the Allies meant the international system that emerged out of the chaos of the Second World War was naturally more bipolar in structure than multipolar, involving an—

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albeit not perfectly symmetrical—dichotomous distribution of global power between the US and the Soviet Union. While this emerging bipolar system was more stable than the tripolar one that preceded it, it was still a system that was potentially problematic—especially given the US’s military edge in 1945 as the sole possessor of nuclear weapons capabilities. In addition to the inherent instability of systemic transition, bipolarity, as John Mearsheimer (2013, p.  85) notes, is also additionally dangerous because, unlike in multipolar systems, it is more prone to generating hostility because the two poles “each concentrates its attention on the other.” This can, over time, cause each side to develop an unhealthy fixation on the other, which, particularly if supplemented by clashing ideologies and pessimistic threat perceptions, can lead to multifaceted great power competition and, thereafter, potential conflict. The scholarly consensus is that the Cold War started in 1947 (Cox, 1990; Gaddis, 1974; Roberts, 1994). That year was important because it was the year in which the US unveiled, in March, its Truman Doctrine—a pledge to counter external and internal authoritarian forces across the globe (Cox, 1990). This was later augmented by the Marshall Plan in early 1948—a financial support package (roughly equivalent to $100 billion in 2018) for Western Europe (Merrill, 2006). These policies were seen in the Soviet Union as being unequivocal in their design to contain Soviet influence in Europe, resulting in the creation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in October 1947. In 1948, the cooling at the heart of the US-Soviet relationship worsened as the Soviet Union looked to further counter the US’s policies in Europe: the Soviet-backed coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet blockade of Berlin were two examples of this (Werth, 1952). There was also the occurrence of the Stalin-Tito split, which, given the perceived geopolitical importance of Yugoslavia, further added tension to the US-Soviet relationship (Wohlforth, 1993). Although these crises were problematic and tense in their own right, they were not necessarily indicative of a Cold War at that time—in fact, few commentators in 1947 or 1948 were characterizing the relationship this way (Gaddis, 1974). However, the crude bipolarity of the international system was an important precursor in pushing the relationship toward the Cold War that eventuated as it was forcing the US and the Soviet Union to look at one another in increasingly suspicious ways. Arguably, the Cold War started to develop as a truly global phenomenon with the steady bipolarization of the second- and third-tier powers of the system between the US and the Soviet Union (van Alstein, 2009).

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Bipolarization is often misunderstood as being a synonym for bipolarity. Whereas bipolarity refers to a clear two-pole distribution of power, polarization (bipolarization in this case) refers to the clustering of smaller powers around the poles (Rapkin, Thompson, & Christopherson, 1979). Bipolarization in the context of the Cold War gained momentum in 1949 when the US along with Canada and its European allies created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (van Alstein, 2009). In 1950 the Soviet Union and China formed a military alliance. This bipolarization continued further in 1954 with the agreement of a US-Japan mutual defense treaty and in 1955 with the formation of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet Union-led collective defense treaty involving all of its satellite states (Tillema, 1994). Bipolarization added additional tension to the US-Soviet relationship and opened up more areas of the globe where the two putative poles were facing one another. In the middle of this increasing bipolarization, the Chinese Civil War (1946–50) came to its conclusion and the Korean War (1950–53) occurred. In both of these conflicts, the US and the Soviet Union—supported by their allies—backed alternative sides, which further augmented tensions and wariness between the two (Wohlforth, 1993). Thereafter, competition between the US and the Soviet Union rapidly grew across the globe. Both became involved in the decolonization process in the developing world, took opposing sides in the Cuban Revolution, and squabbled over Berlin in 1961 (Gaddis, 2006). Certainly, regional security dynamics were important and different regions produced different pressures for both the Soviet Union and the US, as well as the smaller powers residing within these complexes. However, due to emerging bipolarity and wider bipolarization, regional security was inextricably tied to the broader international system in a way that was, at that point, unprecedented (Lake, 1997). To that end, what was occurring systemically at the international level, more than the regional level, was the most important systemic stimuli of international politics during this period. The increasing tension between the US and Russia undoubtedly reached a crescendo with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis stemmed from Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to attempt to deploy Soviet nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba. This was an apparent strategic retaliation for the US’s deployment of nuclear ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey in 1959, which had caused much consternation in the Kremlin (Criss, 1997). The Soviet Union’s decision to use its close friendship with the newly installed communist regime in Cuba to enable it to

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project power directly at the US caused the Cold War to seemingly verge on the edge of becoming a hot war (White, 1995). Indeed, the US, both politically and socially, became gripped by fear and suspicion, much like the fear and suspicion that was already brewing in the Soviet Union (Chap. 5 goes into further detail on this point). With regard to structure, Jeffrey Taliaferro (2004, p. 198) argued that the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba had “the potential to shift the U.S.-Soviet strategic balance in one fell swoop,” which forced the Kennedy administration to prioritize “a return to the status quo ante—that is, the complete removal of all missiles and Strategic Rocket Forces personnel from Cuba.” This strategic maneuver by the Soviet Union was indicative of the instability of bipolarity at that time, as the Soviet Union has made gaining strategic parity with the US a clear goal of its foreign policy. Eventually, not before much tension and rhetoric from both sides, an agreement for the Soviet Union to give up its Cuban plans and for the US to remove its missiles from Turkey was settled (Holloway, 2010). Nevertheless, the Cuban Missile Crisis perhaps represented the closest the two came to actual direct conflict in the entire span of the Cold War, with the remainder of the Cold War being mainly contested through proxy rivalries and conflicts. The point here is that this steady deterioration of the post-war relationship of the US and Soviet Union and its—eventually—massive potential global ramifications was, in part, aided by the fact that the international system was transitioning toward a bipolar structure, with the US and the Soviet Union the clear poles. In addition, the steady bipolarization that occurred among the smaller powers—gravitating toward US and Soviet centers—added further tensions, creating a truly global phenomenon. Of course, the number of crises that each side found itself opposing the other on—again, one of the problems with bipolarity is the constant facing of each pole—further exacerbated things. Interestingly, once strategic parity between the US and Soviet Union was eventually achieved in the late 1960s, the bipolar structure underpinning the Cold War became a lot more stable and, partly, accounted for the relative easing of tensions between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1970s—what became known as détente (Weber, 1990). This remained until the 1980s when the Cold War became more contentious again, and while that was certainly in part a product of Ronald Reagan’s neoconservatism, it was also driven by structural factors, namely the Soviet Union’s clear power decline (­ resulting

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in eventual collapse), which was precipitating another systemic transition: from bipolarity toward unipolarity. Counterfactually, if the international system had remained multipolar in design at the end of the Second World War, of course there would still have been the potential for conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. In fact, it may have even made it more likely. However, this conflict would have been very different from what did emerge in the shape of the Cold War. Without a bipolar structure, any conflict would not have produced a truly global struggle between two blocs led by each of the two poles. In addition, the obsession that bipolarity aided between the poles would have been mediated somewhat in a multipolar system by the mere fact of there being another pole to contend with. Ultimately, while the spike in tension that occurred with the Cuban Missile Crisis eased, the inherent fears and paranoias of the Cold War period never truly dissipated and this was because, until the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system remained crudely bipolar in nature.

3.2   The Structural Dimension of the Current US-Russia Relationship Important contrasts emerge if we compare the nature of the international and (key) regional systems of the Cold War with the nature of the contemporary international and (key) regional systems since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (in the context of US-Russian relations. The end of the Cold War, brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, was widely called the US’s unipolar moment as it represented a clear transition of the international system from the bipolarity that characterized the Cold War toward a unipolar system with a clear hegemon in the US (Krauthammer, 1990; Mastanduno, 1997). Unipolarity, unlike bipolar, tripolar, or more multipolar systems, is generally thought to be a more stable system, although instability tends to be rife during the ascent and descent of the hegemon (Wohlforth, 2009). Consequently, the hegemonic rivalry for primacy which ostensibly dominated the Cold War-era, manifesting paranoid and contentious foreign policies and a litany of proxy skirmishes between the US and the Soviet Union, was supplanted by the relative stability of an American-led unipolar system where “the salience and stakes of balance-­ of-­power politics” were pacified (Wohlforth, 1999, p. 23).

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The US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which occurred without the support of the United Nations and amid much condemnation from numerous members of the international community, was arguably the zenith of US hegemony (Brooks & Wohlforth, 2010). Some have termed the Iraq invasion of 2003 a product of hegemonic hubris, the height of the exceptionalism that had developed in the US’s foreign policy-making since Reagan’s neoconservatism took hold in the 1980s (Rojecki, 2008; Schmidt & Williams, 2008). From a structural perspective, the Iraq invasion represented the raw use of the US’s insurmountable power advantage at that time. The fact that the US did not have a credible casus belli for its Iraq invasion—although it did try to concoct one through citing Saddam’s links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network and his possession of weapons of mass destruction—somewhat demonstrated that the underlying international structural setting provided no significant barriers, in the short term at least, to US action (Calabrese, 2005). The Kremlin, which lived on as the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, had to deal with the fallout from rapidly tumbling from a place as a pole in a bipolar world to a second-tier power beset by internal crises and weakened international capabilities. Due to this significant power change, Russia had to, somewhat begrudgingly, accept the new world order based on American hegemony (Sakwa, 2008). Certainly, Russia’s attitudes toward the US gradually went from relatively warm and optimistic (there is more on this aspect of the relationship in Chap. 5) in Boris Yeltsin’s first term as president of Russia to cool and pessimistic in his second term (Tsygankov, 2010). Under the stewardship of the foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, Russia, during this period, did on occasion lash out against the US and its international order (Ambrosio, 2001). But due to the prevailing structural dimension—namely the US’s overwhelming strategic preponderance—these occurrences were opportunistic and largely theatrical, actions based on careful calculations of the US’s interests (Kubicek, 1999). Consequently, despite growing anti-US and anti-West rhetoric in Yeltsin’s second term, which was then built upon and increased under Vladimir Putin, who assumed office in 2000, Russia still, perhaps more in actions than words, still accepted US hegemony. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 represented an interesting demarcation point in the context of US-Russian relations. After supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan and participating in the US’s ‘Global War on Terror,’ Vladimir Putin publicly criticized the US for invading Iraq

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(Tsygankov, 2005). The temporal and spatial context around this decision is important because 2003 represented a period when important geopolitical changes in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, were occurring. NATO and the EU—increasingly seen as pawns of US power by the Kremlin-were finalizing (or continuing) their enlargements eastward (with 2004 a particularly important year), incorporating many of the countries that were previously within the orbit of the Soviet Union (Averre, 2009). In addition, questions over the status of Kosovo remained—a prickly topic for the Kremlin given their close ties with Serbia (then Yugoslavia) and the existence of numerous frozen conflicts in Russia’s ‘near abroad.’ The consequence of this was that from this point on, Putin and Russia became even more anti-US and anti-Western, upping the rhetoric and even undertaking punitive actions—such as perpetrating the Ukraine gas crises in 2004 and 2007, and invading Georgia in 2008 (Tsygankov & Tarver-­ Wahlquist, 2009). More importantly, from an international structural perspective, the disaster that unfolded in Iraq for the US, coupled with a similar failure in Afghanistan, led to many, including Russia, believing that something of a multipolar, post-American world was on the horizon (Layne, 2012; Posen, 2009). Indeed, this argument was further bolstered by the global financial crisis of 2008 which emanated from the US; the continued, seemingly unstoppable, rise of China; the emergence of BRICS—a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and, more recently, the US’s apparent lack of appetite to stand behind its liberal international order (Peterson, 2018). The hypothesized post-American world—what Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini (2011) alternatively call a g-zero world—has some IR theorists worried because, due to its likely (eventual) multipolar design, the “liberal constraints against great power war could diminish, and the coming decades could be an era of rising nationalism and mercantilism, geopolitical instability, and great power competition” (Layne, 2009, p. 172). This book pours some cold water on the idea that the transition to multipolarity has already occurred, or is likely to occur in the immediate future—although there is indeed a growing perception (somewhat detached from reality) that it is occurring (Wohlforth & Brooks, 2015). Of course, it is undeniable that the system is transitioning toward multipolarity (although it may experience a few decades of bipolarity first), but this is happening at a glacial pace. This is because the US continues to wield unchallenged military power and additionally has significant technologi-

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cal, economic, energy, and soft power strength (Smith, 2019). The ­challengers—China and, perhaps, India—to American primacy have some way to go to match the US in terms of power whether hard, soft, or smart—capabilities (Babones, 2015). Of course, the US appears to be retreating from the omnipresent international role it was playing at the time of the Iraq War in 2003, but this should be read as a sign of fatigue, not significant hegemonic decline. Thus, US hegemonic decline should not be seen as a foregone conclusion but rather as something which, given changing contexts, could be, quite easily if the stars align, resuscitated. What is increasingly more important in the current system, and is perhaps a sign that the US’s position as unquestioned hegemon is starting to slowly dissipate, is the emergence of a number of contentious regional settings. Barry Buzan and Ole Waever (2003, p.  43) observed back in 2003 that the unipolar system in place—a 1 + 4 + x distribution of power with the US at the top and a number of regional powers (the EU, Japan, China, and Russia) operating in a second-tier position—was conducive to the creation of some regional security complexes: regions where “states or other units link together sufficiently closely that their securities cannot be considered separate from each other.” The changing nature of the system since 2003, namely the closing of the gap between the US and the rest, has arguably made a number of these regional security complexes even more contentious (Wæver, 2017). In the context of US-Russia relations, two regional settings have become particularly contentious: Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Regarding Eastern Europe, as alluded to above, the expansion of the West’s ‘exclusive inter-democratic security institutions’ (NATO and the EU) offset by Russia’s resurgence in its ‘near abroad’—peripheral territories that were once part of the Soviet Union—generated a geopolitically-­ charged (i.e. one lacking an agreed security architecture) bipolar regional security complex (Smith, 2017). David Lake (2009) describes such a regional security complex—that is, a bipolar regional setting without an agreed security architecture—as the most unstable type and prone to generating competition in the countries that lie between the two poles. The crescendo, to date, in this region has undoubtedly been the Ukraine crisis, where the US (and broader West) and Russia have clashed over their preferences for Ukraine’s regime (Smith, 2015). After the ostensibly pro-­ Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled from power in early 2014—what Russia characterized as a West-backed coup d’état—Russia quickly retaliated by annexing Crimea and actively working to destabilize

