An Alternative View of the Ukrainian Conflict: Stephen F. Cohen on the Origins of the New Cold War

ABSTRACT

This article deals with views of the American scholar of Russian studies Stephen F. Cohen (1928–2020) on what he termed the “new Cold War”—i.e., the confrontation between the United States and Russia brought about by the US-driven expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe. Given the topicality of Cohen’s views for the analysis of the current war in Ukraine, this article offers a summary and critical assessment of Cohen’s analyses and of his warnings about the potential consequences of US foreign policy in Europe. The conclusion is that Cohen’s analysis was vindicated by the outbreak of the current war in Ukraine, but that his “Russo-centric” view is too narrow, and that his analysis must be placed in the larger global context within which the war in Ukraine takes place: US imperialism’s two-pronged aggression against both Russia and China.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• United States
• Ukraine
• NATO
• China

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cohen wrote an introduction for this collection, he also researched the archives himself and played a role in the recovery of the manuscripts. Cohen’s role is described both in the foreword by Sergei Baburin and in the introduction by Stephen Cohen.

2 Since this article was submitted for publication, a booklet has come out that dismantles the “Western narrative” around the war in Ukraine (Abelow 2022).

3 Cohen argued that “Though denied by a number of participants and commentators, the assurance has been confirmed by other participants as well as by archive researchers” (Cohen 2017a). See the most recent and well-documented confirmation of this statement in National Security Archive (2017).

4 Russia with 5,977 warheads and the United States, with 5,428, together still possess about 90% of all nuclear warheads in the world, according to the report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI 2022, 15).

5 See “What Is Exercise Rapid Trident?” https://clippermedia.org/backstory-ukraines-international-peacekeeping-and-security-center/#:~:text=The%20annual%20exercise%20Rapid%20Trident%20is%20a%20culminating,the%20mentorship%20of%20the%20Joint%20Multinational%20Training%20Group-Ukraine.

6 The GDP data were taken from google: https://www.google.com/search?q=china+us+gpd&rlz=1C1GIGM_enAR758AR758&oq=china+us+gpd&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i13i512l6j0i22i30l3.3784j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8; The population data were taken from the United States Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/popclock/population_widget_310×200.php?component=density&no_scode.

7 “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917).” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/address-to-congress-declaration-of-war-against-germany.

8 As Jean-Jacques Marie wrote:

The politico-journalistic vulgate of an imperialist Russia led by an autocratic dictator assuming the heritage of Stalin, even Hitler, and eager to show his muscles as a juggler at every opportunity, comes up against a set of realities. All imperialism presupposes a dynamic economy, eager to conquer markets by all possible and imaginable means, from trade war to war, and a strong state. However, the Russian economy is marked by a productivity of labor three times lower than that of the main capitalist countries and corroded, like the state itself, by galloping corruption inherited from both the distant and near past, which has increased tenfold since the fall of the USSR. (. . .) In a word, its economy is too weak to sustain a real enterprise of conquest of markets, the prime mover of all imperialism. (Marie 2016, 16–17)

9 Indeed, that possibility was theorized as a goal by leading figures of the US foreign policy establishment such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1997 fantasized about the “enlargement of NATO and the EU,” up to and including “between 2005 and 2010, Ukraine,” an “enlargement” accompanied by the partition of Russia into three puppet states—“a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic.” This “decentralized political system,” along with “free-market economics,” would allegedly “unleash the creative potential of the Russian people and Russia’s vast natural resources,” thus open to the US corporations (Brzezinski 1997, 54–56).

10 Sarah Wagenknecht, a member of the Bundestag for Die Linke since 2009, denounced the German government in a speech at the Bundestag on September 8, 2022, as “The dumbest government in Europe,” arguing that its current policy was set in Washington and saying: “Make America great again? A costly strategy for a German government!” (German Bundestag 2022, 5428–5429).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Gaido

Daniel Gaido is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina. He is the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor, together with Richard B. Day, of Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record (Brill, 2009) and Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War I (Brill, 2009).