From Cold War to Cold Wars

Commentary by Michael Kimmage

Published July 15, 2024

Russian president Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine has caused its share of intellectual confusion. Putin has never coherently or consistently explained his intentions, and Russia's decisionmaking has often been baffling. Although hostilities have stayed mostly in Ukraine, this has hardly been a localized or regional war. It has had extensive global consequences. This war is simultaneously a high-tech conflict, pushing the boundaries of drone and missile technology, and one of tanks and trenches, much like the world wars of the twentieth century. The nuclear parameters of this conflict evoke the Cold War that ran from the late 1940s to 1991.

However this unusual war is categorized, it is not necessarily the United States' primary foreign policy challenge. The mounting tensions between China and the United States can overshadow Europe and the conflict in Ukraine. The relation of the war in Ukraine to actual and possible crises and invasions that might take place in Asia is at least as confusing as the war itself. Is Ukraine an omen of war in Taiwan? Or is Ukraine a footnote to the world war that might begin in Asia? In his new book, David Sanger, a distinguished New York Times journalist, cuts through the confusion. Among the many virtues of New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West (Crown, 2024) is its narrative and analytical clarity.

Sanger traces three separate themes in New Cold Wars. First is the return of large-scale conventional war, implicating more than one great power. This is most vividly exemplified by Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Second is the evolution of new technologies and their untested military applications. Sanger's third theme is the strategic conundrum in which the United States currently finds itself. The United States must contend with a Russia-and a China-bent on overturning any international order of U.S. vintage, and it must do so while addressing epochal changes in the very nature of technological, economic, and geopolitical power.

Should the United States fail to keep pace with these fast-moving challenges, in Sanger's view, further war and further chaos are likely to proliferate.

In a single narrative, Sanger chronicles multiple cold wars. His work is not a philosophical book, not a meditation on warfare as such, not a collection of technical arcana, not an essay on international order, and not a set of prescriptions for U.S. policymakers. It is a careful retracing of events, a history of the past 10 years that illuminates the turning points, the perceptive insights, the grand illusions, the political personalities, and the many nuances of policy formation. Sanger argues that the United States has haltingly arrived at an adequate understanding of China while failing to counter Russia. The war in Ukraine haunts New Cold Wars. Sanger finds himself unable to predict Ukrainian victory, which is an ominous sign for the danger-ridden world that his book so convincingly describes.

Though drawing closer and closer together, China and Russia embody separate threats in Sanger's analysis. China has consolidated state power to advance its long-term economic and geopolitical interests, placing itself within countless supply chains, commanding sought-after global resources, and sponsoring far-reaching military innovation. Vladimir Putin is directing a grinding war for territorial dominion in which technological sophistication has often worked against Russia. Facing China and Russia, the United States must counter very different challenges at the same time. One is fearsomely specific. This is Russia's attempt to transform Europe into an imperial battle royale, a war of all against all. The other is fearsomely abstract. This is China's potential to build an international order of its design and thus eclipse any kind of U.S.-led order.

When Chinese president Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, he inherited an economy predicated on global integration and a polity that was not democratizing. Tipping China toward dictatorial rule by placing himself above the institutions of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi fashioned a sharply confrontational foreign policy. It involved, and still involves, the diminishment of U.S. reach, which is the negative side of Xi's foreign policy. The positive side is the enabling of an assertive, autonomous China through economic clout, regional ambition, and global influence. Xi, having committed China to coercive diplomacy and the aggressive pursuit of Chinese interests, has long flirted with an invasion of Taiwan.

A year after Xi took the helm in China, Putin annexed Crimea. Sanger makes the astute observation that "today what most stands out about the 2014 invasion of Crimea isn't just the audacity of the invasion; it's the West's failure to grapple with this new reality" (91). The annexation of Crimea was no mere territorial adjustment-it was the onset of a new era. Yet, as happens often enough with the onset of a new era, many still believed themselves to be living in the ancien régime, in an era of sacrosanct borders, of a Europe whole, free and at peace, and of the United States as at least the primus inter pares of the great powers, if not an unrivaled hegemon. Not until February 2022 would the true scale of Putin's revisionist ambitions become apparent.

In Sanger's judgment, the contours of Putin's era-ending ambition were discernible much earlier.

The Trump years fit paradoxically into Sanger's narrative of intensifying great power contestation. On the one hand, apart from a global pandemic, not a great deal happened between 2017 and 2021. There was no major war in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. The United States muddled through. It did not implode, although for inscrutable reasons it was often damaging itself just when "America's capability to shape the world [was shrinking]," Sanger writes (115). Sanger describes the intelligent ways in which the Biden team, once it came into office, linked its industrial policy with its Asia policy, a necessary move on the playing field of twenty-first-century geopolitics. Yet in January 2021 the United States had little awareness of how violent the new global state of affairs was destined to be.