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the east of Ukraine—supporting two breakaway movements in the Donbass region, specifically in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts (Motyl, 2014). Since the onset of the crisis, the security situation in Eastern Europe has remained largely unresolved, causing an increased power projection from both sides and the growing fear of further competition and even conflict. The Middle East is arguably less important than Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly to the current US-Russia relationship because it is not a region within Russia’s perceived sphere of privileged interest (unlike Eastern Europe). It is also a far more complex regional security setting because it involves more competing powers than the more simplistic West-­ Russia divide in Eastern Europe, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. Nevertheless, despite this complex web of interests, the US and Russia have still managed to find themselves on opposing sides of the Syrian civil war (Stent, 2016). The US, although for a long time reluctant to intervene, ended up supporting a Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia, while Russia has, since 2015, directly supported Assad and has maintained a robust strategic dialogue with Iran (Trenin, 2018). In addition to the Middle East, US-Russian tensions have also threatened to emerge over North Korea, with Russia in support of the Kim regime and the US vehemently against it. The clear breakdown of US-Russian relations over notable crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is obviously problematic, and it is understandable that such conflicts elicit memories of the Cold War. However, the structural power dynamics, as illustrated above, have shifted significantly from the Cold War, which makes such comparisons of limited value. Russia is not a challenger to the US like the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Russia’s power, despite ongoing military modernization and demonstrably improved soft power capabilities, is still trending downward (Simons & Chifu, 2017). Consequently, whereas the Cold War was truly a global competition, the current cooling of the relationship has largely been confined to two regional security complexes and is unlikely to reach anywhere near the global scope of the Cold War. A much more important development, from a structural power dynamics perspective, is the increasing power of China (Acharya, 2014; Schweller, 2018). It is appropriate to argue that based on current trends China, one day, will reach parity with the US, which will have fundamental implications for the international system (unlike Russia’s current revisionist behavior). When this is factored in, the current cooling of the US-Russia relationship seems

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somewhat insignificant, structurally at least, in the medium-to-long-term scope of international politics.

References Acharya, A. (2014). Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China’s Rise and Asia’s Emerging Security Order. International Studies Quarterly, 58(1), 158–173. van Alstein, M. (2009). The Meaning of Hostile Bipolarization: Interpreting the Origins of the Cold War. Cold War History, 9(3), 301–319. https://doi. org/10.1080/14682740902981395 Ambrosio, T. (2001). Russia’s Quest for Multipolarity: A Response to US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. European Security, 10(1), 45–67. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09662830108407482 Averre, D. (2009). Competing Rationalities: Russia, the EU and the “Shared Neighbourhood”. Europe-Asia Studies, 61(10), 1689–1713. Babones, S. (2015). American Hegemony is Here to Stay. The National Interest. Retrieved April 26, 2018, from http://nationalinterest.org/feature/americanhegemony-here-stay-13089 Bremmer, I., & Roubini, N. (2011). A G-Zero World-The New Economic Club Will Produce Conflict, Not Cooperation. Foreign Affairs, 90(2), 2–7. Brooks, S. G., & Wohlforth, W. C. (2010). World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buzan, B., & Wæver, O. (2003). Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calabrese, A. (2005). Casus Belli: U.S. Media and the Justification of the Iraq War. Television & New Media, 6(2), 153–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/152747 6404273952 Cox, M. (1990). From the Truman Doctrine to the Second Superpower Detente: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War. Journal of Peace Research, 27(1), 25–41. Criss, N.  B. (1997). Strategic Nuclear Missiles in Turkey: The Jupiter Affair, 1959–1963. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 20(3), 97–122. Gaddis, J.  L. (1974). Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point? Foreign Affairs, 52(2), 386–402. Gaddis, J. L. (2006). The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin. Holloway, D. (2010). Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962. In M. P. Leffler & O. A. Westad (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume 1: Origins (pp.  376–397). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521837194.019 Krauthammer, C. (1990). The Unipolar Moment. Foreign Affairs, 70(1), 23–33. Kubicek, P. (1999). Russian Foreign Policy and the West. Political Science Quarterly, 114(4), 547–568.

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Lake, D. A. (1997). Regional Security Complexes: A Systems Approach. In D. A. Lake & P.  M. Morgan (Eds.), Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World (pp. 45–67). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Lake, D. A. (2009). Regional Hierarchy: Authority and Local International Order. Review of International Studies, 35(S1), 35–58. Layne, C. (2009). The Waning of US Hegemony–Myth or Reality? A Review Essay. International Security, 34(1), 147–172. Layne, C. (2012). This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana. International Studies Quarterly, 56(1), 203–213. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00704.x Mastanduno, M. (1997). Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War. International Security, 21(4), 49–88. Mearsheimer, J. J. (2013). Structural Realism. In T. Dunne, M. Kurki, & S. Smith (Eds.), International Relations Theories (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merrill, D. (2006). The Truman Doctrine: Containing Communism and Modernity. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36(1), 27–37. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00284.x Motyl, A.  J. (2014). Putin’s Zugzwang: The Russia–Ukraine Standoff. World Affairs, 177(2), 58–65. Peterson, J. (2018). Present at the Destruction? The Liberal Order in the Trump Era. The International Spectator, 53(1), 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/03 932729.2018.1421295 Posen, B.  P. (2009). Emerging Multipolarity: Why Should We Care? Current History, 108(721), 347–352. Rapkin, D. P., Thompson, W. R., & Christopherson, J. A. (1979). Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the Cold War Era. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 23(2), 261–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200277902300203 Roberts, G. (1994). Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology and the Onset of the Cold War, 1947. Europe-Asia Studies, 46(8), 1371–1386. Rojecki, A. (2008). Rhetorical Alchemy: American Exceptionalism and the War on Terror. Political Communication, 25(1), 67–88. https://doi. org/10.1080/10584600701807935 Sakwa, R. (2008). “New Cold War” or Twenty Years’ Crisis? Russia and International Politics. International Affairs, 2, 241–267. Schmidt, B. C., & Williams, M. C. (2008). The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists. Security Studies, 17(2), 191–220. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09636410802098990 Schweller, R.  L. (1993). Tripolarity and the Second World War. International Studies Quarterly, 37(1), 73–103. Schweller, R.  L. (1998). Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schweller, R. L. (2018). Opposite but Compatible Nationalisms: A Neoclassical Realist Approach to the Future of US–China Relations. The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 11(1), 23–48. Simons, G., & Chifu, I. (2017). The Changing Face of Warfare in the 21st Century. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, N.  R. (2015). The EU and Russia’s Conflicting Regime Preferences in Ukraine: Assessing Regime Promotion Strategies in the Scope of the Ukraine Crisis. European Security, 24(4), 525–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/096628 39.2015.1027768 Smith, N. R. (2017). Assessing the Trajectory of West-Russia Relations in Eastern Europe: Gauging Three Potential Scenarios. Global Policy. Retrieved from https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/articles/conflict-and-security/assessing-trajectory-west-russia-relations-eastern-europe-gauging-thr. Smith, N. R. (2019). Could Russia Utilize Cryptocurrencies in Its Foreign Policy Grand Strategizing? Russia in Global Affairs, 17(2). Stent, A. (2016). Putin’s Power Play in Syria How to Respond to Russia’s Intervention. Foreign Affairs, 95(1), 106–113. Taliaferro, J. W. (2004). Power Politics and the Balance of Risk: Hypotheses on Great Power Intervention in the Periphery. Political Psychology, 25(2), 177–211. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00368.x Tillema, H.  K. (1994). Cold War Alliance and Overt Military Intervention, 1945–1991. International Interactions, 20(3), 249–278. https://doi. org/10.1080/03050629408434850 Trenin, D. (2018). The New Cold War is Boiling Over in Syria. Foreign Policy. Retrieved April 26, 2018, from http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/14/thenew-cold-war-is-boiling-over-in-syria/ Tsygankov, A.  P. (2005). Vladimir Putin’s Vision of Russia as a Normal Great Power. Post-Soviet Affairs, 21(2), 132–158. https://doi.org/10.2747/1060586X.21.2.132 Tsygankov, A.  P. (2010). Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Tsygankov, A.  P., & Tarver-Wahlquist, M. (2009). Duelling Honors: Power, Identity and the Russia–Georgia Divide. Foreign Policy Analysis, 5(4), 307–326. Wæver, O. (2017). International Leadership after the Demise of the Last Superpower: System Structure and Stewardship. Chinese Political Science Review, 2(4), 452–476. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-017-0086-7 Weber, S. (1990). Realism, Detente, and Nuclear Weapons. International Organization, 44(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300004641 Werth, A. (1952). The Zigzags of Soviet Foreign Policy. The Political Quarterly, 23(1), 32–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-923X.1952.tb02686.x White, M. (1995). The Cuban Missile Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Wohlforth, W. C. (1993). The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wohlforth, W.  C. (1999). The Stability of a Unipolar World. International Security, 24(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228899560031 Wohlforth, W. C. (2009). Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War. World Politics, 61(1), 28–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887109000021 Wohlforth, W. C., & Brooks, S. G. (2015). American Primacy in Perspective. In D. Skidmore (Ed.), Paradoxes of Power (pp. 29–38). New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

The Ideological Dimension of US-Russia Relations

Abstract  This chapter begins with an examination of the competing ideologies that developed in the US and the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War. The US’s ideology of Democratic Capitalism and the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology were not only both heavily international in aims and scope, but were also universalist, each seeing itself as the solution to humanity’s problems. As time went on it is argued that both the US’s and the Soviet Union’s ideologies mutated and became anti-Soviet and anti-American, which created a pessimistic ideological dimension. In the current US-Russia relationship, ideology is far less important. Neither side has a universalist ideology, and while Russia’s civilization ideology has the potential to morph into an influential cognitive framework, as it currently stands ideology is far less important to foreign policy-making on both sides than during the Cold War. Keywords  Marxism-Leninism • Democratic Capitalism • Liberal hegemony • Russian civilization The conclusion of the Second World War in 1945 was more than simply the material defeat of the Axis powers; it also signaled the defeat of the ideologies that were guiding those powers. Most important, of course, was the defeat of the Nazi ideology of National Socialism, but with the defeats of Italy and Japan more broadly, the end of the Second World War © The Author(s) 2020 N. R. Smith, A New Cold War?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20675-8_4

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signified the death of fascism as a prominent, and internationally relevant, ideology (for the time). Consequently, much like with the structural dimension, what emerged out of the end of the Second World War was that two main ideologies reigned supreme in the global setting: the US’s ideology of Democratic Capitalism and the Soviet Union’s ideology of Marxism-Leninism. This chapter starts by arguing that ideology played an important role in predisposing the US and the Soviet Union toward competition, and because of this, it should be considered a key component of the Cold War. Thereafter, the role of ideology in the current US-Russia relationship is examined, with an argument that neither side currently has an ideology that is as rigid or universalist as during the Cold War being forwarded.

