Biden’s words add to growing echoes of the Cold War
The echoes of the Cold War are growing louder. Biden invoked the struggle of the Baltic nations to free themselves from a collapsing Soviet Union, and told Putin that the US and its allies would defend Ukraine, and with it other vulnerable parts of Europe, 'as long as it takes'
Published: 02:07 PM,Jul 14,2023 | EDITED : 06:07 PM,Jul 14,2023
Ukrainian Marines from the 36th Brigade rush to pack up after firing rockets from a Grad launcher toward Russian infantry in a frontline tree line position as an artillery team arrives to fire nearby in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, July 13, 2023. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)
The writer is a White House and national security correspondent, and a senior writer
President Joe Biden and his national security team have contended since he took office that all the easy, tempting comparisons between this era and the Cold War are misleading, a vast oversimplification of a complex geopolitical moment.
The differences are, indeed, stark: The United States never had the kind of technological and financial interdependence with its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, that so complicates the increasingly bitter and dangerous downward spiral in the relationship with China.
And Biden’s advisers often argue that Russia is not the Soviet Union.
Yes, it has nuclear weapons, they say, but its conventional military capacity has now been severely degraded in Ukraine.
And in Soviet times, the United States felt compelled to fight an ideological battle around the world. In the new era, it is fighting China’s efforts to use its economic and technological power to spread its influence.
Nonetheless, the echoes of the Cold War are growing louder. Biden himself added to the din this week.
In Vilnius, Lithuania, on Wednesday night, addressing a crowd that was waving American, Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags, he repeatedly invoked the struggle of the Baltic nations to free themselves from a collapsing Soviet Union, and told Vladimir Putin that the United States and its allies would defend Ukraine, and with it other vulnerable parts of Europe, “as long as it takes.”
Biden never quite said explicitly that the United States must again “bear the burden of a long, twilight struggle” — President John F Kennedy’s famous description of the Cold War in his 1961 inaugural address, as it entered its most dangerous phase. But Biden’s message was essentially the same.
“Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken,” he said. “We will stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview in Helsinki, Biden’s last stop, that while Biden may have taken some poetic license to compare Lithuania’s story with Ukraine’s struggle, it is did not signal an effort to revive the spirit or strategies of the Cold War era.
“Fundamentally there still is a challenge of aggression,” he said.
“A need to stand up in defense of sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom and democracy. But those elements can be present without returning to ‘Back to the Future’ on the Cold War.”
What went unspoken during the summit, at least publicly, is another major difference between now and three decades ago: the uncertain level of bipartisan support for continuing to push back on Russian aggression.
From the Truman administration through George H W Bush’s years in office, both major American political parties were devoted to outlasting America’s geopolitical adversary, even if they argued over tactics and whether to get involved in local conflicts. That is not clear now. On the edges of the Nato summit in Vilnius, foreign ministers and aides from close allies and distant ones were asking whether Congress would begin to slow aid to Ukraine when the current appropriations run out at the end of the summer.
And they asked what the chances were that the opposition to US involvement in the war from the two leading Republican presidential candidates — former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov Ron DeSantis — might take hold in a broader swath of the population.
“The Americans are worried that Europe will flag,” one senior European official, who requested anonymity, said during the Vilnius summit. “We worry America will flag. And everyone worries that the Ukrainians will run out of ammunition and air defenses.”
Biden was asked about those concerns at a news conference with President Sauli Niinisto of Finland on Thursday and responded that “there is overwhelming support from the American people” to back Ukraine and Nato.
But then he stated the obvious: “No one can guarantee the future, but this is the best bet anyone could make.”
If there was an overarching theme to Biden’s trip this week, it was that the West should prepare for a long, expensive confrontation that will require levels of cooperation and integration of intelligence and military forces unlike any attempted before.
“At this critical moment in history, this inflection point, the world watching to see, will we do the hard work that matters to forge a better future?” he said at the news conference. “Will we stand together, will we stand with one another? Will we stay committed to our course?”
