The New Cold War – Reviewing Gilbert Achcar’s latest book

In his latest book The New Cold War (The Westbourne Press, 2023) Gilbert Achcar provides a fascinating account of the triangular relationships between the USA, Russia and China from the early 1990s onwards. Two chapters published at the end of the 1990s are complemented with up-to-date assessments of current conflicts between the US and NATO with Russia over Ukraine and US – Chinese rivalries in the South China Sea. In this blog post, I will assess Achcar’s many insights, but also add a notion of caution re the theoretical framework underpinning his book.

 

This is an extremely entertaining, fascinating read. Page after page Achcar carefully unravels the inter-state dynamics unfolding from the early 1990s onwards resulting in the 2014/2022 Ukraine war as well as heightened tensions between the US and China especially over, but not exclusively so, Taiwan.

 

NATO expansion from the late 1990s onwards and especially the Kosovo war in 1999, when the military alliance intervened for the first time after the end of the Cold War, are identified as crucial turning points towards confrontation between the West and Russia. As such, Achcar identifies an increasingly unilateral course of action by the US and the West without any regards for Russia’s (security) interests as a key factor leading up to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The NATO Bucharest summit in 2008, when both Ukraine and Georgia were offered future NATO membership, was a logical consequence of earlier decisions (P.175). And yet, there had been alternatives for the West after the end of the Cold War. ‘The US-led Western policy toward post-Soviet Russia was, as we have seen, calamitous in its early years – as was the decision to enlarge NATO instead of enhancing the role of collective security organizations such as the UN and the OSCE’ (P.232).

 

Nevertheless, Achcar is extremely careful not to excuse Russia’s attack on Ukraine. He is certainly not a Putin apologist. It was also the domestic protests in Russia between 2011 and 2013, which are identified as having changed Putin’s strategy vis-à-vis the West (PP.185 and 191). Unrest at home contributed to a more authoritarian stance domestically as well as on the international stage. In sum, ‘this new experience of NATO’s unilateralism [as, for example, the Western intervention in Libya in 2011] and infringement of international law was frustrating for Moscow. Along with the pro-democracy protests in Russia itself, it determined Vladimir Putin to shift away from the course of détente’ (P.187).

What was more decisive, the West’s unilateralism or Russian domestic instability? This is not answered by Achcar. In the end, both developments were crucial re-enforcing each other. ‘Which of these chains of events is more to blame for the catastrophic outcomes of 2022 – the first, for which responsibility lies primarily with Washington, or the second, for which it lies with Moscow? This becomes a secondary question if it is acknowledged that both sequences contributed to the outcome’ (P.234).

 

Nevertheless, as entertaining a read Achcar’s book is without any doubt, conceptually it is rather troubling. Over large parts of the discussion, Achcar implicitly relies on a state-centric, realist theoretical framework, often counting and comparing the amount of guns, tanks and bombs or military budgets more generally (e.g. P.39). This is complemented by a narration of history as being made by ‘great (male) leaders’ especially Putin in the case of Russia (PP.137-237) and, although to a lesser extent, Xi Jinping in the case of China (PP.260-70). An occasional liberal IR theory insistence on the importance of international organisations such as the UN completes the theoretical picture (e.g. P.232). Deeper, Marxist concepts can at best be glimpsed in discussions of the US permanent war economy and its military-industrial complex (PP.22-8) or, by contrast, Russia’s own military-industrial complex (P.208).

 

Such a lack of detailed theoretical development comes at a cost. Across large parts of the book Achcar discusses surface appearances rather than the real dynamics underpinning global developments. There is, for example, no reflection on the internal relations between the global crisis of overaccumulation (see W. I. Robinson, 2022) and heightened geo-political tensions. Capitalist crises and contradictions are referred to on occasions, but not systematically related to inter-state rivalries.

Finally, the book ends with a rather unmotivated endorsement of Western arms for Ukraine in the current war against Russia. 'It is also proper and just for governments to arm victims of foreign aggression or crimes against humanity in their fight against their oppressors – as Moscow and Beijing armed the Vietnamese, and Washington and its NATO allies are arming the Kurds and the Ukrainians – as long as the aggression or massacre cannot be stopped by non-violent means’ (P.308). Having outlined pages after pages how NATO’s aggressive, unilateral stance vis-à-vis Russia had decisively contributed to the war in Ukraine, Achcar suddenly sees no problems with a continuation of precisely this kind of policy through Western arms exports. The reader is left confused by such a turn of assessment.

For a response by Gilbert Achcar, see his A Comment on Andreas Bieler's Review of The New Cold War. 

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

17 July 2024