4.1   The Ideological Dimension of the Early Cold War Both the US’s and the Soviet Union’s putative ideologies at the start of the Cold War had competing, ‘universalist’ international aims at their heart which provided an important cognitive framework for their policy-­ making. In other words, both believed that the end of history was nigh and that their own ideology would be the last one standing. Crudely, the US’s ideology of Democratic Capitalism had its roots in the “Lockean liberalism” found in the Declaration of Independence (Engerman, 2010). Through evolution and progression over time, this initially narrow form of liberalism—that is, a focus on protection of individual freedoms and property—expanded into a much deeper ideology which included the embedding of free market capitalism. David Engerman (2010, p.  21) argues that regarding foreign policy, the belief that the US’s rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due to their racial and ideological superiority meant that “westward expansion was both providential and inevitable—as the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ suggests.” Of course, an explicit foreign policy based on the tenets of American liberalism first came to prominence under Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s noted idealism aside, his idea of creating a liberal world order—which he failed to realize in his foreign policy at that time—arguably became a cornerstone of the Democratic capitalist ideology that gained prominence during the Cold

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War, built on a firm belief that “their system of democratic capitalism would serve as a magnet” (Leffler, 1999, p. 504). Conversely, the Soviet Union’s official ideology of Marxism-Leninism had its roots, unsurprisingly, in the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Domestically, Marxism-Leninism was an ideology that believed a state should be governed by a ‘vanguardist’ single party (a dictatorship of the proletariat) which presided over a centrally planned economy (Malia, 2008). Regarding foreign policy, both Marx and Lenin, among other prominent socialist thinkers (such as Trotsky), emphasized an international component to their ideologies, with a particular articulation of capitalist states as being war-mongering and imperialist (Tucker, 1977). In Stalin’s own words, he noted that a final victory, according to the doctrine of Leninism, was “‘possible only on an international scale’” (Boer, 2017, p. 40). Furthermore, given the assumption that capitalism was an internationally expansive system, the Marxist-Leninist ideology anticipated that if socialism was to survive, there would be an inevitable international struggle with capitalist states (Brewer, 2002). Odd Arne Westad (2007, p. 39) argues that the commonality of these competing ideologies was that “both were envisaged by their founders to be grand experiments, on the success of which the future of humankind depended.” Subsequently, in conjunction with the structural dimension, the ideological division between the US and the Soviet Union helped sow the seeds of the Cold War as we came to know it: a contentious division between two competing blocs. And, much like the structural and psychological dimensions (examined in more detail in Chap. 5), the ideological dimension grew in importance as the ideologies of the US and Soviet Union became more rigid and entrenched in the first 15 years of the Cold War. The Soviet Union’s ideological entrenchment of Marxism-Leninism ideals in its foreign policy in the post-war setting arguably first took hold in the ‘Sovietization’ of Eastern Europe that it facilitated. As the Soviet Union expanded westward as the Second World War was winding down, it began ‘Sovietizing’—that is, imposing regimes that mirrored the Soviet Union—the new territories it claimed. Alvin Rubinstein (1955, p.  99) argues that the Soviet Union’s haste in attempting to impose Soviet-style systems in Eastern Europe was due to an “acute appreciation of the potentialities of the moment.” Namely, the Soviet Union was given an opportunity by the revolutionary conditions in Eastern Europe and thus utilized an array of military, economic, and political tools to impose Sovietization

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on these states. This was later formalized in institutions such as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. However, the Soviet Union’s ideologically-driven foreign policy was not confined solely to Eastern Europe, as it also developed into a globally ambitious project. Given the anti-imperial, pro-proletariat focus of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union found significant fertile ground for its ideology in much of the developing world, particularly as the process of decolonization was, slowly at first, beginning to take shape. Roger Kanet (2006) notes that starting with support for Nasser in Egypt, the Soviet Union under Khrushchev took proactive steps to aid ‘progressive regimes’ in the Middle East and South Asia. By 1960, this geographic scope had expanded to sub-Saharan  Africa too, with the Soviet Union supporting Ghana, Guinea, and Mali in their efforts to overthrow their colonial masters (Iandolo, 2012). Then, of course, when Fidel Castro officially declared Cuba a Marxist-Leninist state in 1961, the Soviet Union’s ideological focus widened even further, to cover much of the globe. However, this arguably represented the zenith of Soviet ideological conviction as subsequent events in Cuba—most notably the worrying escalation experienced during the Cuban Missile Crisis—led to Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor, adopting a more pragmatic foreign policy, less influenced by Marxism-Leninist ideology (Stojanović, 1988). The US’s adoption of a strong ideological underpinning to its foreign policies in the post-war era somewhat lagged behind the Soviet Union. Arguably, the US—both internally and externally—had felt more threatened by fascism than socialism (Lipset, 1955). Nevertheless, partly due to the creeping Sovietization of Eastern Europe, the ideological component of the US’s policies quickly became apparent by 1947. The Truman Doctrine, for instance, was framed as a pledge by the US to “assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (Merrill, 2006). In addition, the doctrine was built on a fear of the potential domino effect of Communism, causing the US to assert its own ideology. This went hand in hand with a pursuit of military hegemony, the use of economic largesse, proactive nation-building efforts, the creation of alliances, and ultimately, out and out regime promotion. As argued by Dennis Merrill (2006, p. 31), the Truman Doctrine was, in other words, the fusing of US “ideological, political, and economic power to implement a policy of firm and unalterable ‘containment’ to blunt Soviet expansion.”

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The US’s focus, much like the Soviet Union’s, was initially geographically centered on the ideological battle for Europe. However, it symbiotically grew with the Soviet Union’s own ideological aims to focus more globally on promoting, ostensibly at least, the tenets of Democratic Capitalism. Whereas the Soviet expansion to the developing world was, arguably, more a case of being ‘invited’ by the popular movements that arose there, the US’s expansion was more one of ‘imposing’ its ideology as a bulwark against the spread of Marxism-Leninism (Engerman, 2010). This, in part, demonstrated the growing exceptionalism of the US’s Democratic Capitalism ideology—to be fair, such exceptionalism was also evident in Soviet ideology (Westad, 2007)—in the early Cold War period. Indeed, as Robert Patman (2006) notes, US exceptionalism—which was augmented by the clear power advantage the US had in the early days of the Cold War—did have limits and gave way to pragmatism in certain cases, such as the Hungarian revolution and, later, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Importantly, at first, as Engerman (2010, p. 32) notes, “while each side maintained its belief that history would eventually create the ideal global society, each side also acknowledged that such a society might be a long time in coming.” However, as the Cold War progressed in the initial 15 years from 1947 to the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, due to the increasing number of crises, both sets of ideologies mutated, becoming more pessimistic and antagonistic. For instance, the US’s Democratic Capitalism became stringently anti-Communist in its aim and scope. This was in part due to the growing threat perception of the spread of the Soviet Union’s Marxism-Leninist ideology across the globe, but was also a product of domestic ignorance, fear, and paranoia about the Soviet Union and its motivations. Consequently, for much of the first 15 years of the Cold War, the containment of the spread of Communism rather than the explicit promotion of democracy and capitalism became, arguably, the central aim of US foreign policy (Walt, 1989). Indeed, the US’s increasingly heavy-­handed foreign policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated its commitment to anti-Communism (McCormick, 1995). Conversely, while the Soviet Union’s Marxism-Leninism was already strongly anti-capitalist in its orientation, it arguably became more messianic in its proselytizing during the first 15 years of the Cold War. This was particularly the case in the developing world. Kanet (2006, p. 334) argues that Khrushchev “believed that struggle for independence from the imperialist West [in the developing world] would contribute to the weakening

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of the major opponents of the Soviet Union, including ultimately the United States.” The Soviet Union’s expansion undeniably became somewhat anti-American as it echoed a “discontent with the world as it”—particularly built on the belief that the US occupied an unfair position in international politics—and precipitated “a determination to change it,” starting in the developing world (Gaddis, 1981, p. 79). Consequently, the ideological element of the Cold War was crucial in moving the conflict from simply a set of geopolitical crises to representing something more serious, more substantial. As Stanley Hoffmann (1962, p. 671) noted, by 1962, the Cold War had become “a contest for the minds of men at least as much as a fight for men, markets, resources, or space” which had “almost condemn[ed] the world political scene to being a desert without oases.” The strong ideological battle which characterized the first 15 years of the Cold War started to wane somewhat after the Cuban Missile Crisis and then even further with the onset of détente in 1969. This demonstrated the limits of ideology in driving foreign policy. It has to be stressed that ideology was never a primary driver, but merely a cognitive framework for appropriate action. Thus, as Gaddis (1981, p. 75) noted, both the US and the Soviet Union were capable of “subordinating ideological differences to pursue common interests where those existed.” And while ideology returned to the fore somewhat in the 1980s with the putative neoconservatism of the Reagan administration (Winik, 1988) and the last-ditch attempt by the Soviet Union to resurrect its ideology in Afghanistan (Westad, 1994), it never reached the heights of the 1950s and 1960s.

4.2   The Ideological Dimension of the Current US-Russia Relationship Much like the Second World War was thought to have diminished the ideological battle from three main ideologies to two, the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union was characterized as an “End of History” moment where one ideology—Democratic Capitalism—had won out and no challengers remained (Fukuyama, 1989). While the End of History argument has not aged particularly well, one of the central points—that there would no longer be a central ideological struggle in international politics—remains somewhat valid. This is not to say ideology

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has not played a role in international politics since the end of the Cold War, because it clearly has. Most notably, the US, beginning in the 1990s, adopted what has been termed an ideology of liberal hegemony (Ikenberry, 1999; Mearsheimer & Walt, 2016). Liberal hegemony was an ideology that married the liberal values of democracy, free-market economics, and human rights with the US’s unipolar power position. Thus, liberal hegemony is largely the same ideology—based on Lockean liberalism—forged by the US in the early days of the Cold War, just applied to a different international structural context (unipolarity, rather than bipolarity). This liberal hegemony ideology has unequivocally guided US foreign policy grand strategizing from the early 1990s up until the late 2000s—a period during which the US become a liberal ‘sheriff’ of international politics (Brooks & Wohlforth, 2010; Huntington, 1999). Thus, although ideology still mattered, what was missing compared to the Cold War was any significant challenger. Part of this was due to the US’s incredibly advantageous power position, an unprecedented situation in the history of the Westphalian system (Wohlforth, 2009). Additionally, as John Ikenberry (1999, p. 28) argues, it was also because the open, reciprocal, and multilateral foundations of the liberal international order made it “increasingly difficult for a potential rival state to introduce a competing set of principles and institutions.” In the context of this chapter’s focus on the US-Russia relationship since 2003, the altering ideologies of both the US and Russia is undoubtedly still an important intervening factor in understanding the trajectory of the relationship over the past 15 years. For the US, since its ill-fated interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, its underpinning liberal hegemony ideology has clearly begun to fracture. After the neoconservative heydays of the two Bush administrations where US exceptionalism and idealism arguably reached hitherto unseen heights, the Obama administration attempted to adopt a more cautious approach, albeit with mixed success (Kaufman, 2014). One example was the US’s reluctance to get involved in an Anglo-French proposal to intervene in Libya on humanitarian grounds (Chesterman, 2011). While the US did, eventually, participate in an intervention in Libya, the prevailing cautiousness was termed a new era of the US ‘leading from behind’ by one White House official.1

1  Much debate exists as to whether the term ‘leading from behind’ came from a White House source or not (Rogin, 2011).

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More recently, under the Trump administration, the US has flirted with the idea of abandoning its traditional (rhetorically, at least) liberal bent in its foreign policy strategizing. Tauesh Cha (2016) argues that Trump’s ascendency reflects the, often forgotten, Jacksonian tendencies—a kind of American-centric parochialism—of the US’s working-class interior which is far removed from its purported Lockean roots, which is mostly found in coastal elites. What this means for foreign policy is difficult to assert because, to date, making any confident generalizations about a Trump doctrine is difficult due to his penchant for non-linear rambling (Mariani, 2017). Nevertheless, the US, since Trump took over, appears to be less willing to promote liberal values and seems more focused on pursuing crude notions of national interest—such as a mercantilist trade policy (notably against China) and openly questioning the purpose of institutions such as NATO (Friedman Lissner & Rapp-Hooper, 2018). Barry Posen (2018, p. 20) argues that this ideological turn represents the start of a switch from liberal hegemony to illiberal hegemony, an ideology which: still seeks to retain the United States’ superior economic and military capability and role as security arbiter for most regions of the world, but he has chosen to forgo the export of democracy to nation building abroad and abstain from many multilateral trade agreements.

A case in point of the US’s increasing illiberal assertion of its hegemony is the ongoing trade war against China. Notwithstanding some legitimate concerns regarding China’s theft of intellectual property and its flouting of WTO rules, the US’s initiation of a trade war is also a potential power play designed to hurt China’s ongoing rise toward being a challenger to the US’s position as the top dog in international politics (Sheng, 2018). Moreover, unlike the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which arguably also sought to dent China’s power trajectory but within the rules and norms of the liberal international order (Ikenberry, 2017), the means by which the Trump administration is attempting to contain China is clearly through an illiberal—read: mercantilist—trade policy (Stiglitz, 2018). What this perhaps illustrates—along with the recent decision to pull out of Syria—is the gradual manifestation of the “America first” ideology Trump strongly advocated during his election campaigning. Russia’s foreign policy ideology has similarly undergone evolution since the end of the Cold War, and especially in the last 15 years. The early years of Putin’s presidency were best characterized as a period of “pragmatic

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cooperation” with regard to how Russia interacted with the US and broader West—one cannot forget Russia’s support for intervention in Afghanistan and cooperation with the US’s ‘Global War on Terror’ (Tsygankov, 2016b). However, this initial cooperative phase quickly gave way to a more assertive phase, which first reared its head with Russia’s refusal to support the US invasion of Iraq. For Leon Aron (2013), with regard to foreign policy, this ideological change, what he terms the Putin doctrine, was built on three geostrategic imperatives: “that Russia must remain a nuclear superpower, a great power in all facets of international activity, and the hegemon—the political, military, and economic leader— of its region.” In other words, this ideology has, since the mid-2000s, been about Russia reclaiming its “rightful” place as a global great power, something which was taken from it when the Soviet Union collapsed (Lukyanov, 2016). In recent years—arguably most visible since Russia’s intervention in Ukraine—the Putin doctrine has morphed from being more about re-­ asserting Russia’s position as a great power into something much deeper: repositioning Russia as a civilization. Andrei Tsygankov (2016a, p. 237) argues that “partly in response to U.S. criticism, since Putin’s return to the presidency, Russia’s foreign policy has obtained an ideological justification” based on the idea that Russia is a “culturally distinct power.” The clear positioning of Russia as a culture distinct from the West has symbiotically grown with an increasing ‘anti-American hegemony’ bent in its foreign policy. Of course, anti-Americanism has been present in Russian foreign policy for some time and helps explain Russia’s cheerleading of the BRICS grouping and its forging of closer ties with China in recent years. However, more recently, it appears that Russia’s anti-Americanism has become more tangible and brazen; Russia has even taken its fight to the US itself by allegedly meddling in domestic politics, most notably during the 2016 presidential election (Rutland, 2017). What Russia’s interventions in Ukraine since 2014 and in Syria since 2015, and even its alleged meddling in US domestic politics, demonstrate is the great ontological insecurity—that is, a lacking sense of ideational order (Mitzen, 2006)—that Russia has experienced in recent years (Moulioukova, 2017). Certainly, this ontological insecurity in Russia stretches back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and has arguably been a key driver of Russia’s identity crisis and ideological dissonance over the years (Tsygankov, 2016a). However, it was not until the expansion of the EU and NATO eastward, accompanied by flashpoints in Georgia in 2008

