This book began life as a talk at Nottingham Trent University in February 2023. The audience was appreciative and the discussion lively and engaged. However, I discovered later that complaints were raised about the event. The content of the talk was criticised, even though it was presented more in the form of an open-ended enquiry into the causes, course and consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war than an ex-cathedra statement of dogma. The complaint carried threatening implications, not least for Dr Antonio Cerella, who had invited me. Fortunately, the audience feedback on the session was very favourable, and the matter was laid to rest without any serious consequences. The more positive outcome was that Antonio suggested that I write up the lecture to become the inaugural publication in his series on International Security and Sustainability for Anthem, which I was honoured and delighted to do, and the outcome is this book.

Unfortunately, the incident at Nottingham is far from the only instance in which the ‘cancel culture’ which accompanies and aggravates Cold War II has affected me. In 2016, I was invited to teach a course on European international relations at the College of Europe in Natolin, on the outskirts of Warsaw. Over the years I had taught the subject many times, accompanied always by lively and healthy debate. This time, from the outset I noticed something different, with a solid phalanx of Polish and Ukrainian students staring aggressively and refusing to participate in discussions. In the end, I asked one of the brightest students, from Germany, what was going on. She told me, glancing around to check that we were not being overheard, that ‘we have been thoroughly brain-washed’. There could be no questioning of the righteousness of Western actions, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an unmitigated good, and the European Union (EU) was the repository of all the virtues. By contrast, Russia was the fount of all evil, and any questioning of these postulates was not only illegitimate but effectively prohibited. This does not make for a healthy scholarly environment. The line between education and indoctrination, analysis and advocacy, is dangerously blurred.

The Political West usurps the rights and prerogatives of the international system. The rules-based order set itself up as an alternative to international law. This in effect means that the Political West has become revisionist, although it is a revision of a system that it had itself earlier established, generating what has been called ‘internal revisionism’. This self-defeating revisionism undermines the foundations of the system that allowed the Political West to exercise its hegemony in a flexible and multidimensional manner. Hegemony is becoming the assertion of a divisive and militaristic dominance. In response, resistance not only challenges US primacy but also more broadly the hegemony of the Political West in its entirety. A global anti-hegemonic world order is emerging. Russia, China and other countries insist that they are not challenging the UN-based international system, and hence are status quo, even conservative, powers. However, their challenge to the rules-based sub-order means that in the sphere of international politics they are indeed revisionist – resisting the primacy of the Political West and its presumed usurpation of the privileges and prerogatives of the UN-based international system. This hybrid form of anti-hegemonism is neo-revisionism: opposing the claims of the Political West at the level of international politics, but supporting the institutions and norms of the international system in which international politics is embedded.

The Political East

The Eurasian powers of Russia and China are at the core of the challenge, and the two increasingly aligned as Cold War II intensified. Both fear the defeat of the other at the hands of the United States and its allies. Unless they stand together, they are liable to be hanged separately. The two Eurasian powers are part of what can be called the Political East, the counterpart of the Political West but operating according to very different principles. The characteristics of the Political West include militarism, hermeticism and ontological closure, issues that will be explored in more detail later. By contrast, the rhetorical focus of the Political East is on development and peace. It is anti-hegemonic, repudiating the logic of hegemonism in international politics, rather than simply counter-hegemonic, challenging the specific form of hegemonism represented by the US and its allies. However, in the intensely competitive culture of Cold War II, the nascent Poltical East generates hegemonic strategies of its own.

There is not yet a spy literature of Cold War II comparable to that of the first. There is not yet a John Le Carré or even an Ian Fleming. This conflict is not couched in the allure of dangerous operations behind enemy lines, the subtle psychology of propaganda campaigns or the agonised dilemmas of those caught in the middle. A silent but significant minority repudiate the logic of cold war, especially when it diverts attention from the multitude of pressing issues that face humanity and is driven by security concerns that require a diplomatic rather than a military response. To adapt Karl Marx's well-known aphorism, if Cold War I was a tragedy, the second is indeed a farce, although a dangerous one. At its heart is the struggle to control narratives, to shape popular perceptions of reality.

