Ideology returns to war and peace

Asad Latif

THE Russian incursion into Ukraine resumes the ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that was suspended at the end of the Cold War.

As the second Cold War begins in all but name, it is helpful to remember the provenance of the first one. It began at the cessation of World War II, which had united the dominant democracies of Britain and the United States with the Soviet Union, in spite of their ideological differences, against Nazi Germany and its fascist allies because they threatened both democracy and communism simultaneously.

Once the fascist menace had been defeated in 1945, ideological differences between the two victorious camps of democracy and communism came to the global fore.

The parting of ways was encapsulated in the Truman Doctrine and the Zhdanov Line. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were a part of American efforts to contain the Soviet Union by providing political, military and economic assistance to nations threatened by external or internal authoritarian forces. Famously, the case for containment was made in an article authored by the American diplomat George F Kennan, who argued that the political nature of the Soviet Union was such that it could not coexist with capitalist nations. He called for patient but firm containment of the communist state.

Mirroring Kennan, Andrei Zhdanov, a Soviet Politburo member, emphasised the ideological differences between the two superpowers and reiterated his belief that confrontation between them was inevitable. The Zhdanov Line described the world as being divided irreconcilably between two ideological camps: an “imperialist and anti-democratic” camp led by the United States and an “anti-imperialist and democratic” camp led by the USSR”.

The same inevitability, in principle if not in degree, is evident now. It was forecast in the 2018 National Defence Strategy of the United States of America, which declared that the central challenge to the country lay in long-term, strategic competition posed by revisionist powers. “It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model - gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions,” the document said.

The reference to the authoritarian challenge to a democratic America drew attention to the role of ideology in international relations. China and Russia were identified as threats because they challenged America’s claim to global hegemony on the basis of democracy by offering the world an absolutist alternative to a future free of the Western control of human affairs.

The first Cold War began with the West’s determination to contain the Soviet Union within the European frontiers to which it had advanced at the end of World War II. The second Cold War has begun in the opposite direction, with Russia’s determination to prevent the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) from expanding its eastward territorial acquisitions any closer to Russia.

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Nato’s expansion, like its Soviet predecessor’s, would not have produced the Ukraine crisis but for the agency of ideology.

Role of ideology

Ideology, whether democratic or authoritarian, is a determining political principle because it links the domestic legitimacy of national leaders to the global standing of their states. Leaders “will judge the threats that other states pose to their interests by examining how the latter organise their societies. Perceived threats will largely be a product of how another state’s domestic institutions and principles relate to one’s own", Mark L Haas writes in The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989.

The book spans two uneasy centuries marked by the French revolutionary wars (1792, 1793-97 and 1798-1802) and the Concert of Europe (1815-48) that intervened before the onset of the two world wars of the last century, the consequent rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance (1949-60) , and the history of the Cold War from its inception in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 to its conclusion in the dual Reagan/Gorbachev ascendancies of the 1980s that brought down the Soviet Union.

Drawing on the interplay between ideology and state power, Haas writes: “The more similar leaders’ ideological beliefs, the less threatening their relations tended to be; the more dissimilar decision makers’ ideologies, the more threatening their interactions”.

Ideological distrust demarcates the strategic boundaries of the West and the Rest today, the latter represented principally by China and Russia. The more that Chinese and Russian leaders consolidate their domestic positions, the greater the threat that they will pose to the leaders of the West. The more that American and other Western leaders consolidate their hold on the political imagination of their peoples, the greater the threat that they will pose to the political leadership of the Chinese and Russian systems. This essentially is a zero-sum game.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine embodies the latest manifestation of uncomfortable ideological truths. Nato’s visceral opposition to Russia is based, not primarily on what Moscow does to its dissidents and contrarians (because several democratic European countries, too, have less-than-stellar records in dealing with human rights and gender issues) but because the absolutist Russian state confronts Nato’s self-perception as a bastion of global democracy.

All this places the rest of the world in an uncomfortable position. It would be easy for third countries to take a firm stand against the Russian incursion into Ukraine if it were to be defined as an act of aggression against the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of a state - these being acknowledged bedrocks of a peaceful global order.

However, visualising the Ukraine war as a conflict between democracies and autocracies alienates countries that are against aggression but are not willing to go along with the Western narrative that privileges democracy within states as the only legitimate basis for the ordering of international relations.

Unfortunately, as the Ukraine war moves to its inglorious end, it appears that the second Cold War will continue the ideological heritage of the first.