Opinion Sur
Worse than the Thucydides’ trap[1] is this one: the “downhill in my fall[2]“ power struggle between two declining but armed-to-the-teeth powers.
In 1958, in the middle of the Cold War, the rebellious sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book on the causes of World War III[3]. More than six decades have passed since its appearance, and almost no one reads it anymore. In his time, it got mixed with the many alarms that sounded about the nuclear danger and went unnoticed as one more opinion. However, only four years later came the Soviet missile crisis in Cuba, which brought the world to the brink of a thermonuclear war between the two major powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Luckily (and I emphasize the word luck), the leaders of both superpowers – the young and inexperienced John F. Kennedy and the veteran Soviet leader (of Ukrainian origin) Nikita Khrushchev– knew how to offer mutual concessions and withdraw their weapons from Cuba. A miscalculation by one or both of them, and worse, a hasty and irreversible act by a commander on the ground[4], would have triggered a planetary fire and the end of civilization, in a catastrophic end anticipated by Winston Churchill with this phrase: “only rubble will remain bouncing off other rubble.”[5]
In that book Mills applied to his geopolitical diagnosis the same analysis of advanced industrial societies that had made him famous: his controversial thesis on the power elite[6]. Mills argued that in both American and Soviet societies, the three great pillars of the system—military, industrial, and political—came together at their apex to form a single pyramid, in the hands of a small group of very powerful people, which Mills called the power elite. In the US the elite manipulated a two-party liberal-democratic system, with regular alternation of protagonists and different shades of public policy, while in the Soviet Union a totalitarian state led vertically the economy and society, in the name of a people framed by a single party.
Mills argued that both elites were arrogant and irresponsible, apart from a civil society that had been transformed into a mass society easy to indoctrinate through massive communication and information systems. When both elites clashed for control of the global geopolitical system, they had no counterweight other than mutual fear. It was precisely this fear of mutual annihilation — called “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) — that maintained an armed peace during the decades following the Cuban crisis, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The only allowed wars were conventional proxy wars. The alleged nuclear stability gave the false impression of a world at peace, when in fact millions of people died in a “conventional” way.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only one superpower remained in the world: the United States. The incontestable hegemony of the survivor lasted ten years. Faced with the state that succeeded its great rival, now called the Russian Federation, the United States – the supposed “winner” of the Cold War – tried two successive strategies. The first, which failed, was to incorporate Russia into the economic and political order that the United States put together after World War II, from 1945 onwards. U.S. advisers suggested the new Russian authorities a series of draconian reforms and the opening of its economy to large Western economic groups[7]. This intensive therapy produced a great counter reaction in different sectors of the Russian society and the former power elite, who chose another path, more national, more autarchic, and only apparently democratic. That strategy, excluding any strong Western interference, led to the formation of a ruling class and a new national security state above it[8]. The social contract between these two actors seems to be a cession of political power to an autocrat in exchange for private enrichment. This social contract entails the transformation of an industrial and post-industrial economy into an extractive and rentier economy based on the natural resources of the largest country on the planet. Such is the new power elite in the Russian Federation: autocratic, oligarchic, and rentier. We can call it a delegative oligarchy. The system maintains a strong military power, and above all, a large arsenal of nuclear weapons of all kinds, second only to that of the United States. In its geopolitical periphery, the countries that were satellites of the Soviet empire gained independence and, well or badly, joined the Western system of capitalist rules.
It was precisely in that key decade that followed the end of the Cold War, that almost the entire West[9], with the United States in the lead, was wrong. It was a major strategic mistake, perhaps understandable as hegemonic dizziness, but inexcusable. The sources of the error were the illusion of complete domination, both geopolitical and historical ignorance, and deafness to the advice of their most distinguished statesmen, including Churchill’s: “In war [you must have] resolution; in defeat challenge; in victory magnanimity.” In the Cold War there was neither resolution nor defeat, but rather the collapse of one of the rivals, and in the supposed victory of the rest there was neither magnanimity nor insight. The West repeatedly refused to guarantee Russian security on its periphery.
In the post-Cold War, the European Union and NATO incorporated the countries of the former Soviet periphery into their economic and military influence. Not only Russia, but any outside observer with a modicum of objectivity should have regarded this development as harassment. For Russia, it became an existential challenge, against which it could only protest for not having the strength or prestige to confront it – until the time came to consider itself strong enough to do so. And that moment came, from 2008, with a crescendo that went from 2014 to 2022, and especially about Ukraine, whose relationship with Russia is historically complex and reluctant to any simplistic narrative by either side in conflict. It is a country that the US wanted to transform into a bulwark of containment against Russia. For its part, considering Ukraine as a non-existent sovereign country and Ukrainians as second-rate “rusitos[10]” (Малороссы), Vladimir Putin made a strategic mistake as serious and treacherous as the West’s mistakes in its previous harassment of Russia as a “former disposable power.”
