The existence of two or three major military powers with huge arsenals of nuclear weapons is supposed to reduce the likelihood of Armageddon. And has that been the case?
By loveand Bordachev, Director of programming at Valdai Club
In late 1945, the noted author of several fictional dystopias, George Orwell, published a column titled “You and the Atomic Bomb.” Aimed at a broad audience, this classic of 20th-century literature suggested that the impact on the course of history of a technological innovation such as nuclear weapons would be far greater than anything that had come before. We may be approaching a time when the course of world politics will either confirm Orwell’s judgment and the predictions based on it or, tragically, refute them.
To make matters worse, even learning from past global tensions between nuclear powers is not a panacea: their position in the world has changed significantly over the past thirty years, and the most acute indirect conflict is taking place in close physical proximity to Russia's main administrative and industrial centres. That is why many serious observers now have some doubts about whether the US strategy, which in the most general terms aims to reproduce the logic of the confrontation with Moscow from 1945 to 1991, is correct.
If we try to summarize Orwell's hypothesis, it boils down to the fact that the acquisition by two or three powers of such tremendous opportunities to destroy not only each other, but all of humanity, completely changes the course of world history. Previously, as we know, it was always based on the ability of the powers to counterattack the existing world order, and the consequences of such revolutions became fundamental for the next one. After the atomic bomb, Orwell wrote, all nations of the world have been prevented from even thinking that such a measure could be successful for them. Nuclear powers cannot because a world war would lead to their guaranteed destruction, and small and medium-sized ones cannot because of the relative weakness of their armies. At first glance, this seems to be true: acting according to the old methods, that is, resorting to military force, none of the developing powers can now qualitatively change its position in the world.
Hence the axiom that it is impossible to defeat a nuclear power in a war and that the only threat to it is itself, that is, the inability of its political system to maintain its population in relative harmony. As Orwell writes: “If, as appears to be the case,[a nuclear bomb]is a rare and expensive object, as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is more likely to put an end to large-scale wars at the price of indefinitely prolonging a ‘peace that is not peace. ’ The first premise has so far been confirmed. Even economically powerful China does not yet seem to have arsenals comparable to those of Russia and the US. The second – the end of major wars – needs further proof. The accumulation of this is the main problem facing world politics today, however painful it may be for our reflections on our own future.
Orwell writes that nuclear superpowers are unassailable states and are therefore in a permanent state of “cold war” with their neighbors. Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like, as cold war is known to be an alternative to hot war. Few people doubt that not all practices of American or Russian foreign policy are entirely satisfactory to their respective neighbors. Particularly noteworthy is the case of the Americans, for whom control over others is an important part of their own prosperity, as understood by the political establishment and its sponsors. In recent years we have seen many examples of the United States dealing very harshly with its European or Asian allies. Germany has lost its economic privileges in the conflict between Russia and the West. France has been reduced to the position of a junior partner of the United States, although it possesses some nuclear weapons of its own. Not to mention the Asian countries Japan and South Korea, whose foreign policy is determined by Washington, often under direct pressure. None of the countries mentioned has the power to change its position.
The Cold War, in the Orwellian sense of the term, remains the most important feature of world politics in the nuclear age. And it is not at all surprising that the United States is guided by the same rules it has learned over the past decades. The first and most important is the lack of responsibility for the fate of those through whose hands the United States is waging its proxy war. Simply because the United States does not link its own security to the survival of those agents. This means that the United States cannot fully understand the possible reaction of an enemy to the actions of those whom it uses to achieve its goals. Since the agents are neither official representatives nor citizens of the United States, Washington feels formally unaccountable for their actions. Some observers have noted that some radical movements in Syria receive support from abroad – for example, from Turkey – but this has had little effect on Russia’s relations with its sponsors.
In the past, China actively used radical Marxist movements in Southeast Asia and provided them with various forms of support, but that did not turn its relations with the countries where these groups were active into a war situation. The USSR also supported several rebel movements operating against the United States and its allies, but Washington did not see this as a reason for a larger conflict. From the point of view of any normal state, only direct aggression by the other side against its national territory is a reason for war. Perhaps that is why the United States does not believe that its actions in Ukraine could provoke a direct conflict with Russia.
But it remains to be seen how far such logic can work now that the conflict is taking place in the immediate vicinity of the Russian state capital and not, for example, in far-off Afghanistan. Especially since NATO's enlargement policy over the past thirty years has created a number of opportunities for the United States that also pose challenges. After all, the bloc's members in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, are seen in Washington and Moscow as mere American agents whose participation in hostilities has little to do with the direct threat that Russia and the United States could pose to each other. Needless to say, the potential threats and disruptions that a scenario based on such an assumption could entail are enormous.
Nor should we ignore the not-quite-understood link between the foreign policy positions of the great powers and their internal stability. We can see that much of the American nervousness about what is happening in the world is related to the need to continue to benefit from the overall functioning of the global political and economic system. Not only is it difficult for the United States to accept changes in this area because of the inertia of its thinking, but it could be dangerous until the American establishment finds other effective ways to keep the situation under control at home. Especially since the general crisis of the socio-economic system created by the West since the mid-1970s is not disappearing, but is only gaining momentum. Yes, generally speaking, the presence of two or three major military powers with colossal arsenals of nuclear weapons reduces the likelihood of a general war in the traditional sense. But the state of “peace that is not peace” promised by the classicists still seems like a balancing act on the verge of something that would make all theoretical constructions lose all meaning.
This article was first published by Valdai Debate Clubtranslated and edited by the RT team.
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