(Source: picryl.com)
Just as importantly but less well-remembered, Western and Eastern support for unpopular regimes in the Global South dwindled as the utility of strategic territory abroad shrank. Neither the US nor former imperial capitals now feared that a strategically dangerous foe would gain power over their neglected satrapies and so cut off their economic lifelines. The strategic partnership of the United States and the People’s Republic of China similarly atrophied without the shared challenge of the Soviet Union to inspire it.
History had not so much ended as reached a new modus vivendiof strategic drift, wherein US military and economic power was too preponderant to be seriously challenged. The relative tranquillity of the 1990s relative to 2020 is partially an illusion constructed by the increased diversity of strategic instabilities in the latter: the former decade witnessed more than its share of civil wars and regime collapses even after 1991. Nevertheless, at some point between 1991 and 2020 this ‘post-Cold War’ consensus ended and the world again became more strategically contentious.
Westerners generally remember the post-Cold War modus vivendifondly, while understanding why Russians might not share this opinion. The post-Cold War era represented less the triumph of liberalism than a general retreat of strategic interest emanating from Washington, Moscow, and the capitals of Europe. This vacuum of strategic interest in turn set the stage for many of the issues we confront today.
At the start of 1991, the leaders of Africa had been in power for an average of 12 years. By 2000, this had fallen to 9.6 years. By 2020, this had fallen slightly further to 9.1 years. This collective shift represents the breaking of the governing class of Cold War-era Africa as strategic interest in maintaining African client dictators declined. Whereas in 1991 most African leaders could easily be sorted between pro-US and pro-Soviet, this distinction is largely absent in 2020. This transition unfortunately reflects less the increase of African agency in international affairs than it does the retraction of external interest in the 1990s.
Entering the 2020s, strategic retrenchment may ultimately benefit African diplomatic agency. No African leader seems willing to enter a broad strategic bloc; those willing to deepen political or military ties with the main powers of the 21stcentury generally work with multiple of them. Djibouti today hosts French, US, Japanese, and Chinese bases on its small territory and regularly hosts Russian Navy port visits. The Global South will likely see few cartoonish pro-US or pro-China dictators and more pragmatists taking money from both sides, fewer Augusto Pinochets and more Rodrigo Dutertes.
The post-Cold War era also saw liberalism unsteadily diffuse into central Europe. In retrospect, this period appears a steady period of expansion of the European Union and NATO coupled with the general conversion of centre-left parties to neoliberal pro-market policies. This occurred at different times and places, not as a general wave. The conversion of the centre-left to quasi-libertarianism was generally confined to northern Europe. Though several countries – Czechia, Hungary, and Poland most prominently – made rapid moves seeking accession to western European institutions, others vacillated. Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia elected populist nationalists of varying rabidity; Bulgaria re-elected a Communist leader in 1995.
The European post-Soviet space adjacent to the Russian Federation divided roughly into three camps: anti-Moscow jubilation in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine and Belarus; de facto pro-Russia localist anti-reform economic communities in southern and eastern Ukraine and much of Belarus; and confused national identity in central Ukraine, Moldova, still other parts of Belarus, and among Russian minorities in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In the 1990s, certain political forces sought adjustments to the consensus on Soviet dissolution via plebiscites, confederations, or further balkanization. However, these tempers generally calmed by 2000 such that attempts to provoke geopolitical quibbles with the post-Soviet solution seemed quixotic by 2010.
Since 1991, these divisions have become more complicated. Russian propaganda avidly tries to discredit the first camp and convince the third camp to join the second with claims that the Soviet economy delivered for its citizens by offering jobs everywhere compared to the market forces of the European Union. Russian messaging provokes fear of the unknown – the creative destruction of the neoliberal European common market – rather than revisionist calls to action rebuilding the Soviet empire. Its destabilising power is its spurring of a political debate to which the West has no coherent answer.
Most Westerners, including Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and western Ukrainians, find romanticism for the Soviet era bizarre and untenable. The counterargument to the Russian message is to raise the sheer economic inefficiency and political repression of Soviet communism, but this answer is losing power as the communist era fades further into memory. Instead, hostility to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seemingly neo-imperial policies unite anti-Moscow partisans but according to a consensus sharing little vocabulary or reality with their rhetorical opponents.
In Asia, post-Cold War strategic drift manifests itself more starkly. As the Soviet Union dissolved, some scholars anticipated the next Asia-Pacific strategic contest would feature the United States against the vibrant Japan of the era. Though the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Taiwan Strait Crisis combined with the disappearance of an opponent ended the meaningful rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the predominant shift of the 1990s in the Asia-Pacific was again the atrophy of strategic alignment.
The defining crisis of the astrategic post-Cold War world was North Korea’s (DPRK) intransigence, refusing either to reform like the PRC or collapse like the Soviet Union. Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, legacy Eastern bloc weapons kept a ‘military solution’ to the Korean peninsula problem ethically unfathomable. Instead, a torturous status quo in which the DPRK demanded attention the rest of the world was loath to give. Classical military threats made the DPRK the abnormal geopolitical throwback of this era. Even today, while most nuclear powers are developing smaller nuclear weapons, the DPRK alone seeks bigger ones as though it is still the 1960s.