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and Ukraine since 2015, that Russia began to consciously turn the US, and its Western allies, into an ‘other’ from which Russian civilization is defined against (Smith, 2017). Thus, acts like the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and the intervention in Syria, which went against the wishes of the West, are in some ways an assertion of ontological security, an assertion of an ideology of Russia as a great power and a great civilization that can act on its own, free from the control of the West. When you factor in the ideological development of the US and Russia over the past 15 years it is fair to argue that the current state of the relationship is blighted by some clear ideological differences. On the one hand, while the US is appearing to become less liberal in its foreign policy-­ making—something which Russia has arguably wanted for some time—it shows no desire to acquiesce its power as it still, despite obvious fatigue, remains the self-perceived ‘top dog’ in international politics. This, of course, makes the US resistant to international challengers, and given Russia’s involvement in the BRICS and with China, Russia is naturally viewed with suspicion by the US. On the other hand, Russia’s increasing anti-Americanism in its civilizational foreign policy-making—while perhaps mostly a response to the US’s previous liberal hegemony ideology— makes any swift change in opinion with regard to the US difficult. Given that the US occupies the ‘other’ in Russia’s civilizational idea, keeping the US as an enemy is an important component in achieving foreign policy continuity for Russia. However, despite these clear ideological divisions, it would be hyperbolic to claim that the current ideological dissonance bears any resemblance to the immense ideological contestation that was at the heart of the Cold War, especially in the first 15 years. Importantly, neither side today has a universalist ideology driving its foreign policies. Rather, their ideologies are focused on achieving crude understandings of national interest, that is, returning Russia to a position of a unique (civilizational) “great power” and the US pursuing a policy of “America first.” Thus, unlike the early days of the Cold War, ideology in the contemporary US-Russia relationship does not play anywhere near as exacerbating a role in pushing the competition toward something more existential in nature. Consequently, rather than the end of history, what we have seen is something more along the lines of the end of ideology, as a creeping geopolitical nihilism has emerged in international politics with the ostensible failure of the US’s liberal hegemony ideology to change the world. Indeed, Russia’s civilizational turn is perhaps the rediscovery of

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a confident ­ideology, particularly as it has fueled risky interventions in Ukraine and Syria. Nevertheless, if the US’s illiberal turn in its foreign policy ideology continues and Russia is able to rediscover its pragmatism, it is plausible to envisage a scenario where some sort of ideological harmony is developed between the two sides. Indeed, Vladimir Putin remarked during the 2015 Republican primaries, in response to proRussia comments made by Donald Trump, that “he says he will want to reach another, deeper, level of relations. What else can we do but to welcome it? Certainly, we welcome it” (CBS News, 2015). Allegations of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin aside, in the context of international politics, despite some moments of warmth between the two at various international forums (as well as a bilateral summit in Helsinki in 2017), it is still too early to tell where the ideological component of the current US-Russia relationship is headed.

References Aron, L. (2013). The Putin Doctrine. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved October 3, 2016, from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2013-03-08/ putin-doctrine Boer, R. (2017). Stalin: From Theology to the Philosophy of Socialism in Power. Singapore: Springer. Brewer, A. (2002). Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. Abingdon: Routledge. Brooks, S. G., & Wohlforth, W. C. (2010). World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. CBS News. (2015). Donald Trump Appears to Have a Friend in Russia President Vladimir Putin. CBS News. Retrieved January 20, 2019, from https://www. cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-russia-president-vladimir-putin/ Cha, T. (2016). The Return of Jacksonianism: The International Implications of the Trump Phenomenon. The Washington Quarterly, 39(4), 83–97. Chesterman, S. (2011). “Leading from Behind”: The Responsibility to Protect, the Obama Doctrine, and Humanitarian Intervention After Libya. Ethics & International Affairs, 25(3), 279–285. Engerman, D. (2010). Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962. In M. P. Leffler & O. A. Westad (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume 1: Origins (pp.  20–43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521837194.003 Friedman Lissner, R., & Rapp-Hooper, M. (2018). The Day after Trump: American Strategy for a New International Order. The Washington Quarterly, 41(1), 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2018.1445353

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Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest, 16(Summer), 3–18. Gaddis, J. L. (1981). Containment: Its Past and Future. International Security, 5(4), 74–102. Hoffmann, S. (1962). Restraints and Choices in American Foreign Policy. Daedalus, 91(4), 668–704. Huntington, S. P. (1999). The Lonely Superpower. Foreign Affairs, 78(2), 35–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/20049207 Iandolo, A. (2012). The Rise and Fall of the “Soviet Model of Development” in West Africa, 1957–64. Cold War History, 12(4), 683–704. Ikenberry, G.  J. (1999). America’s Liberal Hegemony. Current History, 98(624), 23–28. Ikenberry, G.  J. (2017). The Plot against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive. Foreign Affairs, 96(3), 2–9. Kanet, R. E. (2006). The Superpower Quest for Empire: The Cold War and Soviet Support for “Wars of National Liberation”. Cold War History, 6(3), 331–352. Kaufman, R. G. (2014). Prudence and the Obama Doctrine. Orbis, 58(3), 441–459. Leffler, M.  P. (1999). The Cold War: What Do “We Now Know”? American Historical Review, 104(2), 501–524. Lipset, S. M. (1955). The Radical Right: A Problem for American Democracy. The British Journal of Sociology, 6(2), 176–209. Lukyanov, F. (2016). Putin’s Foreign Policy: The Quest to Restore Russia’s Rightful Place. Foreign Affairs, 95(3), 30–37. Malia, M. (2008). Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia. New York: The Free Press. Mariani, M. (2017). Is Trump’s Chaos Tornado a Move from the Kremlin’s Playbook? Vanity Fair. Retrieved January 20, 2019, from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/is-tr umps-chaos-a-move-from-the-kremlins-playbook McCormick, T. J. (1995). America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mearsheimer, J.  J., & Walt, S.  M. (2016). The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior US Grand Strategy. Foreign Affairs, 95(4), 70–83. Merrill, D. (2006). The Truman Doctrine: Containing Communism and Modernity. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36(1), 27–37. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00284.x Mitzen, J. (2006). Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341–370. Moulioukova, D. (2017). Decoding Russian Foreign Policy. PhD thesis, University of Miami. Patman, R. G. (2006). Globalisation, the New US Exceptionalism and the War on Terror. Third World Quarterly, 27(6), 963–986. Posen, B. R. (2018). The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony. Foreign Affairs, 97(2), 20–27.

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Rogin, J. (2011). Who Really Said Obama Was “Leading from Behind”? Foreign Policy. Retrieved January 20, 2019, from https://foreignpolicy. com/2011/10/27/who-really-said-obama-was-leading-from-behind/ Rubinstein, A.  Z. (1955). The Sovietization of Eastern Europe. Social Science, 30(2), 99–104. Rutland, P. (2017). Trump, Putin, and the Future of US–Russian Relations. Slavic Review, 76(S1), S41–S56. Sheng, A. (2018). Trump’s Threat of a Trade War is Driven by the West’s Fear of the Rise of the Rest. South China Morning Post. Retrieved January 20, 2019, from https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2137466/ trumps-threat-trade-war-driven-wests-fear-rise-rest Smith, N. R. (2017). Assessing the Trajectory of West-Russia Relations in Eastern Europe: Gauging Three Potential Scenarios. Global Policy. Retrieved https:// www.globalpolicyjournal.com/articles/conflict-and-security/assessing-trajectory-west-russia-relations-eastern-europe-gauging-thr Stiglitz, J. E. (2018). Trump and Globalization. Journal of Policy Modeling, 40(3), 515–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JPOLMOD.2018.03.006 Stojanović, S. (1988). From Ideology to Pragmatism. Society, 25(4), 24–27. Tsygankov, A. P. (2016a). Crafting the State-Civilization Vladimir Putin’s Turn to Distinct Values. Problems of Post-Communism, 63(3), 146–158. Tsygankov, A.  P. (2016b). Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tucker, R. C. (1977). The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy. Slavic Review, 36(4), 563–589. Walt, S.  M. (1989). The Case for Finite Containment: Analyzing US Grand Strategy. International Security, 14(1), 5–49. Westad, O.  A. (1994). Prelude to Invasion: The Soviet Union and the Afghan Communists, 1978–1979. The International History Review, 16(1), 49–69. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.1994.9640668 Westad, O. A. (2007). The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winik, J. (1988). The Neoconservative Reconstruction. Foreign Policy, 73(Winter), 135–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/1148881 Wohlforth, W. C. (2009). Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War. World Politics, 61(1), 28–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887109000021

CHAPTER 5

The Psychological Dimension of US-Russia Relations

Abstract  This chapter begins with an examination of the psychological environment which emerged in the early Cold War period. It is argued that the prevailing structural and ideological dimensions combined with the uncertainty of which side was stronger, interlinked with the arms races and disputes over numerous international crises, led to the rise in anxiety and paranoia in the US-Soviet relationship. This anxiety and paranoia was present on both sides and reached a crescendo during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the prospect of nuclear conflict seemed plausible. The current US-Russia relationship undeniably demonstrates a worsening psychological trajectory, with the return of anxiety and paranoia observable on both sides. Russia’s fear of the US’s desire for regime change is reciprocated by the US’s fear of Russian meddling in its domestic politics. While this is ‘Cold War-esque,’ it still has yet to reach the fever pitch of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Keywords  Mirror image • Cuban Missile Crisis • Ukraine crisis • 2016 presidential election The psychological dimension of the Cold War is arguably the most vivid aspect of the conflict that lives on in present-day popular memory. The anxiety, fears, and paranoias that came to dominate the Cold War, especially in the first 15 years, were a product of the structural and ideological © The Author(s) 2020 N. R. Smith, A New Cold War?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20675-8_5

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dimensions, both of which (as examined in Chaps. 3 and 4) had important roles in influencing the psychology of the key decision-makers on both sides. Of course, there had long been a sense of distrust between the Soviet Union and the US. Part of this distrust stemmed from the US’s participation in an ‘allied’ intervention in the Russian Civil War against the Bolsheviks, which was overtly about aiding the Czechoslovak Legion in re-establishing an Eastern front, but covertly about overthrowing the Bolsheviks and reinstating the White Movement (Foglesong, 1995). As was discussed in the previous chapter, the deep-seated differences between Marxism-Leninism and Democratic Capitalism, both of which acted as cognitive frameworks for appropriate action, made suspicion a natural aspect of the relationship from the start. This chapter begins by providing an overview of how the psychological dimension of the early Cold War became beset by growing anxiety and paranoia on both sides, the creation of a mirror image of distorted perceptions. Threat perceptions, it is argued, reached a crescendo during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the fear of nuclear conflict reached unprecedented levels. Thereafter, the psychological dimension of the current US-Russia relationship is examined, and while growing anxiety and paranoia is a clear characteristic of the relationship, it still has not reached the level experienced during the early Cold War.

5.1   The Psychological Dimension of the Early Cold War Despite cooperating to defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War, the psychological dimension of the US-Soviet relationship quickly unraveled in the initial post-war setting. For William Wohlforth (1993, p. 100), this inherent psychological problem in the US-Soviet relationship lay in the ambiguity of distribution of power after the Second World War, because “after all, the two states had never fought each other,” which led to “different interpretations of the war’s results.” Consequently, there was a perceptive dissonance at the heart of the US-Soviet relationship in 1945, which, in part, helped lay the foundations, along with the structural, ideological, and technological dimensions, for the Cold War to emerge in such a rapid and escalating fashion. Regarding the Soviet Union, its strategic perceptions of the US altered immediately after the US used atomic bombs against the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Stalin, it is reported, was well aware of

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the strategic implications of the US’s new weapon, which he perceived was precipitating a “political offensive” by the US against the Soviet Union’s interests in East Asia and Europe (Zubok, 2009). However, as with the structural and ideological dimensions, the characteristically pessimistic and paranoid psychological dimension that would characterize the initial Cold War had its roots in the ostensible onset of the Cold War in 1947. The Soviet Union’s interpretation of the Truman Doctrine—both in the form of the strategy of containment and the economic conditionality of the Marshall Plan—was that the strategy represented a concerted effort to encircle the Soviet Union and, perhaps, even act as a springboard for an eventual conflict. As Wohlforth (1993, p. 106) details, in a 1951 speech by the then security chief of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria, the US was charged with “restoring the two seats of war, Germany and Japan” and undertaking “the Marshallization of Europe” as “war preparation.” The Soviet Union’s perceptions of the US became arguably even more pessimistic and ingrained in the 1950s. After the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, the eruption of the Korean War became an obvious point of contention in the US-Soviet relationship. Stalin’s initial decision in 1950 to support a North Korean invasion of South Korea was a rare moment of strategic optimism vis-à-vis the Soviet Union’s strategic struggle against the US in East Asia. This was built on a perception that the Sino–Soviet pact would dissuade US intervention on behalf of South Korea, as the US would not risk the potential for another “world war” (Roberts, 2006). However, the US did eventually intervene—officially under the command of the United Nations—and by the conclusion of the war in 1953, not only were the Soviets (along with the Chinese and North Koreans) widely perceived as the instigators of the war, the US now had committed significant (permanent) military resources to the South. Furthermore, the effect of the war on the Sino-Soviet pact, a perceived key strategic partnership in the face of the US challenge, was significant in pushing it toward breakdown—which eventually happened in 1960 (Nakajima, 1979). As Geoffrey Roberts (2006, p. 370) contends, Stalin’s decision to support the North’s invasion of the South “was one of his most abject failures,” one which had significant psychological consequences. If the 1950s were not difficult enough, the Soviet Union’s threat perceptions of the US arguably reached an apogee in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis developed largely due to the Soviet Union’s fear around the US’s decision to deploy nuclear missiles in Turkey (and Italy) in 1962 (Criss, 1997). The timing of this decision came