Buried in the Nato communiqué are the building blocks for the next twilight struggle. There are plans for larger defense budgets, though nearly a decade after Nato set a minimum military spending standard of 2 per cent of each member’s GDP, most of the wealthier Western European nations have yet to hit the goal.There are plans for a truly integrated Nato military strategy, including specific ways to integrate cyber defenses, and to ramp up the production of conventional artillery rounds, which almost no one thought would ever be needed again in Europe.
But the reality is that those changes are just a beginning — and hardly sufficient if the West is entering years, or decades, of enmity with Russia, officials say. Jens Stoltenberg, who agreed last week to extend his tenure as secretary-general of Nato, acknowledged the reality in an article for Foreign Affairs.
“Even if the war were to end tomorrow,” he wrote about the Ukraine conflict, “there is no sign that Putin’s broader ambitions have changed. He sees freedom and democracy as a threat and wants a world where big states dictate what their neighbours do. This puts him in constant confrontation with Nato’s values and international law.”
Lurking in the background of the summit meeting was another factor that makes this era sharply different from the Cold War: the role of China.
The communiqué issued in Vilnius included extensive discussion of the risks of supply chain dependency on suppliers like China, an issue Nato did not think about much in the past.
In the Cold War, there was a single major adversary; now there are two, and the contours of their “no limits” relationship is still something of a mystery. US officials believe Beijing is providing technology to Russia, but not the weaponry it craves. While China’s president, Xi Jinping, talks of his close relationship with Putin, US intelligence officials believe the Chinese leader is worried about what he is seeing as Russia struggles on the battlefield.
And Xi may be hesitant to fuel yet another conflict with the United States when he has so many on his hands that more directly affect China’s future. Those include the effects of the cutoff of high-end computer chips — which Chinese officials complain about regularly — and the likelihood of new restrictions from Washington on Western investments in critical technologies, including artificial intelligence.
There was never a debate about such issues in Cold War days, of course, because the United States and the Soviets barely traded with each other, and neither made any of the products that the other depended upon.
“The Cold War is just not a particularly useful analogy in fundamental respects,” Sullivan said, ticking off “the level of economic interconnectedness, the nature of the technology competition, the need to cooperate on global challenges that spill across borders” with China. - The New York Times
President Joe Biden and his national security team have contended since he took office that all the easy, tempting comparisons between this era and the Cold War are misleading, a vast oversimplification of a complex geopolitical moment.
The differences are, indeed, stark: The United States never had the kind of technological and financial interdependence with its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, that so complicates the increasingly bitter and dangerous downward spiral in the relationship with China.
And Biden’s advisers often argue that Russia is not the Soviet Union.
Yes, it has nuclear weapons, they say, but its conventional military capacity has now been severely degraded in Ukraine.
And in Soviet times, the United States felt compelled to fight an ideological battle around the world. In the new era, it is fighting China’s efforts to use its economic and technological power to spread its influence.
Nonetheless, the echoes of the Cold War are growing louder. Biden himself added to the din this week.
In Vilnius, Lithuania, on Wednesday night, addressing a crowd that was waving American, Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags, he repeatedly invoked the struggle of the Baltic nations to free themselves from a collapsing Soviet Union, and told Vladimir Putin that the United States and its allies would defend Ukraine, and with it other vulnerable parts of Europe, “as long as it takes.”
Biden never quite said explicitly that the United States must again “bear the burden of a long, twilight struggle” — President John F Kennedy’s famous description of the Cold War in his 1961 inaugural address, as it entered its most dangerous phase. But Biden’s message was essentially the same.
“Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken,” he said. “We will stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said in an interview in Helsinki, Biden’s last stop, that while Biden may have taken some poetic license to compare Lithuania’s story with Ukraine’s struggle, it is did not signal an effort to revive the spirit or strategies of the Cold War era.
“Fundamentally there still is a challenge of aggression,” he said.
