Cold War redux

When P-Noy publicly stated that China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea impinged on the Philippine territorial sovereignty, he warned that if the world did not counter these attempts, this would be a policy of appeasement similar to Hitler’s takeover of Sudetenland. The historic lesson is that the failure of the world community to counter territorial aggression would only encourage the aggressor to become more assertive.

He was called an amateur statesman. He was also accused of misinterpreting history and that his statement was unduly provocative.

Recently, Hillary Clinton made a similar statement. She said that Russia’s de facto takeover of Crimea, a region of Ukraine, was similar to Hitler’s invasion of Sudetenland before the Second World War. In this case, the public response was more muted. After all, Hilary Clinton was former United States Secretary of State and seems the most probable president of the United States after its 2020 elections.

In P-Noy’s case, the aggressor is China. In Hilary’s case it is Russia. But the circumstances are exactly alike. A military superpower — China or Russia — decides that a neighboring territory of a weaker neighbor can be annexed through the use of armed force even at the expense of international law. In both cases, the invading parties have openly declared that they have no intention in bowing to international pressure or going through any legal process under international law.

The world is now on the brink of an environment where international disputes are settled by brute force. We have a geopolitical environment where superpowers do not hesitate to use force against weaker neighboring countries in order to seize territories. In both cases – Crimea and the West Philippine Sea – the invasions are justified by so-called historical claims.

In several historical cases, a policy of appeasement resulted to short term peace but eventually allowed aggressor nations to become more assertive and confident that the world would not react.

When Hitler was allowed to annex Austria and Sudetenland, this eventually led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland. This led to the Second World War where millions died.

After the Second World War, when the world allowed the Communists to overthrow governments in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, the world plunged into another type of war – the Cold War.

The Cold War, which lasted from 1947 to 1991, did not result in a Third World War. But dozens of armed conflicts occurred in countries all over the world because of this war. Among the bloodiest were the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola and Malaysia. The superpowers on both sides also encouraged and financed armed insurrections, guerrilla forces and coup d’etats all over the world in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Libya, Tibet, Congo, and even the Philippines.

The superpowers on both sides waged war indirectly against each other through the financing of subversive groups, political assassinations and economic sabotage. The world was divided into two armed camps, with each one forming alliances. On one side were the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (including Russia) and China. Their main international alliances were the COMINTERN – the Communist Internationale – and the Warsaw Pact which united Russia and its Eastern European satellites into a defense pact.

The United States, Canada and Western Europe united in a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counteract the Warsaw Pact. In order to counter the threat of China, A Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) was organized as a mutual defense alliance.

The term “Cold War” was actually coined by Walter Lippmann, then the world’s most popular columnist, in 1947 in a book with that title, Lippmann recalled the term from the late 1930s when “le guerre froide” had been used to characterize Hitler’s war of nerves against the French.

A cold war was therefore one in which two states weighed each other up, viewing each other warily, viewing each other warily like two boxers circling each other in the ring before the proper fight began. It was not used with any optimism, as if anticipating decades of antagonism that would never quite tip into the war.

Today, the warring camps that are emerging are the same as those during the Cold War. In Europe, we have the NATO on one side and Russia and its allies on the other. Russia invaded Georgia and NATO did not respond. Now it has invaded Ukraine. Will the West respond? Probably not.

In Asia, the territorial confrontations are between China on one side, and on the other are Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines. It is not yet clear as to what extent the US will commit to defend the countries opposing China’s territorial aggression.

Political observers are warning that this could be the beginning of another cold war. My own personal observation is slightly different. We are witnessing not the beginning of another cold war, but the extension of the previous one. There was a temporarily truce or “spring of peace” but the protagonists are now preparing for the next round of struggles.

Perhaps we need simply to look at the leaders again. The Western leaders have simply inherited the perspectives of their previous leaders. But what about the other side?

Russia’s President Putin was a leader of the KGB, Russia’s secret police. He has openly said that he believes the collapse of the USSR was the worst political disaster of the 20th century. Worse than the two World Wars. China’s Politburo, its ruling entity, is controlled by the “princelings” – direct descendants of the original leaders of the Communist revolution in China.

I believe that the world s now witnessing the start of a Cold War. The only question is whether this is a new cold war or simply the extension of the 1947 – 1991 Cold War. The first historical cold war between Germany and France led to a Second World War.

Will this resumption of Cold War hostilities again be marked by surrogate battles all over the world like subversive movements, guerrilla wars, economic sabotage, political assassinations, and territorial incursions? Or will it lead to a Third World War?

Obviously, all the manifestations and probable results have no room in an ever-progressing world striving to uplift the quality of human life. A world striving to help the less fortunate win their daily, personal wars against poverty really has no use for large-scale wars involving many countries that will result in the loss of countless lives.

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