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hot on the heels of the US’s failed Bay of Pigs mission in Cuba and the Berlin Crisis, both of which occurred in 1961 and continued the growing pessimism that had festered in the 1950s (Lunak, 2003). Declassified documents paint a picture of the Soviet Union’s decision to place missiles in Cuba as a desperate ploy to close the perceived “missile gap” that had emerged in favor of the US (Garthoff, 1988). There was a belief in the Kremlin that the US had an ability, thanks to its deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey, to destroy the Soviet Union before it could respond (Lee, 1972). Thus, placing nuclear missiles in Cuba was an aggressive bargaining play at either reaching strategic parity or, at the very least, getting the US to remove its missiles from Turkey (Garthoff, 1988). Beyond this, it also demonstrated the complete breakdown of dialogue in the relationship at that time, as something of a period where ‘actions spoke louder than words’ emerged. Regarding the US, its initial, already wary, perceptions of the Soviet Union grew even more negative in the wake of the ‘Sovietization’ that was occurring in Eastern Europe at the conclusion of the Second World War. The US had hoped to place Western-leaning governments in power in Romania and Bulgaria, and when that objective failed a fear developed that Soviet expansion in Europe would head westward and southward (Roberts, 2007). This fear was augmented by the fact that many Western European countries had strong popular socialist movements sympathetic to the Soviet Union (Blum, 2003). Indeed, such a fear—especially the potential of losing Greece and Turkey to the Soviets—was an important driver for the implementation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 (Gaddis, 1974). However, the Truman Doctrine outgrew simply shoring up Greece and Turkey as it soon became a European-wide project—coupled with the Marshall Plan—partly due to an inherent fear of the domino effect of Communism (Merrill, 2006). John Lewis Gaddis (1974, p. 386) argues that what the Truman doctrine signaled was the recognition that the Soviet Union represented a clear challenge to the US’s putative foreign policy objective: creating “an external environment conducive to the survival and prosperity of the nation’s domestic institutions.” The US’s predominately Europe-centered fears regarding the Soviet Union’s motives and interests shifted to East Asia at the turn of the decade when Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. Similarly to the Soviet Union, the Korean War was deemed by the US to be a crucial conflict with regard to the long-term balance of power in East Asia.

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Importantly, it also came shortly after the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War and the Soviet Union’s first nuclear weapons test (Jervis, 1980). Indeed, North Korea’s invasion initially caught the US off-guard and there was much domestic debate about the degree to which the US should support the South (Roberts, 2006). The eventual strong level of commitment, which surprised Stalin, who was banking on minimal support, demonstrated the gravity, in the eyes of the US, of the potential cost of losing South Korea to the North, which would have resulted in a Sino-Soviet strategic monopoly in continental East Asia (Roberts, 2006). Robert Jervis (1980, p. 597) argues that the Korean War was a watershed moment for the US’s foreign policy and cemented the emergence of a Cold War because it altered the perception in Washington of the Soviet Union as being “threatening but weak; expansionist but cautious” to something closer to threatening and strong; expansionist and reckless. The Cuban Missile Crisis, as with the Soviet Union, represented an apogee of US fears about what lengths the Soviet Union was prepared to go to in order to challenge the US. By this time, unlike during the Korean War, the Soviets now had an indisputable nuclear weapons capability and were also making inroads with popular movements in the developing world (whereas the US was more reliant on force to promote its ideology), with Cuba a particular success story (Morgenthau, 1970). Furthermore, given Cuba’s proximity to the US, unlike Korea, the threatened encroachment of the Soviet Union into the US’s backyard was deemed highly problematic. Particularly vulnerable to these threat perceptions was John F. Kennedy. Not only did Kennedy’s sanctioned Bay of Pigs intervention end in ignominy in 1961, he had, according to his press secretary Pierre Salinger (1966, p. 175), become convinced that “Khrushchev would not shrink from pulling the nuclear trigger if his back was to the wall.” Although this perception was instrumental in helping to de-escalate the Cuban Missile Crisis, because it meant the US respected the Soviet threat, it still demonstrated significant pessimism: a perception that something as mutually destructive as nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real possibility if relations were mismanaged. Consequently, what occurred psychologically in the early years of the Cold War was the creation of a relationship beset by growing distrust, fear, anxiety, and paranoia—all of which made the threat of conflict seem imminent. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1961, p. 46) characterized this as a distorted mirror image:

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the Russian’s distorted picture of us [the US] was curiously similar to our view of them—a mirror image. But of course our image was real. Or could it be that our views too were distorted and irrational—a mirror image in a twisted glass?

Therefore, the rational barrier against nuclear war—that is, the irrationality of pursuing something that leads to mutually assured destruction— could, in theory, be circumvented by the anxiety and paranoia produced by the mirror image, which helped make unthinkable outcomes not only realistic but perhaps necessary (Eckhardt & White, 1967). This is why the developing psychological dimension of the Cold War was particularly dangerous, especially when it was fused with the similarly contentious structural and ideological dimensions. Furthermore, the increasing entrenchment of anxiety and paranoia in the 1950s and early 1960s also restricted any measures aimed at removing the distortions, such as constructive dialogue or cooperation (Smith, 2018). Indeed, it took the brink of nuclear war at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later Henry Kissinger’s and Leonid Brezhnev’s calm pragmatic realism, to help push the relationship toward the détente and an eventual de-escalation of the Cold War from the crescendo of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis until the 1980s, when it somewhat sparked up again (Weber, 1990).

5.2   The Psychological Dimension of the Current US-Russia Relationship When the Cold War ended, the initial psychological dimension of the US-Russia relationship that emerged was initially far more positive and optimistic. For the US, Russia was seen as a democratic and capitalist project, a state which, with some support and encouragement, could grow to become a productive member of its liberal international order (Diamond, 1992). At a meeting with Russian president Boris Yeltsin at Camp David in early 1992, US president George H W Bush proclaimed that “Russia and the United States are charting a new relationship, and it’s based on trust; it’s based on a commitment to economic and political freedom; it’s based on a strong hope for true partnership” (Wines, 1992). Russia was similarly optimistic, because for ostensible ‘Atlanticists’1 like Yeltsin (at 1  Atlanticists, in the Russia context, referred to people who believed interacting and integrating with the West was the prudent option on the table (Tsygankov, 2016).

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that time) and his then foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev (1992), the US was seen as a source of inspiration, a model which, if followed correctly, could be the source of a new, prosperous dawn in Russia. At the same Camp David meeting, Yeltsin stated that “from now on we do not consider ourselves to be potential enemies, as it had been previously in our military doctrine. This is the historic value of this meeting” (Wines, 1992). However, such optimism faded relatively quickly—by as early as late 1992 to be exact—as the harsh realities of simultaneously undertaking multiple transitions—social, political, and economic—proved to be beyond Russia’s capacity, leading to a number of internal crises and the eventual abandonment of Atlanticism for a more pessimistic Eurasianism (Rubinstein, 2000). Eventually, these crises in Russia led, in part, to the rise of a strongman leader, Vladimir Putin. Since then, the psychological dimension has, gradually at first, become increasingly pessimistic to a point, in the context of the current US-Russia relationship, where the psychological dimension has undoubtedly, compared to the structural and ideological dimensions, returned to a level which appears commensurable with the Cold War. Russia’s changing perceptions of the US first manifested clearly in the mid-2000s, as it became suspicious about the West’s interests and intentions in Eastern Europe and domestically in Russia. The expansion of the West’s “exclusive inter-democratic security institutions,” NATO and the EU, coupled with the US’s support of the color revolutions in the mid-­ 2000s, especially Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, was perceived by Russia as a form of American imperialism against Russia (Diesen, 2016). Putin (2007) made his thoughts clear in his address at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, arguing that: NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?

Russia’s particular issue with NATO expansion was further demonstrated when, roughly 18 months after Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech, Russia invaded Georgia, igniting the Russo-Georgian War.2 The 2  Importantly, Dmitry Medvedev had replaced Putin as Russian President in 2008, but it is fair to say that Putin remain crucially important to Russia’s domestic and external policy developments (Ambrosio & Vandrovec, 2013).

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stated casus belli of the war was, officially, according to the Kremlin, on humanitarian grounds—namely the protection of Ossetians against Georgian aggression. However, the conflict occurred mere months after Georgian (and Ukrainian) membership was discussed at the NATO Summit in Bucharest and at a time when Georgia’s then president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was notably pro-Western in his orientation (Wivel & Mouritzen, 2012). Despite this clear growing threat perception and corresponding actions, Russia did not necessarily view the US as a “mortal” enemy at this time. Illustrative of this was the fact that Russia agreed to the ‘reset’ initiative designed to revitalize US-Russian relations, demonstrating that there was still some trust in the relationship (Rubin, 2014). Indeed, part of this decision to agree to a reset may rest with Dmitry Medvedev’s more liberal leaning, comparatively to Putin (McFaul, 2018). And, further to this point, when Putin returned as president in 2012, he adopted an even clearer ‘Eurasianist’ geopolitical lens which practically signified the end of the reset with the US (Pryce, 2013). As was discussed in the chapter on the ideological dimensions, Russia’s growing anti-Americanism—as part of its (Eurasian-centered) civilizational ideology—became an increasingly important  cognitive framework  for  guiding its foreign policy-­ making (Smith, 2017). Consequently, this helps, in part, explain the suspicion Russia had regarding the West’s growing interaction with Ukraine leading up to the onset of crisis in late 2013 (Smith, 2015). Since the onset of the Ukraine crisis—where Russia annexed Crimea and has supported pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass region—Russia’s threat perceptions of the US have worsened considerably. Crudely speaking, Russia has perceived the West, particularly the US, as attempting to use Ukraine to pursue a policy of regime change in Russia (Mearsheimer, 2014). Such fears have led to Russia’s foreign policy-making becoming increasingly ‘survivalist’—a bleak and pessimistic psychological state (Shevtsova, 2014). Russia’s ongoing modernization of its military, including its nuclear weapons, is one sign of this growing survival logic. In his 2018 ‘state of the nation’ speech, Vladimir Putin, speaking directly to the US, declared “you have failed to contain Russia” as he announced that Russia has developed nuclear capabilities which render the US’s defense systems “useless” (Klikushin, 2018). Indeed, the return of the rhetoric of nuclear war by Russia is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s nuclear

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posturing under Khrushchev, demonstrating one area where Cold War-­ style behavior has returned (Smith, 2018). Regarding the US, its perceptions of Russia in the 2000s—although never returning to the optimism of the early 1990s—were nowhere near as pessimistic as Russia’s perceptions of the US at the same time. Of course, Russia’s disapproval of the US invasion of Iraq and its open frustration toward the US for what it saw as its meddling in the color revolutions wave—especially in Ukraine—created some ripples that were felt in Washington, and cooled the mood somewhat (Sakwa, 2008). Yet, despite subsequent Russian action in Georgia in 2008, the Obama administration still believed it could engineer a “reset” with Russia in 2009 (Rubin, 2014). Indeed, those within the US establishment—such as Senator John McCain—who were fearful of Russia’s perceived growing anti-­Americanism in its foreign policy were heavily chastised for failing to let go of their “Cold War biases.” One prominent example of this was Obama’s ridiculing of Mitt Romney in a 2012 presidential debate: asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia … the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years (Moorhead, 2012).

The US’s perceptions about the Russian threat started to change with Russia’s belligerence in Ukraine and its decision to intervene in Syria, both of which were seen as signs that Russia was unequivocally entering a phase of antagonism against the West. According to Obama, Russia’s assertive policies in Ukraine signified that a “Cold War lens” had re-emerged in Russia’s decision-making (BuzzFeed, 2015). In retaliation to Russia’s Ukraine intervention, the US not only levied target sanctions against the Russian regime, it also declared Russia an “unusual and extraordinary threat” (The White House, 2016). Even so, in Obama’s (2014) own words, the breakdown in relations with Russia over Ukraine was not tantamount to the start of a “New Cold War” (at least from the perspective of the US) but rather “a very specific issue related to Russia’s unwillingness to recognize that Ukraine can chart its own path.” However, more recently, the revelations concerning Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election have resulted in US perceptions of the Russian threat starting to return to Cold War levels of fear, anxiety, and, arguably, paranoia. Of course, the current US President,

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Donald Trump, does not seem to exhibit any of these psychological traits vis-à-vis Russia. This could be because Trump is compromised by Putin— numerous rumors exist about what ‘kompromat’ Putin might have on Trump (Oates, 2017)—but it could also be simply that Putin, given his personality, is someone Trump thinks he can do business with (Marten, 2017). However, beyond Trump and his inner circle, a clear threat perception has emerged regarding Russia’s perceived escalatory actions against the US. US general John Hyen called Russia “the only existential threat to the country right now” (Macias, 2018). In addition, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis stated that the US would need to increase its “lethality” as its “competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare—air, land, sea, space and cyberspace—and it is continuing to erode” (Manson, 2018). While the growing pessimism in the threat perceptions of both sides in the US-Russia relationship has not quite reached the levels witnessed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is, since 2017 especially, certainly reminiscent of the Cold War era. Indeed, distortions about the interests—and which means they will use to achieve these—of both sides appear to be developing in the relationship, with some more detached from reality than others. However, in contrast with the Cold War, even with the alleged targeting of US domestic politics by Russia, the observed anxiety and paranoia in the current US-Russia relationship is still largely geographically contingent. This Cold War-style anxiety and paranoia seems to dissipate the further away from the epicenters of Ukraine and Syria you get, creating a kind of concentric circle effect (Smith, 2018). To this end, the perception that the currently cooling US-Russia relationship might lead to a world war—which was a real threat perception during the Cold War, particularly during the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis— remains largely confined to conspirational corners of society (Huseynov, 2016). Nevertheless, the increasing conviction in the US that Russia meddled in its presidential election and the strong belief in Russia that the US wants regime change in the Kremlin portend a further dose of pessimism to the relationship. As Andrej Krickovic and Yuval Weber (2018, p. 382) argue, even if both sides remain genuinely committed to easing hostilities and putting an end to the ‘new Cold War’ standoff, as long as the underlying commitment and information problems remain unresolved, any significant improvement in U.S.–Russia relations will continue to be out of reach.