Sanger refuses to describe the war in Ukraine as an accident or as Putin's whim. He persuasively characterizes it as a definitive feature of the present moment, a logical extension of a lust for power and territory that is not unique to the Kremlin. Here, Sanger may be indulging in too linear an argument or in the wishful thinking that U.S. power could (on its own) have eliminated Putinism. "When the world underreacted to the annexation of Crimea in 2014," Sanger writes, "a drive to grab the whole country was, in retrospect, only a question of timing. [Putin] chose 2022" (254-255). This may or may not be true. Putin's thinking is notoriously opaque and notoriously hard to know, and not every action of Putin is a reaction to what is done or not done in the West. But the war in Ukraine is quite possibly a turning point in Asia and the Middle East, as it already is in Europe.

There are some drawbacks to writing in such proximity to current events. Sanger is too pessimistic about the outcome of the war in Ukraine, mirroring the disappointment felt when Ukraine's counteroffensive petered out in 2023; this must have been the moment Sanger was finishing his book. With too much certitude, he writes "it was becoming increasingly apparent that a negotiated solution was all but inevitable, not only because of the stalemate but because cracks were appearing in America's commitment [to Ukraine]" (440). If anything, Russia is the one that is slowly losing this war. Ukraine would be wise not to negotiate with Russia until Putin has left the Kremlin and Russia has given up on this war. In this conflict, a negotiated solution is anything but inevitable.

In another quick judgment, Sanger declares that "globalization is out; self-reliance and control of a nation's supply chains are in" (411). This point mischaracterizes China, Russia, and the United States alike. Of the three, China has the most control over its supply chains, but China is pushing as hard as it can for its style of globalization. Russia has only survived three years of full-scale war by globalizing its supply chains and maintaining its access to outside markets. Under President Biden, the United States has begun to redirect its supply chains and its market access away from China and entirely away from Russia, refashioning globalization rather than jettisoning it. Globalization is not out. Globalizations are in. They are no less transformative than a singular globalization would be.

Two distinctions between past and present shine through in New Cold Wars, one being that the paradigmatic war of the Cold War was a proxy war. Prime examples are the Korean War and the Vietnam War, in which the superpower adversaries engaged openly but without the intent to conquer. Mostly, these opponents sought to keep their chess pieces in place and to hold the line-to preserve South Korea, for example, or to try to preserve South Vietnam. Espionage and political warfare could do the rest since the Cold War was a war of global positioning. This limited the Cold War conflicts, staving off great power war, but it also made these conflicts proliferate, as they did in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Outside of Europe, outside of the Soviet Union, outside of the United States, and outside of China, the Cold War was both gargantuan and ruinously bloody.

In the new world Sanger chronicles, geopolitical competition focuses more on discreet territory and outright wars of conquest. Russia is not fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. Russia is attempting to take over Ukraine, where it is fighting an old-fashioned war. The United States and Russia are not locking horns across the globe as they were prone to do in the Cold War. Yet they waver on the edge of direct conflict in Ukraine, something that would have been unthinkable in the Cold War. Should China invade Taiwan, the United States might find itself in direct conflict with China. In the new cold wars, a great power war, not witnessed since 1945, is much more likely.

The other distinction embedded in New Cold Wars does not bode well for the United States. Technology dictated outcomes in the original Cold War as much as, if not more than, political economy. When the United States surged ahead with computers and microchip production in the 1970s, the Soviet Union drifted into an untenable position. The Soviet Union was not equipped to manage the technology transfer that established great power status in the 1980s; it was increasingly indebted to the West. The Soviet Union became a hollowed-out power, which General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was willing to accept, to his credit, without resorting to the nuclear weapons that remained in the Soviet Union's arsenal. If the United States "won" the Cold War, it did so on the plane of technology. Innovations occurring between the public and the private sectors, which in the United States are deeply intertwined, were crucial to the Soviet Union's collapse.

If there were a new cold war only with Russia, the United States would have little to worry about in the technological domain. Today's Russia is a more hollowed-out power technologically than even the late Soviet Union. China, however, has sponsored massive investments in science and technology, fostering its versions of the private sector and outpacing the United States at times in its combination of resource extraction, manufacturing, research, and development. Though the United States is highly competitive and in some areas much more competitive than China, it will not have the easy advantages over China that it did over the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The United States must live with the risk of falling behind China.

One suspects that Sanger's motivation in writing New Cold Wars was to assess this risk and to get his readers to take it seriously.

Sanger's New Cold Wars is much more than a narrative history of the last 10 years. It clarifies the turning point reached with Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014, projecting the implications of this turning point far into the future. Without sensationalism, Sanger's book punctures any complacency that might persist about the next few decades. No exercise in defeatism or in catastrophism, New Cold Wars is an appeal to create and harness technological prowess so that the lust for territory and power can be held in check, so that regional wars do not metastasize into world wars, and so that smaller countries do not just get overrun by bigger ones. It is an appeal to think big and to innovate. In his book, David Sanger charts the course for a successful twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy.

Michael Kimmage is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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