“A need to stand up in defense of sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom and democracy. But those elements can be present without returning to ‘Back to the Future’ on the Cold War.”
What went unspoken during the summit, at least publicly, is another major difference between now and three decades ago: the uncertain level of bipartisan support for continuing to push back on Russian aggression.
From the Truman administration through George H W Bush’s years in office, both major American political parties were devoted to outlasting America’s geopolitical adversary, even if they argued over tactics and whether to get involved in local conflicts. That is not clear now. On the edges of the Nato summit in Vilnius, foreign ministers and aides from close allies and distant ones were asking whether Congress would begin to slow aid to Ukraine when the current appropriations run out at the end of the summer.
And they asked what the chances were that the opposition to US involvement in the war from the two leading Republican presidential candidates — former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov Ron DeSantis — might take hold in a broader swath of the population.
“The Americans are worried that Europe will flag,” one senior European official, who requested anonymity, said during the Vilnius summit. “We worry America will flag. And everyone worries that the Ukrainians will run out of ammunition and air defenses.”
Biden was asked about those concerns at a news conference with President Sauli Niinisto of Finland on Thursday and responded that “there is overwhelming support from the American people” to back Ukraine and Nato.
But then he stated the obvious: “No one can guarantee the future, but this is the best bet anyone could make.”
If there was an overarching theme to Biden’s trip this week, it was that the West should prepare for a long, expensive confrontation that will require levels of cooperation and integration of intelligence and military forces unlike any attempted before.
“At this critical moment in history, this inflection point, the world watching to see, will we do the hard work that matters to forge a better future?” he said at the news conference. “Will we stand together, will we stand with one another? Will we stay committed to our course?”
Buried in the Nato communiqué are the building blocks for the next twilight struggle. There are plans for larger defense budgets, though nearly a decade after Nato set a minimum military spending standard of 2 per cent of each member’s GDP, most of the wealthier Western European nations have yet to hit the goal.There are plans for a truly integrated Nato military strategy, including specific ways to integrate cyber defenses, and to ramp up the production of conventional artillery rounds, which almost no one thought would ever be needed again in Europe.
But the reality is that those changes are just a beginning — and hardly sufficient if the West is entering years, or decades, of enmity with Russia, officials say. Jens Stoltenberg, who agreed last week to extend his tenure as secretary-general of Nato, acknowledged the reality in an article for Foreign Affairs.
“Even if the war were to end tomorrow,” he wrote about the Ukraine conflict, “there is no sign that Putin’s broader ambitions have changed. He sees freedom and democracy as a threat and wants a world where big states dictate what their neighbours do. This puts him in constant confrontation with Nato’s values and international law.”
Lurking in the background of the summit meeting was another factor that makes this era sharply different from the Cold War: the role of China.
The communiqué issued in Vilnius included extensive discussion of the risks of supply chain dependency on suppliers like China, an issue Nato did not think about much in the past.
In the Cold War, there was a single major adversary; now there are two, and the contours of their “no limits” relationship is still something of a mystery. US officials believe Beijing is providing technology to Russia, but not the weaponry it craves. While China’s president, Xi Jinping, talks of his close relationship with Putin, US intelligence officials believe the Chinese leader is worried about what he is seeing as Russia struggles on the battlefield.
And Xi may be hesitant to fuel yet another conflict with the United States when he has so many on his hands that more directly affect China’s future. Those include the effects of the cutoff of high-end computer chips — which Chinese officials complain about regularly — and the likelihood of new restrictions from Washington on Western investments in critical technologies, including artificial intelligence.
There was never a debate about such issues in Cold War days, of course, because the United States and the Soviets barely traded with each other, and neither made any of the products that the other depended upon.
“The Cold War is just not a particularly useful analogy in fundamental respects,” Sullivan said, ticking off “the level of economic interconnectedness, the nature of the technology competition, the need to cooperate on global challenges that spill across borders” with China. - The New York Times