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Thus, easing the increasingly negative effects of the psychological dimension to the US-Russia relationship requires a concerted effort on both sides to smash through this distorted mirror image that places the other as the ‘evil-doer’ in the ongoing breakdown of relations.

References Ambrosio, T., & Vandrovec, G. (2013). Mapping the Geopolitics of the Russian Federation: The Federal Assembly Addresses of Putin and Medvedev. Geopolitics, 18(2), 435–466. Blum, W. (2003). Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. London: Zed Books. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1961). The Mirror Image in Soviet American Relations: A Social Psychologist’s Report. Journal of Social Issues, 17(3), 45–56. BuzzFeed. (2015). Full Transcript of BuzzFeed News’ Interview with President Barack Obama. BuzzFeed. Retrieved from http://www.buzzfeed.com/ buzzfeednews/full-transcript-of-buzzfeed-news-interview-with-president Criss, N.  B. (1997). Strategic Nuclear Missiles in Turkey: The Jupiter Affair, 1959–1963. The Journal of Strategic Studies, 20(3), 97–122. Diamond, L. (1992). Promoting Democracy. Foreign Policy, 87(Summer), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1149159 Diesen, G. (2016). EU and NATO Relations with Russia: After the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Abingdon: Routledge. Eckhardt, W., & White, R. K. (1967). A Test of the Mirror-Image Hypothesis: Kennedy and Khrushchev. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 11(3), 325–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200276701100306 Foglesong, D. S. (1995). America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: US Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gaddis, J.  L. (1974). Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point? Foreign Affairs, 52(2), 386–402. Garthoff, R.  L. (1988). Cuban Missile Crisis: The Soviet Story. Foreign Policy, 72(Autumn), 61–80. Huseynov, V. (2016). Soft Power Geopolitics: How Does the Diminishing Utility of Military Power Affect the Russia-West Confrontation Over the “Common Neighbourhood”. Eastern Journal of European Studies, 7(2), 71–90. Jervis, R. (1980). The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 24(4), 563–592. Klikushin, M. (2018). Putin Enlists Late Dissident Andrei Sakharov for His Deadly Cause. Observer. Retrieved April 26, 2018, from http://observer.com/2018/03/ putin-enlists-late-dissident-andrei-sakharov-for-his-deadlycause/ Kozyrev, A. (1992). Russia: A Chance for Survival. Foreign Affairs, 71(2), 1–16.

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Krickovic, A., & Weber, Y. (2018). Commitment Issues: The Syrian and Ukraine Crises as Bargaining Failures of the Post–Cold War International Order. Problems of Post-Communism, 65(6), 373–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/107 58216.2017.1330660 Lee, W.  T. (1972). The “Politico-Military-Industrial Complex” of the USSR. Journal of International Affairs, 26(1), 73–86. Lunak, P. (2003). Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis: Soviet Brinkmanship Seen from Inside. Cold War History, 3(2), 53–82. Macias, A. (2018). Nuclear Commander: Russia is ‘Only Existential Threat’ to US Right Now. CNBC. Retrieved April 26, 2018, from https://www.cnbc. com/2018/02/28/nuclear-commander-russia-is-only-existential-threat-tous-right-now.html Manson, K. (2018). Jim Mattis Warns US Losing Military Edge. Financial Times. Retrieved April 26, 2018, from https://www.ft.com/content/72eb74eafd24-11e7-9b32-d7d59aace167 Marten, K. (2017). Trump and Putin, Through a Glass Darkly. Asia Policy, 23(1), 36–42. McFaul, M. (2018). From Cold War to Hot Peace: The Inside Story of Russia and America. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Mearsheimer, J.  J. (2014). Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault. Foreign Affairs, 93(5), 77–89. Merrill, D. (2006). The Truman Doctrine: Containing Communism and Modernity. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36(1), 27–37. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00284.x Moorhead, M. (2012). Obama: Romney Called Russia Our Top Geopolitical Threat. PolitiFact. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://www.politifact. com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/22/barack-obama/obama-romney-called-russia-our-top-geopolitical-fo/ Morgenthau, H. J. (1970). Changes and Chances in American-Soviet Relations. Foreign Affairs, 49(3), 429–441. Nakajima, M. (1979). The Sino-Soviet Confrontation: Its Roots in the International Background of the Korean War. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 1, 19–47. Oates, S. (2017). Kompromat Goes Global?: Assessing a Russian Media Tool in the United States. Slavic Review, 76(S1), S57–S65. Obama, B. (2014). Statement by the President on Ukraine. The White House. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2014/07/29/statement-president-ukraine Pryce, P. (2013). Putin’s Third Term: The Triumph of Eurasianism. Romanian Journal of European Affairs, 13(1), 25–43.

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Putin, V. (2007). Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy—The Free Online Library. Wikisource. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Speech_and_the_Following_ Discussion_at_the_Munich_Conference_on_Security_Policy Roberts, G. (2006). Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roberts, G. (2007). Stalin at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences. Journal of Cold War Studies, 9(4), 6–40. Rubin, M. (2014). Why “Reset” Failed: Diplomacy with Rogues Rarely Works. World Affairs, 177(2), 74–81. Rubinstein, A. Z. (2000). Russia Adrift. Harvard International Review, 22(1), 14. Sakwa, R. (2008). “New Cold War’or Twenty Years” Crisis? Russia and International Politics. International Affairs, 2, 241–267. Salinger, P. (1966). With Kennedy. New York: Doubleday. Shevtsova, L. (2014). The Russia Factor. Journal of Democracy, 25(3), 74–82. Smith, N.  R. (2015). The EU and Russia’s Conflicting Regime Preferences in Ukraine: Assessing Regime Promotion Strategies in the Scope of the Ukraine Crisis. European Security, 24(4), 525–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/096628 39.2015.1027768 Smith, N. R. (2017). What the West Can Learn from Rationalizing Russia’s Action in Ukraine. Orbis, 61(3), 354–368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. orbis.2017.04.001 Smith, N.  R. (2018). The Re-emergence of a “Mirror Image” in West–Russia Relations? International Politics, 55(5), 575–594. The White House. (2016). Notice—Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Ukraine. The White House. Retrieved October 5, 2016, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/03/02/notice-continuation-national-emergency-respect-ukraine Tsygankov, A.  P. (2016). Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Weber, S. (1990). Realism, Detente, and Nuclear Weapons. International Organization, 44(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300004641 Wines, M. (1992). Bush and Yeltsin Declare Formal End to Cold War; Agree to Exchange Visits. The New  York Times. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/02/world/bush-and-yeltsin-declareformal-end-to-cold-war-agree-to-exchange-visits.html Wivel, A., & Mouritzen, H. (2012). Explaining Foreign Policy: International Diplomacy and the Russo-Georgian War. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Wohlforth, W. C. (1993). The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zubok, V. M. (2009). A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Technological Dimension of US-Russia Relations

Abstract  This chapter begins with an examination of how changing technology—namely the development of nuclear weapons—impacted the early Cold War period. It is argued that the nuclear weapons arms race that enveloped the first 15 years of the Cold War had a massive impact on the conduct of international politics. The gradual development of the logic of mutually assured destruction stabilized US-Soviet interaction and meant that other areas of technological competition became symbolically important. The continued exponential technological evolution that has occurred since the Cold War has meant that the technological dimension of the current US-Russia relationship is alien to that of the Cold War. Nowadays cyberspace has become a crucial realm in international politics, and clearly this is where much of the cooling of the US-Russia relationship has played out, with the likelihood that it will grow even more hostile in the near future. Keywords  Nuclear weapons • Nuclear deterrence • Cyberspace • Cyberwar • Non-linear war Technology was an intractable component of the original Cold War. Technological change, as was discussed in the theoretical chapter (Chap. 2), has long impacted how international politics is conducted. In the context of the Cold War, the technological changes that stemmed from the © The Author(s) 2020 N. R. Smith, A New Cold War?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20675-8_6

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struggle to win the Second World War were extremely important in determining the nature of the Cold War. Indeed it has been argued, especially since the Second World War, that wars are a boon for technological advancement as research and development is a key component to waging war and the advancements that are made have a wider societal impact, especially once the war is concluded (Brunk & Jason, 1981). Given the Second World War’s length and the amount of research and development that accompanied it on all sides, it is unsurprising that at its conclusion the technological advancements were significant and affected the conduct of international politics profoundly. This chapter begins by examining the key technological advancement during the early Cold War period—nuclear weapons. The cat and mouse game between the US and the Soviet Union that followed—moving from a situation in 1947 where the US had an atomic bomb monopoly to a situation where, by the late 1950s, both sides had hydrogen bomb capabilities—was extremely important to defining how the diplomacy of the Cold War operated. Thereafter, the technological dimension of the current US-Russia relationship is factored in, with an argument that the continued exponential advancements in the digital revolution have moved international politics to new frontiers, namely cyberspace, which creates a very different mode of competition between the US and Russia.

6.1   The Technological Dimension of the Early Cold War Undoubtedly, the key technological advancement that came out of the Second World War was the invention of the atomic bomb. Development of nuclear weapons capability was an important aspect of the research and development efforts of the US (with support from its close allies Britain and Canada), Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union during the Second World War—Japan and France also had smaller, less effective nuclear programs (Maddock, 2010). And while nuclear weapons did not play much of a role in the outcome of the Second World War, beyond hastening Japan’s surrender in the final days of the war, their existence became an instant game changer to great power politics. This was not only with regard to warfare—and the potential costs of war—but also to broader foreign policy-making and diplomacy, permeating the structural, ­ideological, and psychological dimensions which were examined in the previous chapters (Westad, 2000).

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As was evident in the two atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons were an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction which afforded the US an unrivaled capability to wage war at that time. Internally, however, the destruction and death caused by the two bombs dropped on Japan—some estimates put the death toll at approximately 250,000 people (Selden & Selden, 2015)—had rattled US leadership with dismay and guilt (Bernstein, 1991). After the bombing of Nagasaki, then president Harry Truman remarked that the “thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible” (Glover, 2001, p. 102). Nevertheless, up until Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, the US was planning to, begrudgingly, drop more atomic bombs on Japan, possibly even on Tokyo (Bernstein, 1991). This demonstration of an unprecedentedly powerful weapon, coupled with a resolve to use it, gave the US an unrivaled ability to project power in the second half of the 1940s. The US was undoubtedly emboldened by its apparent technological superiority at the end of the Second World War, and this quickly filtered through into its foreign policy grand strategizing shortly after (Westad, 2000). The Truman Doctrine, the US’s pre-eminent grand strategy in the initial post-Second World War setting, for example, was not only heavily influenced by ideological and psychological factors (as detailed in Chaps. 4 and 5), but also by technology. Dennis Merrill argues that, in part, the US’s faith in its superior weapons technology was instrumental to the Truman Doctrine becoming a “watershed in modern American foreign policy” because it encouraged the US to portray the “world holistically” and “rallied America to internationalism” (Merrill, 2006). Indeed, the US’s sole possession of atomic bomb capability was arguably why the Truman Doctrine (and later the Marshall Plan) remained largely economic in its means as the US believed that any potential incursion of the Soviet Union into Western Europe could be dissuaded through the threat of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union (Gaddis, 1974). Thus, conventional power projection—such as the placing of troops and weapons on borders—was deemed unnecessary at that time due to the US’s nuclear weapons monopoly. The fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the US was the sole international power with nuclear weapons capabilities was, unsurprisingly, of great concern to the Soviet Union. This clear technological gap was exacerbated by the worsening ideological and psychological dimensions in the late 1940s, which increasingly placed the US as a mortal enemy to the Soviet Union, one which could use nuclear weapons to wipe