This is an age-old endeavour, but in Cold War II the misrepresentation of situations is exacerbated by the decline of high modernist ideals of fact-based journalism and impartial scholarship. Western media act less like ‘watchdogs as to their own government's foreign policy. Rather, they act as a handmaiden.’ Jacques Baud even goes so far as to argue that Western societies are governed by fake news. He argues that the refusal to conduct impartial investigations of critical events, such as Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria or Putin's attempts to destabilise Western democracies (notably in the Russiagate case in the United States), shapes the foreign policy of Western countries. Having worked for the UN and NATO, he witnessed at first hand

He notes how ‘suppositions become certainties and prejudices become realities’, with the sad outcome: ‘We do not understand war, so we cannot understand peace.’ The prejudices generated by fake news rebound to generate ‘the terrorism that is killing us’. It is not only terrorism that is generated but cold war as a form of international politics.

With the end of Cold War I in 1989, a new paradigm of international politics took shape. This was a world without the challenge of a communist superpower and its associated conception of world order. Instead, the world order associated with the Political West appeared to triumph, but the fruits of that putative victory contained some deadly toxins that would corrupt the triumphant order itself. It remains to be seen just how lethal this will be, but we can already see one of the outcomes in the form of Cold War II. As described in this book, a whole culture is associated with cold war as a form of international politics.

The inter-cold war paradigm, what we can call the postcommunist model, was characterised by a number of key features. First, the interpellation of the Political West, variously presented as the liberal international order, rules-based international order or Atlantic power system, between the Charter International System and the practices of international politics. The Political West effectively usurped the privileges and prerogatives that should properly belong to Charter institutions, above all the UN, its agencies and the whole body of international law that it has spawned. Second, this entailed the displacement of the fundamental Charter principle of sovereign internationalism, where states meet as normative equals and unite in various multilateral formats to resolve problems of mutual concern. Instead, the ideology of democratic internationalism was advanced, which introduces not only sovereign inequality but also an inherently didactic, if not outright interventionist, dynamic into international affairs. The allegedly more advanced societies bring enlightenment, by book or by crook, to the more backward. Third, the absence of a peer competitor encouraged neoconservatives to forge a grand strategy based on permanent US dominance, requiring the imposition of constraints on potential competitors. In the first instance, this applied to Russia and was then extended to China. At the same time, the rise of economic neoliberalism from the 1970s provoked the radical transformation of social orders into market states, with wrenching domestic consequences.

Sanctions undermine the liberal order that they are intended to protect. By challenging the principle of innocent until proven guilty, the Political West erodes its moral standing not only in target countries but across the Global South. Undermining the property and legal rights of individuals and states damages not only economic interdependence but also the very idea of deeply interconnected economies. The trend towards deglobalisation accelerates as states seek to insulate their economies and make them more resilient by short-ening supply chains, increasing localisation and import substitution. The geopolitical effects are also severe. Sanctions on Japan precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Unilateral coercive measures, as sanctions are better called, act as a form of ersatz war, entrenching the growing hostility between Russia and the West, a process that was later repeated vis-à-vis China. In his study of peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia, James C. Scott examined the moral economy of economic activity and relationships. The term is applied here to highlight the morally contentious ground on which sanctions are applied today. Without procedural justice and impartiality, not only the legitimacy of the sanctions but that of the sanctioning states themselves is questioned. No less important, sanctions contribute to the overall deterioration in the geopolitical environment, indefinitely locking states into patterns of hostility.

Sanctions from Hell

The modern era of sanctions was launched by Congress's adoption of the Magnitsky sanctions in December 2012, followed by Obama's expulsion of diplomats in 2016. Putin's ‘cronies’ became an easy although dangerously unspecific target, along with assorted oligarchs and genuine criminals. In July 2017, Congress adopted the landmark legislation, ‘Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act’ (CAATSA). The CAATSA sanctions limited the president's ability to ease or lift earlier ones. Obama's sanctions had been introduced by executive order, but they were now codified in statute and therefore cannot be rescinded by presidential decree. The target was no longer alleged Russian crimes but the Russian corporate economy as a whole. This came on top of the cessation of most military-to-military contacts in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine crisis with the exception of ‘deconfliction’ procedures in Syria. A reluctant Trump had no choice but to sign the measure.

