Chapter 4 - Fighting Cold War II

Summary

After 1989, NATO became a politico-military organisation and ultimately transformed the Political West in its image. Neo-realists assumed that having completed its primary task, the containment of the Soviet Union, NATO would disband. Instead, it launched various expeditionary wars while remaining the cornerstone of the collective defence of Western Europe. It thereby became an obstacle to the transformation of the European security order. A collective defence body is very different from a system of collective security. It applies a logic of inclusion and exclusion and imposes hierarchy into alliance relationships. Russia was stuck on the outside of an expanding system centred on Washington. Transatlantic ties took priority over a re-envisioning of European continentalism. From this failure stemmed incalculable consequences. Instead of indivisible security on a continental scale, Washington enlarged NATO to bring the former Soviet and some other states under its defence umbrella. This was the free choice of the countries concerned, but their choice was structured by the options on offer.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative pan-European security structure encompassing all states in some sort of continental security confederation. In the early 1990s, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was touted as the framework for such an entity, while NATO's Partnership for Peace programme was welcomed by Moscow. The idea of some sort of OSCE security council, analogous to the UN Security Council, was also advanced as a way of regulating great power relations in the region. A major security role for the EU was also proposed. In the end, the paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation at the end of Cold War I is striking. NATO enlargement became the only game in town. Any short-term gain was balanced by the long-term degradation of the European security environment, as well as the profound internal transformation of the Political West itself. In the absence of a security order that included Moscow, the security dilemma intensified. European security became defined against Russia, rather than with Russia. In May 2024, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov noted that an acute foreign policy confrontation between Russia and the West was ‘in full swing’, with the Western powers seeking to impose a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia and the very existence of the country under threat.