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Communism from the face of the Earth (Mazarr, 1991). This combination of drivers of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy led to Stalin making a single strategic request to his chief scientists: “provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time” (Sagan, 1997, p. 58). Of course, the Soviet Union was not starting from scratch as they had already embarked on a nuclear weapons program during the Second World War. Furthermore, they were able to close their technological gap with the US relatively quickly through effective intelligence-gathering from the US’s Manhattan Project and the rounding up of German physicists in 1945–46 (Pondrom, 2012). By 1949, the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program had advanced to the stage where it tested a bomb in Kazakhstan, conducting a test which “dwarfed the Trinity test in terms of preparations and scale,” and sending a clear message to the US that their nuclear weapons monopoly was over (Gordin, 2009, p. 165). The Soviet Union’s desire to close the technological gap with the US consumed its foreign and domestic policy-making in the initial years of the Cold War. David Holloway (1994) argues that Stalin’s fears around the US’s nuclear monopoly, and his desperate quest for the Soviet Union to develop a nuclear weapons capability, helped shape a pessimistic worldview in the Kremlin, one which came to characterize the Soviet Union’s perceptions of the US as an enemy in the first 15 years of the Cold War. In other words, acquiring the bomb—part of a broader technological obsession—was not just simply about the survival of the Soviet Union— although this of course was the chief initial concern—but rather, aided by the prevalence of the other dimensions of the relationship, part of the Soviet Union’s growing efforts to compete, globally, against the US. The Soviet Union’s growing nuclear prowess thus became a symbol of the ability of a system based on a Marxist-Leninist ideology to compete with the US’s Democratic Capitalism. The onset of the Korean War in 1950 became an immediate test of how international politics would play out in a world where the US’s nuclear monopoly—short-lived as it was—was no more. As was discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, there was a significant amount of guess-­ work involved in the conduct of the US and the Soviet Union with regard to how the war would play out in Korea, with the potential for nuclear conflict an ‘elephant in the room.’ Soviet and Chinese fears that the US would use the bomb were present but gave way to a rational belief that it was not in the US’s interests to do so (Roberts, 2006). The US did seriously consider the nuclear option, but a mixture of potential international

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fallout, the capabilities of the Soviet Union and China, and a lack of suitable targets in Korea led to the option being shelved and the Korean War sliding into a state of inertia (Jervis, 1980). What the Korean War demonstrated was a gradual change in perception as to the role of nuclear weapons in warfare. As Holloway (2010, p. 382) notes, “military planners thought of the bomb as another weapon to be used in war, but policymakers influenced perhaps by the peace movement and public opinion, saw it as being in a class of its own.” Thus, the belief that nuclear weapons could be used as a tactical weapon of war, like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was eroding and being replaced by a belief that nuclear weapons were more of a last resort security blanket, a more defensive-­than-offensive weapon. Indeed, this changing mindset on both sides—along with the development of thermonuclear weapons capabilities on both sides in the 1950s—was important to the development of a new kind of bilateral international politics based on mutual nuclear deterrence (Gaddis et  al., 1999). Nuclear war therefore began to be seen, in Khrushchev’s own words, as “unacceptable” and it began to be felt that “coexistence was elementary” (Holloway, 2010, p. 384). Of course, anxiety and paranoia, as discussed in the previous chapter, remained a constant element of the US-Soviet relationship at this time because as long as, no matter how remote their use, the other side had nuclear weapons capabilities a chance remained that they could be used. It is also important to remember that both the Soviet Union and the US had suffered surprise attacks in the Second World War, by Germany and Japan, so the fear of something similar in the Cold War, understandably, could not be entirely eliminated in contingency planning (Holloway, 2010). Nevertheless, as the 1950s went on, despite ever-increasing nuclear weapons capabilities, the prospect of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the US became, ironically, less likely—although this waxed and waned throughout the Cold War (Steff, 2016). Indeed, incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis seemingly did push the Cold War toward becoming a thermonuclear war, but eventually cooler heads—concerned about the incalculable costs of potential nuclear war on humanity—prevailed. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred at a time when both the Soviet Union and the US had developed the capability to launch nuclear warheads from submarines, which completed the necessary levels (i.e. a nuclear triad of land, air, and sea capabilities) for a mutually assured destruction logic to become credible in the relationship (Gillespie, 2011; Craig & Radchenko, 2018).

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The nuclear weapons cat and mouse game that characterized the initial Cold War years went much deeper than just either side securing a strategic advantage. Given the enormous internal societal efforts required in pursuing ever-greater nuclear weapons capabilities, the spillover effect of this was that the desire for technological advancement was not just confined to nuclear weapons technology but extended to all aspects of the Cold War (Leslie, 1993; O’Neill, 1982). In essence, it became a battle of laboratories (Westad, 2000). And because, over time, it became far less likely that either the Soviet Union or the US would engage the another directly in a war—due to the incredible costs of a nuclear conflict—the technological competitions that emerged elsewhere became arguably even more important, at least symbolically. One clear example of this was the development of the space race between the Soviet Union and the US in the late 1950s— reaching a crescendo in 1969. As Paul Musgrave and Daniel Nexon (2018, p.  610) argue, “success in space became constructed as a contest over whether Soviet communism or democratic capitalism was superior for humankind.” As the Cold War entered the 1970s, nuclear weapons arguably took a back seat in the conflict as the Soviet Union achieved parity with the US in terms of capabilities while both sides engaged one another with the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (Weber, 1990). This is not to say that nuclear weapons ceased to be relevant, as the testing of nuclear weapons remained a constant on both sides right until the end of the Cold War, and, because of their incredible potential to cause catastrophe, they continuously lingered in the background of US-Soviet Union relations. Nevertheless, Odd Arne Westad (2000, p. 557) argues that “one of the biggest surprises that early Cold Warriors would have been in for, had they still been with us in the 1980s and 1990s, was that it was neither nuclear bombs nor nuclear power that came to decide the Cold War.” Technology, however, did ultimately play a crucial role in the ending of the Cold War as the Soviet Union’s decline, in part, was due to its inability to compete—largely due to its relative international isolation and totalitarian system—with the US in harnessing new communication and computer technologies (Burghart, 1992).

6.2   The Technological Dimension of the Current US-Russia Relationship In the post-Cold War setting, the threat of nuclear war diminished even further, although latent fears about the potential for nuclear conflict—see the perceived threat of Iran obtaining the bomb (Sagan, 2006)—have

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remained. Technological advancement, however, as in the Cold War, has continued to drive international politics to new, uncharted realms. The digital revolution which, as briefly alluded to above, began during the Cold War has continued at an exponential rate in the post-Cold War setting, most notably with the development of the internet and the spread of technology to access the internet across the globe. Klaus Schwab (2016), the founder of the World Economic Forum, has argued that the digital revolution—what he terms the third industrial revolution—is currently giving way to a fourth industrial revolution: “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” The effect of the digital revolution—and the emerging fourth industrial revolution—on international politics has been undeniably significant. One key area has been the creation of a new realm of human interaction, one which also extends to international politics: cyberspace. Michael Benedickt (1994, p.  123) defines cyberspace as a “globally networked, computer-­ sustained, computer-accessed, and computergenerated, multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality.” Cyberspace is challenging for foreign policy-­ making because interaction in cyberspace is much more opaque than in the real world, so knowing who is behind an action or actions can be difficult (Choucri & Goldsmith, 2012). However, this view of cyberspace as being a frontier where anarchy reigns over hierarchy has been challenged in recent years. The initial view by technological utopians like John Perry Barlow (1996) that cyberspace could (should) be a realm free from state interference quickly gave way to an idea that the Westphalian system of international relations also now extends to cyberspace (Demchak & Dombrowski, 2014). Importantly, though, unlike in the “real world” where the Westphalian system is mediated by the presence of nuclear weapons, economic interdependence, multilateralism, and agreed norms, cyberspace is undoubtedly an area where competition between states is at its most ferocious (Wheeler, 2018). Some even go as far as saying a “first world cyberwar” has emerged (Belam, 2016). In the context of US-Russia relations in the post-Cold War era, cyberspace has undoubtedly emerged as a key, if not the most important, area of the growing contestation and competition in the relationship, especially since the onset of the Ukraine crisis. However, both the US and Russia have used their cyber capabilities to advance foreign policy aims since, at the very least, the mid-2000s. Regarding the US, although talk of the US army using cyber warfare dates back to the 1990s (Clemmons & Brown, 1999), it only started to take acquiring cyber capabilities seriously—in terms of security

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but also as a weapon—in the mid-2000s after growing increasingly paranoid about its vulnerability to cyber-attack, especially from the Chinese (Demchak & Dombrowski, 2014). Exactly what the US’s cyber warfare capabilities look like is shrouded in mystery but some examples of anonymous cyberattacks which seemingly advance US interests have been observed, as well as a number of revelations coming from Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks (Segal, 2014). The most infamous example of purported US cyber warfare (allegedly in conjunction with Israel) is the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facilities. Stuxnet was a complex and sophisticated “worm” which spread undetected and only initiated an attack once the specific target’s computer DNA was identified (Langner, 2011). The Stuxnet attack represented a watershed moment in cyberwar as it demonstrated that cyberattacks could go beyond the realm of cyberspace and inflict real-world strategic damages on an adversary (Demchak & Dombrowski, 2014). However, there is no evidence of the US using similar cyber warfare tactics to attack Russia. Russia’s engagement in cyber warfare arguably pre-dates the US’s own use of cyber weapons, although given the murkiness of this realm it is hard to confidently assert either way. Nevertheless, Russia’s use of cyber weapons, at first, tended to be focused on its near abroad: a self-defined sphere of Former Soviet Union states where Russia has a “privileged” interest. One of the earliest examples of this was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, orchestrated by “patriot hacker” on Estonia’s banking and government networks in 2007 (Klimburg, 2011). Similar attacks—that is, DDoS attacks—occurred in Georgia, during the Russo-Georgia war in 2008, and in Kyrgyzstan in 2009, when a dispute over a US airbase there was erupting (Kozlowski, 2014). Importantly, though, it was with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine that its use of cyber warfare was demonstrated to have matured significantly. Numerous cyber-attacks against Ukraine since 2014—including targeted attacks on the 2014 presidential elections— have been attributed to Russian hackers (Iasiello, 2017). In addition, Russia has arguably taken it further, using its cyber capabilities to aid its ‘non-linear war’ against Ukraine through spreading disinformation and propaganda (Galeotti, 2016). Thus, as evidenced by its Ukraine efforts, Russia has demonstrated a “capacity to exercise hard and soft power in cyberspace,” representing what Joseph Nye (2010) calls a “cyber power.” Since Russia’s apparent upping of the ante in Ukraine—the use of its cyber power has become pivotal to this conflict—it has taken this strategy global, most notably against the West. First, there were allegations—albeit

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prone to hyperbole—about Russia interfering in the UK’s 2016 referendum for whether to leave the EU or not, with Russia pushing a pro-Brexit narrative (Romanova, 2018). Second, soon after the election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, allegations of Russian interference in the election came to the fore. Beyond allegations of direct financial and intelligence support for the Trump campaign (which are still the subject of the Mueller investigation), the most significant cyber-attack to date was the hacking of John Podesta and the Democratic National Congress (Inkster, 2016). Through illegally obtaining as many as 20,000 emails, Russia is said to have used the information acquired to smear the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. This was part of a wider “non-­ linear” disruption strategy used by Russia during the 2016 presidential election which also included the use of social media bots—especially on Twitter and Facebook—to push disinformation and confusion (Gardner, 2018). These allegations are strenuously denied by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and, furthermore, some question how effective this strategy is (Galeotti, 2018). But, as time goes on, more and more concrete evidence has emerged as to the role of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), in undertaking a kind of cyber warfare against the US (Lysenko & Brooks, 2018). Russia’s apparent success in undermining the domestic politics of Western states, including the far stronger US, demonstrates how cyber weapons can be used to wage asymmetrical warfare (non-state actors like ISIS have also demonstrated this). Essentially, Russia has used technological advancements—many of which have stemmed from the US—against the US in order to pursue a grand strategy of diminishing the US’s clear international primacy.1 And, for a variety of reasons—including a kind of strategic narcissism—the US was initially wholly unprepared for this kind of attack by Russia (Downes, 2018). Peter Roberts (2017, p. 17) argues that part of the issue for the US (and broader West) is that their “understanding of war remains essentially Napoleonic: organized campaigns, orchestrated by a central staff,” while Russia has “reconstructed conflict and reimagined warfare to suit their own ends.” However, since the revelations of Russia’s purported attacks on US democracy, the US has begun to invest more heavily in acquiring capabilities to meet the threat of cyber infiltration—not only from Russia but also China—head on, albeit without much initial success (Weber, 2018). Nevertheless, the US’s growing 1  To this end, some even postulate that Russia might use cryptographic technologies to try to undermine the US’s financial power, a key lynchpin of its international hegemony (Smith, 2019).

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consciousness of its cyber insecurity means that perhaps the world is on the cusp of a cyber arms race or even the start of a “global cyberwar” between the US and revisionist powers like China and Russia. It is obvious that the continued technological evolution from the start of the Cold War until the recent cooling of the contemporary US-Russia relationship has made the nature of these two compared relationships and conflicts significantly different. The early days of the Cold War centered on the perceived threat of nuclear Armageddon and precipitated a cat and mouse game between the US and the Soviet Union to gain superior nuclear capabilities—although, of course, the technological conflict (thanks somewhat to stable nuclear duopoly) became much deeper than this. Certainly, the nuclear threat remains part of the contemporary relationship but, compared to the initial 15 years of the Cold War, it now lurks in the background and only occasionally returns to the fore of the US-Russia bilateral relationship. Thus, the current conflict between the US and Russia, thanks to the changing nature of international politics—namely the increasing importance of cyberspace—is predominately happening online and involves both harder—that is, specific online targets—and softer—that is, information war—aspects of cyber warfare. Of course, making definitive judgments on what the nature of this conflict looks like is difficult due to our obscured vision of cyberspace, but the reality is that the emerging fourth industrial revolution is shifting international politics in unprecedented directions, all of which have massive implications for the future of US-Russia relations.

