NOW’S THE TIME FOR A NEW COLD WAR
Russian President Vladimir Putin began his invasion of Ukraine on Monday. He also effectively occupies Belarus. Western leaders, and especially President Joe Biden, must face the music: They must mount a new Cold War.
Putin’s ambition has been nakedly obvious for years: He wants to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. He has patiently rebuilt Russia’s military into a smaller, modern fighting force. And he has moved nominally independent states within the old Soviet borders into de facto client states, using war and Russian troops invited as “peacekeepers” as tools to expand or maintain his country’s influence over the former U.S.S.R.
The failure of diplomacy to prevent such blatant aggression is a feature, not a bug, of Putin’s presidency. Germany has increased its economic ties to the kleptocratic oligarchy that sustains Putin’s power, but these ties have not prevented Russia from expanding its global military reach. In 2009, when Biden was vice president, he told European leaders that the United States wanted to “press the reset button” with Russia in an attempt to improve relations. That effort also went nowhere; Putin annexed Crimea and fostered the Ukrainian breakaway “republics” whose supposed invitation welcomed Russian troops to Ukraine on Monday.
It should be no surprise, then, that the united efforts of Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders over the past few months had absolutely no effect on the determined dictator.
Putin’s expansion of ties with dictatorships in China and Iran means the West now faces a de facto Eurasian axis. The three powers and their minnow allies have discrete objectives, but they all know they cannot achieve them without cooperating with one another to overcome Western resistance. As with Russia, diplomacy has not diverted Iran from fomenting terrorism abroad and trying to build a nuclear weapon at home, nor has it deflected China from engaging in genocide against the Uyghurs, culturally suppressing Tibet and snuffing out democracy in Hong Kong.
Recognizing these dismal facts is the first step to peace. For all of their military might and expertise in cyberwarfare, the autocratic axis remains economically weaker than the West and depends upon Western financial and intellectual capital.
This means the West can be in the driver’s seat if it is resolute. Stringent economic sanctions and reductions in trade with these countries would over time seriously weaken their ability to harm the West. Moving serious numbers of troops to NATO nations that border Russia and Ukraine, such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic states, would provide the clear deterrence that Ukraine currently lacks. Pulling out of talks to restart the Iranian nuclear deal would show that the West recognizes Iran’s small but pivotal role as the Middle Eastern arm of the evil alliance. None of these moves comes without costs or risk, but they all show that the West is no longer blindly walking into its own destruction.
The West, and especially Europe, will also have to significantly and rapidly increase its defense spending to counter the rising axis. U.S. defense spending dominance is dramatically overstated, as a recent analysis from the Center for Economic Policy Research demonstrates. While NATO defense spending is up over the past few years, almost all nations remain well below the recommended level of 2% of GDP.
No humane person wants war. But it’s better to prepare for one than to fight at a time and place of an enemy’s choosing. Putin has thrown down the gauntlet. The West must pick it up.