Since you cannot declare war on an entity that does not consider itself a “real country,” Putin called his invasion “a special military operation,” and thought he would find more sympathy or docility than resistance – a kind of light Anschluss[11]. What he found was an unpleasant surprise: inveterate resistance from a fairly consolidated nation[12], a less fragmented Western front than he thought, and powerful and underhanded military aid to the resisters from NATO, without risking troops of its own. [13] Thus, the war was transformed from partial to total, and from local to global, with a horizontal escalation (territorial extension) and at the same time bloodier that could well end in a vertical escalation (firepower) towards the use of nuclear weapons.
Faced with the situation we face as I write, I am struck by the apparent naivety of some American and European analysts who warn, a little late, that a great power in decline, as Russia manifestly is, considering itself cornered is capable of extreme reactions (read a nuclear response). They do not realize that from the bottom of history, Russia is destined (or if you prefer, doomed) to be powerful, with enormous resilience. Moreover, they do not realize that what the Romans said could be said about the United States: De te fabula narratur (“the same story is valid for you”).
Likewise, the United States are also in decline and increase their bellicose bet (using Europe as a battering ram) to prevent its abandonment of strategic positions on the world board too visibly and fast. They have lost the wars they had chosen (after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), and have seen themselves overtaken by China in the race on the economic and strategic terrains. Consequently, we are facing two decadent giants stubbornly engaged in a dangerous game of trick and trickery[14] with wrong and symmetrical strategic perceptions, in which the victims multiply outside their borders[15], while the real winner is a third.[16]
We have closed the circle of the argument, and returned to C. Wright Mills’ thesis on the pyramids of power (in this case two cracked pyramids) and their irresponsible confrontation. The United States and Russia together fall short of seven percent of the world’s population, but they play the fate of the rest — a nice disproportion. It is no longer, as Borges would say, two bald men fighting over a comb, but two forgetful arthritic thugs of the MAD (the great reciprocal fear) endangering the world around them, distracting everyone from what we should face together and in solidarity, namely how to repair, rejuvenate, and cultivate a stripped and rickety planet, in the future benefit of the great majorities?
[1] About this alleged trap see https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-40974871
[2] . TN, word game with the lyrics of a famous tango called Cuesta abajo by Gardel and Lepera (1934).
[3] C.W. Mills, The Causes of World War Three, New York: Ballantine Books, 1960.
[4] Many years later, it became known that the Kremlin had delegated the decision to launch rockets with atomic warheads to one or two Soviet colonels in Cuba, leaving the fate of humanity subject to the amount of vodka or rum those officers could ingest.
[5] The original quote is “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”
[6] C.Wright Mills, The power elite, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963.
[7] It is worth reading about it the interview with one of those former advisors (maybe repentant and today critical about the U.S. Government), Jeffrey Sachs, in Corriere della Sera, May 2, 2022, entitled «On Ukraine, Joe Biden doesn’t want to compromise».
[8] For a summary on the transition, see Peter Rutland’s essay, “Russia’s Post-Soviet Elite” http://prutland.faculty.wesleyan.edu/files/2016/07/post-soviet-elites.ed_.pdf
[9] Not even Germany nor France enthusiastically participated in the North American festival.
[10] . TN as second-class Russians (said in a contemptuous tone).
[11] German word meaning fusion, and referring to the union of Austria and Nazi Germany into a single nation, on March 12, 1938, as a province of the Third Reich.
[12] See the interesting article of a retired U.S. military officer, Col. James Robert, Sr., “Ukraine: a History of Autonomy”, The Officer Review, May-June 2022.
[13] The same surprise that Napoleon received in 1808 when he invaded Spain and met the first resistance of guerrillas who amazed even Clausewitz himself and had as a collateral effect to detonate the wars of independence in Latin America and increase the imperial reach of England.
[14] Anyone interested in gambling game can consult https://www.ludoteka.com/clasika/truco-en.html
[15] Global energy and food shortages, especially in poorer countries, increase every day, while attention and resources are diverted out of other major humanitarian crises. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/20/world/americas/ukraine-war-global-food-crisis.html
Russia and Ukraine, along with India and USA, are granaries of the world. The war in Ukraine has disrupted the supply of grain, which Argentina and Brazil could well take advantage of if they do not miss the opportunity due to internal conflicts. See https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/04/argentina-and-brazil-could-expand-wheat-production-due-to-the-war-in-ukraine.html The same goes for the energy supply, if a deposit like Vaca Muerta does not become a dead letter.
[16] See the opinion by John Mearsheimer in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgiZXgYzI84
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