Why the US wants to bring back the Cold War
According to American mainstream news coverage, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is part of his grand scheme to bring back the Soviet Empire. Of course, this narrative allows us to ignore the context of what led up to the conflict, and the role of Western powers in its tragic escalation.
In 2014, a US-backed coup replaced a neutral government with a pro-Western government, which opened renewed talks of Ukraine joining NATO. Russia, not keen to have a hostile military alliance on its doorstep, sought to secure Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donbas and Luhansk. Both parties then accused each other of planning an invasion of these provinces, escalating the situation until Putin decided to pull the trigger.
Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can’t be justified, we can however ask some questions about how we got here, and how we could have avoided such conflict. For example, why was there a push for Ukraine to join NATO? More fundamentally, why is NATO even still a thing? At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, why wasn’t NATO?
I think the answer lies in the narrative framing we started out with, the idea of Putin dreaming about bringing back the Soviet Empire in all its glory. What if this dream isn’t Putin’s, but America’s?
America was at its best during the WW2 and Cold War era, protecting the Free World from dangerous totalitarian ideologies. Liberalism was a beacon of freedom and enlightenment compared to the barbarism of fascism and the Kafkaesque horrors of Stalinism. After the fall of the USSR, in the 90s it seemed like the end of history was reached: it seemed like liberal-democratic capitalism was the best system possible, and the “developing” world would simply catch up.
The shocks of 9/11 in 2001 and the economic crisis in 2008 put an end to this dream. Even though liberalism won, it is now somehow sick, unable to sustain itself on its own terms. As the suffering around the world grows, liberalism is slowly losing its legitimacy, and with it, America is losing its legitimacy, both internally and in the eyes of the rest of the world.
So it’s no wonder America has a kind of toxic nostalgia towards the Cold War era, when it was still so clear who the Good Guys were and who the Bad Guys. Like any patriarch, America must invent the danger it offers protection against, and so it created the narrative of a Putin seeking to restore the Soviet Empire, turning him into a villain from a James Bond movie. Of course I don’t mean in any way to defend Putin here: just because the West needs him to be a villain, doesn’t mean that he isn’t actually that.
