How will Cold War 2.0 be contained?

COLD WAR 2.0 is on. It replicates the logic of Cold War 1.0, which began soon after the defeat of a common enemy, Nazi Germany, in 1945 sundered the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Cold War 1.0 ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cold War 2.0 has similar origins. Its end is unknown.

What is known is that the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 left a triumphant US dealing with Russia, which had formed the core of the departed communist sphere and which remained its successor state in many ways.

With the Soviet Union gone, European affairs turned on the military equation between the US and Russia.

That relationship involved the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a defence bloc created in 1949 to provide an American guarantee for the security of Western Europe against the Soviet Union.

In 1999, only eight years after the end of Cold War 1.0, Nato expanded to include the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In 2004, Nato announced that Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia would join it.

Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland had been among the members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, Nato's communist counterpart, set up in 1955.

East Germany effectively became a part of Nato when Germany unified under the aegis of West Germany, a Nato member.

Nato's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe brought America to Russia's threatened doorstep. Relations between the US and Russia began to sour.

In 2014, Russia invaded the West-friendly Ukraine, a part of the erstwhile Soviet Union, and annexed its Russian-speaking region of Crimea in a pointed reminder of Russia's great-power propensities and abilities.

Russia made its muscular presence felt in the Balkans and the Black Sea as well. Russia had accepted defeat in Cold War 1.0, but it was not conceding its place automatically in any reorganisation of power blocs to follow.

China's case is rather different. After its political split from the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Beijing turned naturally to the West for countervailing support against a militarily superior Moscow.

Since the 1970s, China has served as a valuable yet junior partner on the Western front of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated its international choices.

However, just as Russia was not content with being a has-been of international relations, nor was China. Like Russia, it had once had its own empire, long before the advent of America on the world stage.

It was a matter of time before China sought to recreate its own sphere of influence, just as Russia wished to.

That opportunity appeared when the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 shook the material foundations of the Americo-centric global order.

China sensed an opportunity to assert its autonomous agency in international affairs.

Its desire to supplant the US as a global supplier of public economic goods manifested itself in its initiation of the inter-continental Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 and the institution of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2016.

China's terse rejection of an international tribunal's rebuke of its behaviour in the South China Sea in 2016 revealed its military confidence in its economic rise, somewhat as America had done with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of 1947, political and economic efforts that foreshadowed America's plans to block the Soviet Union militarily through the formation of Nato.

Of particular importance today is China's interest in breaking out of the encirclement of three island chains that were used to contain the Soviet Union and China in the Pacific when they were on the same side of the Cold War.

The first island chain, consisting of islands that include Taiwan and Okinawa, constitutes the first barrier between China and the Pacific Ocean. The second island chain includes Saipan and Guam.

The third island chain - which covers the maritime area lying between Hawaii, Japan and New Zealand - represents the naval boundary between Asia and the Americas and marks the remit of Japanese expansion during the last global war.

Beijing's naval moves in the South China Sea reflect its belief that it can escape from the maritime geography of American containment by wedding its military prowess to its economic, political and diplomatic initiatives to influence the direction of strategic affairs in Asia, Europe and Africa through the AIIB and the BRI.

Much as Chinese estrangement with the Soviet Union in the 1960s made it turn to the US, China's and Russia's common break with America today is drawing the two estranged countries closer.

There is a sense of deja vu in all this. Until the 1960s, Moscow and Beijing were part of Cold War 1.0 with Washington.

Sixty years later, a blink of the eye in geopolitics, they are a part of Cold War 2.0 with the same Washington.

CONTAINMENT 2.0

One reason for this return to the past is the ruling ideology of states, which is much more resilient than the fluctuations of international politics to which states are subject.

George Kennan, the architect of America's policy of containment of the Soviet Union, wrote that the maintenance of Soviet power depended on "the pursuit of unlimited authority domestically, accompanied by the cultivation of the semi-myth of implacable foreign hostility".

The autocratic nature of Russian and Chinese power today has survived the transition of both systems from communism to capitalism.

Admittedly, the American state is no less imperious than its Russian and Chinese counterparts when dealing with foreign challenges to its power.

However, the ameliorating role of legalised and institutionalised dissent within its democratic body politic sets America apart from its Slavic and Sinic challengers. Two hostile ideologies cannot rule the world together.

Cold War 2.0 was inevitable. The question now is about Containment 2.0. It will not be as simple as Containment 1.0.

The Soviet Union and China then inhabited a rival bloc driven (and ultimately driven to the ground) by a communist market that simply could not meet the basic economic and political expectations of their people.

The Americo-centric Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund could not be challenged materially by the Soviet-centric Comecon.

All that America had to do was to prove its economic superiority outside the Comecon system.

Today, both Russia and China are stakeholders in a global capitalist order from which America cannot afford to withdraw.

Former US president Donald Trump's attempts to decouple the American and Chinese economies hurt both of them and other nations.

If containment has to work today, it will have to be of a higher order than what was achieved decades ago. America will have to prove its political superiority within a universal economic system. That remains to be seen.

Both Cold War and Containment 2.0 will be more interesting than 1.0.

• The writer is a Singapore journalist; asad@sph.com.sg