Amidst the strategic drift, Russia appeased the PRC by yielding to virtually all the territorial demands for which the Soviet Union had previously been willing to fight. Other regional territorial disputes – generally over islands – metastasized into interminable tacit agreements to disagree. Rather than resolve these disputes, the United States as the world’s sole superpower generally encouraged its partners, allies, and interlocutors to ignore these contentions if possible, at one point even restoring imperialist-era naming for certain geographic features to avoid offending either side of the dispute.
Across Eurasia and Africa, military reform in the post-Cold War era generally meant eliminating unreliable legacy weapons systems rapidly built up decades earlier to plug some now forgotten force imbalance. At times, celebrities such as Princess Diana successfully intervened in military debates to end the use of certain types of weapons. Opposition to such public political pressures failed because of the indefensibility of using strategy to justify such weapons as military strategy was outdated. Certain figures even argued that disarming oneself of especially amoral weapons such as cluster munitions yielded amorphous strategic benefits as these arms made their employers unpopular.
Popular politics displaced strategy in the post-Cold War world. US strategy toward the PRC, for example, became a continuous partisan debate on the locations of jobs and whether it was appropriate or useful to lodge complaints about human rights. US forces stationed abroad outside the visible wars in Afghanistan and Iraq remained in Germany, Japan, and dozens of other countries primarily for logistical purposes but US politicians occasionally inexplicably defended these bases as continuously needed since 1945 presumably to ensure that the occupied 21st-century countries did not relapse into fascism.
With the benefit of hindsight, this broad framework of strategic drift ended around 2011. It did not end by design but rather by acknowledgement that foreign and military policy could be used in short-term bursts to great strategic effect. This may seem strange considering the first decade of the 21stcentury being geopolitically dominated by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevertheless, these invasions, no matter how poorly planned or conceived, obliged policymakers to address their consequences with considerable resources for years.
By contrast, in 2011, Western governments ran a military operation against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and abandoned a pro-Western dictator in Egypt amidst the broader sweep of the Arab Spring. Western governments refused to keep a long-term large-scale presence in Libya in response to the political backlash experienced following the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. The resulting state instability across the Middle East shattered the European geopolitical holiday as refugees fled poverty and violence for the continent of prosperity and peace.
Though Russia used conventional war against Georgia in 2008, the war’s conduct proved to its political and military leadership that drastic reform was necessary to the armed forces. Six decades after the Second World War, Russia finally abandoned the mass mobilization basis of its military, investing in flexible forces of greater professionalism and potential strategic utility. Whereas the pre-2008 mobilization army could only be strategically used in relatively rare conventional wars – and only defended in such conduct if they were clearly shown to be defensive wars – a lighter force could potentially fill the strategic vacuums of the post-Cold War world. An agile force can create a strategic situation that a mobilization army cannot without shattering the national economy and morale.
Russian observers looked on the Arab Spring as potential proof that the West could overthrow governments it wanted to replace with an exceptionally light footprint. Though this claim relies upon tenuous logic, it proved decisive for the Russian government to prepare analogous capabilities. The Russian Special Operations Forces Command was established in 2012, though its initial forces were earmarked in 2009; they would prove decisive in Crimea two years later.
The PRC proved the enduring strategic military capability of conventional forces in 2012, seizing control of long-claimed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines. By simply establishing a maritime presence around the reef, the PRC could turn a longstanding political disagreement into de factosovereignty and even nationalist triumph. Not just conventional forces need be used for this endeavour: the PRC mobilised a large quantity of the merchant marine to overwhelm local law enforcement in a context well beneath the traditional threshold of war. The PRC deployed this so-called Maritime Militia against not only the Philippines in 2012 but also G7 advanced economy Japan in the Senkaku Islands. Though the establishment of de facto sovereignty has been less complete on other disputed islands ranging from underwater rocks in the South China Sea to the island of Taiwan populated by 23 million, maintaining a strategic presence reduces China’s rivals to declaring non-recognition of facts on the ground and intermittent freedom of navigation operations.
Since 2011, the United States, Russia, and the PRC have all become more daring in their strategic gambles. Whereas the PRC acquired control of an uninhabited shoal in 2012, Russia took control of the strategically-located Crimean peninsula inhabited by over 2 million people in 2014. In 2019, the United States and much of Europe ceased recognition of the government of Venezuela, putting almost unlimited pressure on a country of almost 30 million people. Russia and the United States use punitive strike capabilities around the Middle East to defeat terrorists gnawing at the states whose governments they support. Around the world, armed conflict is no longer the antiquated throwback that DPRK chemical and artillery threats to Seoul seemed before 2010. War seems a real possibility in no small part considering that multiple conventional wars have been ongoing for years as of 2020, particularly in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State and in the Donbass.
The post-post-Cold War world is not a return to 20thcentury strategic parity. For one thing, most world governments are not definitively categorizable into pro-US or pro-Soviet camps as they were before 1991. Much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America expresses defiant neutrality toward the new great power competition even as the US, PRC, and Russia eagerly engage them in the hopes of gaining a friend. The strategic retreat of the post-Cold War world remains but is well above its low-water mark.
Autor
Nicholas Myers
Analyst of great power competition; Russian, US, and Chinese foreign policy; and the Russian and Belarusian militaries. He has been studying policy and statecraft for over 10 years, focusing especially on Russia. He has written a number of reports on the operational capabilities of the Russian military and overseen a wide variety of wargames of potential conflicts in the European Intermarium and Asia-Pacific regions. He is currently starting a PhD in Politics at the University of Glasgow, having just completed an MLitt in War Studies at the University of Glasgow and received his undergraduate degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 2011.
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