The ideological clash between communism and capitalism gave way to a broader but no less entrenched confrontation. Manichean binaries are fostered, represented as a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In his State of the Union address in March 2022, US president Joe Biden neatly divided the world into two camps: ‘In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.’ Later that year, in a speech in Warsaw, Biden declared:

This was a resounding statement of the liberal view of international affairs, dividing the world into progressive and regressive camps. It was also an implicit condemnation of the purported ethical nihilism of realist approaches, in which the focus is more on outcomes rather than the purity of intentions. Underlying the renewed dichotomous approach to international affairs is a profound ‘epistemic’ clash between contrasting visions of security, development and peace. The struggle is one between distinctive representations of universalism, the foundations of the good life within societies and the appropriate relations between states. The Political West advances democratic internationalism, the view that all societies must ultimately conform to a certain model of modernity generated in the West, whereas Russia, China and many other states defend the Charter principle of sovereign internationalism – that the destiny of each state should be its own affair, as long as it remains broadly in conformity with Charter principles. Ultimately all states, including those in the democratic internationalist camp, insist on the right to defend their interests and therefore selectively apply Charter principles in the rough and tumble of international politics. This chapter explores the key developments and actors that shape the culture and politics of Cold War II.

After 1989, NATO became a politico-military organisation and ultimately transformed the Political West in its image. Neo-realists assumed that having completed its primary task, the containment of the Soviet Union, NATO would disband. Instead, it launched various expeditionary wars while remaining the cornerstone of the collective defence of Western Europe. It thereby became an obstacle to the transformation of the European security order. A collective defence body is very different from a system of collective security. It applies a logic of inclusion and exclusion and imposes hierarchy into alliance relationships. Russia was stuck on the outside of an expanding system centred on Washington. Transatlantic ties took priority over a re-envisioning of European continentalism. From this failure stemmed incalculable consequences. Instead of indivisible security on a continental scale, Washington enlarged NATO to bring the former Soviet and some other states under its defence umbrella. This was the free choice of the countries concerned, but their choice was structured by the options on offer.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative pan-European security structure encompassing all states in some sort of continental security confederation. In the early 1990s, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was touted as the framework for such an entity, while NATO's Partnership for Peace programme was welcomed by Moscow. The idea of some sort of OSCE security council, analogous to the UN Security Council, was also advanced as a way of regulating great power relations in the region. A major security role for the EU was also proposed. In the end, the paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation at the end of Cold War I is striking. NATO enlargement became the only game in town. Any short-term gain was balanced by the long-term degradation of the European security environment, as well as the profound internal transformation of the Political West itself. In the absence of a security order that included Moscow, the security dilemma intensified. European security became defined against Russia, rather than with Russia. In May 2024, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov noted that an acute foreign policy confrontation between Russia and the West was ‘in full swing’, with the Western powers seeking to impose a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia and the very existence of the country under threat.

Postcommunism as a condition is not restricted to the former communist states but affects the rest of the world. The long after-life of the revolutionary socialist challenge continues to shape Western polities. Even after the dissolution of the communist order and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, the instruments and practices devised to counter the communist and Soviet threat not only survived but radicalised. The Political West, formed in and shaped by cold war, lives on in the form of NATO and the entirety of the cold war security arrangements, as well as the ideological apparatus and the military–industrial complex of the Trumanite state. Nevertheless, the collapse of communism unravelled the consensus focused on Cold War imperatives and opened up the terrain to new forms of contestation. Class politics gave way to culture wars and technocratic ‘third way’ depoliticised governance practices. In international affairs, the cold peace lasted a bare 25 years before full-scale cold war was reignited with Russia in 2014 (over Ukraine) and with China in 2018 (trade war). The notion of cold war is misleading if it simply suggests a rehash of the earlier conflict, but my argument is that cold war entails a certain style of international politics in the nuclear age, a distinctive culture, based on an enduring pattern of hostility between consistently aligned groups of protagonists, contesting not only militarily but also through economic and ideational antagonisms. This in turn has profound domestic effects, reproducing patterns of control, information management and imposed consensus on the key issues of the day. Cold war binaries are restored, in which one side claims to be on the right side of history and to speak the truth while the adversary is historically anachronistic and spews only falsehoods and ‘disinformation’.

Wars of Reality

Cold War II is more amorphous but no less dangerous and pervasive than the first. The regimes of truth established by classical concepts of liberalism and socialism, ‘based on a belief in the limitless power and normative value of the mind’, have dissolved. In the absence of clearcut ideological divisions and the erosion of the civic culture of high modernity, the distinction between truth and falsehood breaks down. Mediatised narratives and the culture of the spectacle themselves became the terrain of contestation.