References Barlow, J. P. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved February 8, 2019, from https://www.eff.org/ cyberspace-independence Belam, M. (2016). We’re Living through the First World Cyberwar—But Just Haven’t Called It That. The Guardian. Retrieved February 8, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/30/first-worldcyberwar-historians Benedickt, M. (1994). Cyberspace: Some Proposals. In M.  Benedickt (Ed.), Cyberspace: First steps (pp. 119–224). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bernstein, B.  J. (1991). Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Early Thinking about Tactical Nuclear Weapons. International Security, 15(4), 149–173. Brunk, G.  G., & Jason, G.  J. (1981). The Impact of Warfare on the Rate of Invention: A Time Series Analysis of United States Patent Activity. Scientometrics, 3(6), 437–455. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017436

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Burghart, D. L. (1992). Red Microchip: Technology Transfer, Export Control and Economic Restructuring in the Soviet Union. Brookfield: Dartmouth. Choucri, N., & Goldsmith, D. (2012). Lost in Cyberspace: Harnessing the Internet, International Relations, and Global Security. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68(2), 70–77. Clemmons, B.  Q., & Brown, G.  D. (1999). Cyberwarfare: Ways, Warriors and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Military Review, 79(5), 35. Craig, C., & Radchenko, S. (2018). MAD, Not Marx: Khrushchev and the Nuclear Revolution. Journal of Strategic Studies, 41(1–2), 208–233. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2017.1330683 Demchak, C.  C., & Dombrowski, P.  J. (2014). Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age: The Coming Decades. In M. Mayer, M. Carpes, & R. Knoblich (Eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology (pp.  91–113). Berlin: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_5 Downes, C. (2018). Strategic Blind–Spots on Cyber Threats, Vectors and Campaigns. The Cyber Defense Review, 3(1), 79–104. Gaddis, J.  L. (1974). Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point? Foreign Affairs, 52(2), 386–402. Gaddis, J.  L., et  al. (1999). Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galeotti, M. (2016). Hybrid, Ambiguous, and Non-linear? How New is Russia’s “New Way of War”? Small Wars & Insurgencies, 27(2), 282–301. Galeotti, M. (2018). The Mythical “Gerasimov Doctrine” and the Language of Threat. Critical Studies on Security, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/2162488 7.2018.1441623 Gardner, B. (2018). Social Engineering in Non-Linear Warfare. Journal of Applied Digital Evidence, 1(1), 1–28. Gillespie, A. (2011). Dialogical Dynamics of Trust and Distrust in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In I.  Marková & A.  Gillespie (Eds.), Trust and Conflict: Representation, Culture and Dialogue (pp. 139–156). New York: Routledge. Glover, J. (2001). Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gordin, M. D. (2009). Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Holloway, D. (1994). Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Holloway, D. (2010). Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962. In M. P. Leffler & O. A. Westad (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume 1: Origins (pp.  376–397). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521837194.019 Iasiello, E. J. (2017). Russia’s Improved Information Operations: From Georgia to Crimea. Parameters, 47(2), 51–63.

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Inkster, N. (2016). Information Warfare and the US Presidential Election. Survival, 58(5), 23–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2016.1231527 Jervis, R. (1980). The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 24(4), 563–592. Klimburg, A. (2011). Mobilising Cyber Power. Survival, 53(1), 41–60. Kozlowski, A. (2014). Comparative Analysis of Cyberattacks on Estonia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 10(7), 237–245. Langner, R. (2011). Stuxnet: Dissecting a Cyberwarfare Weapon. IEEE Security & Privacy, 9(3), 49–51. Leslie, S. W. (1993). The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-­ Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press. Lysenko, V., & Brooks, C. (2018). Russian Information Troops, Disinformation, and Democracy. First Monday, 22(5). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i5.8176 Maddock, S.  J. (2010). Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mazarr, M.  J. (1991). START and the Future of Deterrence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11524-2_1 Merrill, D. (2006). The Truman Doctrine: Containing Communism and Modernity. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36(1), 27–37. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.00284.x Musgrave, P., & Nexon, D. H. (2018). Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War. International Organization, 72(3), 591–626. Nye Jr., J.  S. (2010). Cyber Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. O’Neill, W.  L. (1982). A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pondrom, L. G. (2012). The Soviet Atomic Project: How the Soviet Union Obtained the Atomic Bomb. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company. Roberts, G. (2006). Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roberts, P. (2017). Designing Conceptual Failure in Warfare. The RUSI Journal, 162(1), 14–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2017.1301512 Romanova, T. (2018). Russia’s Neorevisionist Challenge to the Liberal International Order. The International Spectator, 53(1), 76–91. https://doi. org/10.1080/03932729.2018.1406761 Sagan, S.  D. (1997). Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb. International Security, 21(3), 54–86. Sagan, S.  D. (2006). How to Keep the Bomb from Iran. Foreign Affairs, 85(5), 45–59.

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Schwab, K. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means and How to Respond. World Economic Forum. Retrieved February 8, 2019, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/ Segal, A.  M. (2014). Cyberspace: The New Strategic Realm in US–China Relations. Strategic Analysis, 38(4), 577–581. Selden, K. I., & Selden, M. (2015). The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, N. R. (2019). Could Russia Utilize Cryptocurrencies in Its Foreign Policy Grand Strategizing? Russia in Global Affairs, 17(2). Steff, R. (2016). Strategic Thinking, Deterrence and the US Ballistic Missile Defense Project: From Truman to Obama. New York: Routledge. Weber, S. (1990). Realism, Detente, and Nuclear Weapons. International Organization, 44(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300004641 Weber, V. (2018). Linking Cyber Strategy with Grand Strategy: The Case of the United States. Journal of Cyber Policy, 3(2), 236–257. Westad, O.  A. (2000). The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms. Diplomatic History, 24(4), 551–565. Wheeler, T. (2018). In Cyberwar, There are No Rules. Foreign Policy. Retrieved February 8, 2019, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/in-cyberwar-there-are-no-rules-cybersecurity-war-defense/

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract  The conclusion compiles the four examined dimensions together into an argument that characterizing the current US-Russia relationship, despite clear cooling, as a New Cold War is of little analytical value because such significant differences exist. Further to this, it is argued that the propensity of key decision-makers in both the US and Russia to fall back into ‘Cold War-era’ thinking leads to suboptimal policy-making and blinds them to more prudent grand strategies. For Russia, antagonizing a superpower—one which remains the unipole—is not a smart long-term strategy, while for the US, being fixated on a declining power such as Russia blinds their preparation for China’s rise. Nevertheless, because the current US-Russia relationship does not have the same structural, ideological, or technological drivers as the Cold War, coupled with the fact that the psychological dimension is the easiest dimension to change, the prevalent doomsaying that characterizes many analyses of the current US-Russia relationship may prove to be wide of the mark, come 5 to 10 years. Keywords  New Cold War • Four-dimensional analysis • China’s rise This book has demonstrated that when the structural, ideological, psychological, and technological dimensions of the Cold War are compared with the state of the current US-Russia relationship, significant differences are

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observable, which questions the utility of using the Cold War as an analytical analogy. The Cold War, particularly in the 15 years between the start of the conflict in 1947 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, became a globally significant competition precisely because it involved the two poles of a bipolar system, both of which had clear underlying universal ideologies and anxious and somewhat paranoid threat perceptions, and were involved in a technological race regarding nuclear weapons capabilities. The interaction of these four dimensions—the pressures emanating from bipolarity, the constraints imposed by their ideologies, the increased pessimism of their psychologies, and the destructive potential of the developing nuclear weapons technology—turned the post-war international setting into a venue for an existential struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, particularly in the first 15 years. The current state of the US-Russia relationship bears little resemblance to the Cold War. Structurally, the international system is not only significantly different from during the Cold War, but Russia also has an insurmountable power deficit in relation to the US. The current evolution of the international system toward multipolarity—with perhaps a period of bipolarity between China and the US in between—coupled with Russia’s long-term decline (despite recent modernization attempts) also does not portend a situation where the US and Russia could return to a power relationship commensurable with the Cold War. Ideologically, neither the US nor Russia has a clear universalist ideology driving its foreign policies. Indeed, ideology still plays an important role, and there has been a growing clash in the putative ideological visions of Russia—as evident in Russia’s civilizational turn—and the US,—which although it has perhaps lost the liberal aspect of its liberal hegemony, still maintains a hegemonic view of its international actions. However, this current ideological clash is nowhere near as influential as the ideological clash of the Cold War. Technologically, while fears around nuclear war remain a concern in the current state of the US-Russia relationship, the nature of international politics has evolved significantly since the Cold War thanks to the continued digital revolution. The interaction between the US and Russia in cyberspace is arguably where much of the ‘cooling’ of the relationship has played out, with something of a cyberwar emerging between the two—but this is very different in nature and substance to what transpired during the Cold War. It is the psychological dimension of the current US-Russia relationship which clearly resembles the Cold War. Russia has experienced growing anxiety and paranoia with regard to the US’s strategic interests since the

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mid-2000s. This, coupled with the US’s increased anxiety and paranoia in the wake of the revelations about Russia’s meddling in its 2016 presidential election, has clearly created a tense and pessimistic psychological dimension in the current US-Russia relationship. While the levels of suspicion and distrust in the current US-Russia relationship have not been seen since the Cold War, it still has not reached the fever pitch of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is unlikely because although aspects of the psychological dimension of the current US-Russia relationship are reminiscent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, it does not have the underlying structural, ideological, or technological drivers of that time, which were key in generating the Cold War. Furthermore, of the four examined dimensions, the psychological dimension is arguably the most malleable as perceptions, unlike ideology, which is more ingrained, and structure and technology, which are more path dependent, can change relatively quickly (although they are, of course, influenced heavily by structure and ideology). Nevertheless, as it is only the psychological dimension that resembles Cold War levels, the overwhelming pessimism of the literature to date is arguably wide of the mark. The concern for the current US-Russia relationship is that neither side’s perception of the other has properly adjusted to the broader realities of the changing international political environment, as both Russia and the US seem imprisoned by the legacy of the Cold War. To this end, both the US and Russia seem incapable of viewing the other as anything other than the enemy. This is problematic because it is leading both to pursue suboptimal foreign policy strategies which focus more on the short term than the long term. Although Russia, correctly, understands that its future as an influential great power rests on hastening the decline of the US and the emergence of multipolarity, it has undertaken risky strategies in Ukraine and Syria and, even more brazenly, seemingly attempted to infiltrate US domestic politics. The result of all this has been the strengthening of the US’s resolve to check Russia as well as reinvigorate NATO in Europe, an institution which had become somewhat dormant until Russia’s interventions in Ukraine. Poking a superpower, even one which is suffering fatigue like the US, is a high-risk strategy with less than certain rewards. Furthermore, while its apparent bandwagoning of China’s rise seems to have a number of short-term advantages, it is far from certain that the relationship will remain friendly and robust in the future, particularly as there is potential for conflicting interests in Central Asia.

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For the US, its continued obsession with Russia blinds it from strategizing for the obvious key long-term development in the international system right now: the rise of China. While China’s rise was the central concern of Obama’s grand strategizing—evident in its Asia pivot strategy—this momentum has been somewhat lost because of the shifting focus to Russia’s various points of antagonism. Of course, under President Trump, the US has engaged a trade war with China, but this is based more on short-term goals—such as punishing China for its unethical intellectual property practices—and is not part of a coherent long-term grand strategy of adapting to China’s rise. If anything, the US’s blunt approach toward China—although possibly effective in the short term—will force China to adapt and lessen its trade dependence on the US. Whatever transpires, the US-China relationship is, unequivocally, far more important moving forward than the US-Russia one for both the US and the rest of the world. However, this continued fixation on Russia, while not only blinding the US from a more optimal grand strategy, also has the potential to push Russia and China closer together, which would create future headaches as the structural transition of the international system picks up pace. This could be problematic for the US because it is conceivable that by the time China’s power reaches a point where it is comparable to the US’s, the US-China relationship might have similar structural, ideological, and psychological dimensions to the Cold War. Until this happens, however, the Cold War analogy should be put to bed in the context of not only the current US-Russia relationship but international politics more broadly.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 2016 US presidential election, 2, 61

E Eurasianism, 59

B Berlin, 27, 28 Brezhnev, Leonid, 42, 58 Bush, George W., 45, 58

I Illiberal hegemony, 46

C China, 6, 28, 32–34, 46–48, 71, 75, 76, 82–84 Chinese Civil War, 28, 55, 57 Cuban Missile Crisis, 4, 19, 28–30, 42–44, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 71, 82, 83 Cyberwar, 74, 82 D Democratic Capitalism, 40, 41, 43, 44, 54, 70, 72

K Kennedy, John F., 29, 57 Khrushchev, Nikita, 28, 42, 43, 57, 61, 71 Korean War, 28, 55–57, 62, 70, 71 L Liberal hegemony, 45, 46, 48, 82 M Marxism-Leninism, 40–43, 54 Mutually assured destruction, 5, 58, 71

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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N Near abroad, 32, 33, 74 Neoclassical realism (NCR), 2, 4, 9–19 Nuclear weapons, 2, 3, 5, 27, 57, 60, 68–73, 82 O Obama, Barrack, 45, 61, 84 P Polarity, 13 Putin, Vladimir, 31, 32, 46, 47, 49, 59, 59n2, 60, 62, 75 S Second World War, 5, 18, 25, 26, 30, 39–41, 44, 54, 68–71 Sovietization, 41, 42, 56

Stalin, Joseph, 27, 41, 54, 55, 57, 70 Syrian Civil War, 34 T Truman, Harry, 69 Truman Doctrine, 27, 42, 55, 56, 69 Trump, Donald, 2, 46, 49, 62, 75, 84 U Ukraine crisis, 2, 33, 60, 73 Y Yeltsin, Boris, 31, 58, 59