Cold War 2.0

I stumbled across a column earlier this week that commanded my attention. Noted journalist, long-time television personality and political operative Pat Buchanan wrote, “Reading Putin’s excoriation, it is hard to recall, in four decades of Cold War, or the three decades since, a speech of such relentless vitriol and hostility toward the West.”

Buchanan was referring to Vladimir Putin’s speech laying permanent claim to the occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and his promise to defend the now Russian territories with “all the forces and means at our disposal.” The speech was viewed as one of several thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons if backed into a corner, and most pundits agree that Mr. Putin has effectively backed himself into that corner.

Considering the source, Buchanan’s statement says quite a lot. Pat Buchanan began his political career during the Goldwater years and was later a press secretary for the Nixon Administration. He knows a thing or two about the cold war.

Buchanan was always a bit to the right of me on social issues, but he has always been well-versed on foreign affairs. Mr. Buchanan citing a speech as being the most “relentless vitriol” in 70 years tells me that we might have a problem on our hands. Remember, Buchanan rose to prominence during the Khrushchev years. Do you remember the Elmer Fudd look-alike who put nukes 90 miles off the coast of Florida and pounded his shoe on the desk at the United Nations? Buchanan thinks Putin talks tougher than that guy.

Buchanan’s comments aren’t the only red flags I’ve seen in the past week. Pentagon watchers have reported movements of known nuclear weapons platforms being moved from deep within Russia to the western border with Ukraine. I can only guess that Mr. Putin has a good idea of what our surveillance capabilities are and he wants us to see that he is backing up his bombast with action.

At about the same time that Putin was bellowing his threats, Japan was ordering people into bomb shelters because North Korea thought it would be a good idea to fire an intermediate-range missile over Hokkaido. It’s widely understood that the Kim Dynasty’s urge to settle old scores with Japan is held in check by Beijing, so one can only wonder why Xi Jinping would let Pyongyang off the leash now. What message are they sending us this week?

This, of course, is all against the backdrop of continued harassment of Taiwan by the Republic of China. The uptick in tensions between Taiwan and Mainland China predates Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by a longshot. Beijing has insisted on a “One China” policy since 1949 but has really ramped up since they checked Hong Kong off their shopping list in 1997. Taiwan, by the way, believes in a One China policy too, but without the Chinese Communist Party.

Have you ever wondered how wars become world wars? This is it. With Russia, China and Iran as the new Evil Empire, and our commitments to Israel, a growing NATO and most of the British Commonwealth sphere, our alliances are even more entangled than they were when Archduke Ferdinand went for a drive in 1914.

The relatively unsettled, but resource-rich Arctic Circle is expected by many to be the next area of conflict, but the Chinese have been quietly establishing a foothold in Africa and parts of South America. China’s efforts in Africa should not be underestimated. While we have been busy building KFCs and Coca-Cola bottling plants on the continent, China has been building roads, bridges and dams. In some places, the yuan/renminbi is pushing out the mighty dollar as the backing exchange currency. I’m not as worried about the dollar, at least not in the short run, but we should pay more attention to the smaller military dust-ups in places we’ve never heard of.

The larger concern is that new technologies (i.e. miniaturization, sophisticated guidance systems, satellite-based targeting, etc) have enabled the development of strategic small-scale nukes to a point that renders our old friend, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) obsolete. MAD served us well between 1945 and 1989, and Soviet/Russian politics afforded us a few years to relax between 1989 and 2014. Whether it began in 2014 or in 2022, we seem to have entered a new era.

As a duck-and-cover baby and a shortwave radio buff, I have contended that the Cold War never really ended. The adversarial rhetoric softened, but never went away. Now, there’s not much point in denying that it’s back, and old Mr. Buchanan has seen this movie before. He has also, historically, been an isolationist. He’s not a hawk itching for a new war to start, so if he is sending up red flags, we should probably pay attention.