PERSPECTIVES Perspectives on Global Development ON GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND and Technology 16 (2017) 736-755 TECHNOLOGY brill.com/pgdt Reheating the Cold War: US, Russia, and the Revival of Rollback Gerald Sussman Portland State University [email protected] Abstract A neoconservative coalition of oppositional forces, comprised of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and their allies in the Republican Party, the liberal mainstream media, and the deep state have promoted a new Cold War against Russia. This is in- tended as a mobilizing strategy to overturn the Trump presidency, weaken the Russian state, and reconstruct state legitimacy following years of decline in the quality of life and democracy in America. The coalition reconstructed the Cold War as an ideological tool in the interest of continuing to pursue domestic and global neoliberal policies and dealing with a fractious public disenchanted with government, its elected officials, the mainstream media, and a failing democracy. Keywords Boris Yeltsin – CIA – Cold War – Crimea – Donald Trump – Hillary Clinton – NATO – neoconservatism – neoliberalism – NSA – Russia – Ukraine – Vladimir Putin 1 Introduction Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. Kennan 1997:118 The international conflicts inherited by the Trump administration and the Obama and Bush administrations before 2017 were embedded in a Cold War © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15691497-12341459Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:59:03AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 737 that never actually ended. The Soviet Union collapsed, but the rollback initia- tives, beyond containment, continue to be pursued to the present day. Not a lot has changed in terms of the ambitions of the surviving superpower that views itself, quite openly, as having the unique moral authority to rule the world sys- tem based on its hegemony over the international division of production and labor and its overwhelming global military power and presence. Between the end of the Second World War and the present, a decade-long interregnum, the 1990s, was a hiatus in Washington’s conflict with Moscow. During that de- cade, the US manipulated Russia through Boris Yeltsin, whom it actively sup- ported, particularly during his 1996 presidential campaign. Yeltsin debilitated the country’s economy through the ruthless prescriptions of “shock therapy,” bringing severe destabilization, untold suffering, massive alcoholism, and early death to millions of Russians.1 Upon capturing the Russian presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin began to turn things around economically and politically, while restoring the nation- al pride that had been badly damaged with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corrupt and stumbling, alcohol-spiked authoritarian rule of Yeltsin.2 Putin stood up to the US and NATO, the difference, however, between today and the early postwar period being that Russia no longer had a Warsaw Pact. Vice President Biden incited the Russian leadership by publicly declaring that the US opposed any effort on Russia’s part to recreate a sphere of influence even though there was no hard evidence offered of such a Russian agenda. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, pointing to the return of Crimea to Russia,3 described the Russian government in Cold War rhetoric. She even 1 The Yeltsin regime opened the door to the West, relying on Russia’s exports of oil and natural gas. “Shock therapy,” introduced to the country by Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Harvard Institute for International Development, proved disastrous, bringing about social conditions that were considerably worse and longer-lasting than the Great Depression. Similar results followed the introduction of a radical program of market-based policies in other former Soviet repub- lics, including Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. The US ran Yeltsin’s presidential campaign in 1996, securing a victory, but one that a Yeltsin associate, Russia’s current prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, says was rigged to block the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, who received the most votes, from winning. See Shuster 2012; Sussman 2010. 2 From 1992 until 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was re-elected as president, the United States made Russia its third largest recipient (at more than $2.1 billion) of bilateral foreign aid. The World Bank and IMF bailed out his government with a $22 billion rescue package, turning a blind eye to Yeltsin’s use of military force to dissolve the Russian parliament in 1993 and his other repressive measures. See Hook 2002; Ralph 2000; Rutland 2000. 3 Crimea historically was part of Russia, from 1783 to the year that the Russian government handed it over to Soviet Ukraine in 1954, where it remained after Ukraine’s independence in 1991. In 2014, it was re-absorbed by Russia, immediately following the coup that overthrew Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded 16 from(2017) Brill.com09/26/2021 736-755 11:59:03AM via free access 738 Sussman compared Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, the deepest possible insult consid- ering that the Russians and Soviets lost 27 million people (including Putin’s older brother and grandmother) in their successful efforts to defeat the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union and most of Europe (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2009; Rucker 2014). The callousness of such remarks harks back to the McCarthy era, when the American public was subject to a fear campaign that Communists were plot- ting within the major institutions of society—the unions, the universities and high schools, Hollywood, the State Department and other branches of govern- ment, even the military—to take over the country. The Soviet Union was seen as an imminent threat, and public schools were subject to regular air raid drills, requiring pupils to duck under their desks in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If children in the 1950s were told that Communists were hiding under their beds, in Cold War 2.0 it’s about Russians lurking inside every phone, computer, email, Twitter account, and website, linking Putin to everything, says Guardian contributor Trevor Timm (2016), “from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece, and Spain.” It’s hard to reconcile the pervasive Russo-bogeymania in America with the missing mainstream media (MSM) attention to the massive NSA Big Brother spying on US citizens. Were it not for people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, the work of WikiLeaks, and the investigative reporting of a few independent and intrepid journalists, the legal and moral transgressions of the state against the people’s right of security under the First and Fourth Amendments would be unknown to the public. This article seeks to provide a critical analysis of the present US-Russia rela- tionship in terms of the larger geopolitical economy in which both countries are major players, the ideological and strategic conflicts, and the new Cold War tensions and war of words that stem from that competition. In comparing the 1950s Cold War era with the present, one thing that has not changed is the pervasive use of propaganda, which has become ever more technologically, though not more substantively, sophisticated. Harking back to West’s carica- ture of the Tsarist era, America’s MSM have recycled the meme of the aggres- sive Russian “Bear” approaching the steps of civilization, an evil personified by Putin. This has remained an ideological fixture for US and British ruling circles, helping to build public consensus in defense of privileged interests. The construction of a rogue, heartless Russia was earlier popularized through Hollywood’s adversaries, as in Rocky IV, Rambo, James Bond, Red Dawn, and, for youth, TV’s Rocky & Bullwinkle, which shaped an us-versus-them popular the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and a referendum organized by the Crimean par- liament and the city council of Sevastopol for the purpose of joining the Russian Federation. Perspectives on Global Development and TechnologyDownloaded from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2017) 736-755 11:59:03AM via free access Reheating the Cold War 739 antagonism. Even during détentes and “resets,” the gut-level hostility has been close to the surface. Mainstream corporate media have a long tradition of sym- biosis with the imperialist state. Of interest here are the ways in which the Russian caricature is reproduced and the political utilities that it serves for the maintenance of state stability. The US government and the MSM not only have a compelling need to iso- late or destroy their adversaries; their propaganda relies heavily on Manichean vilifications to isolate them on moral grounds, the current scale of which has not been seen since the Second World War, and particularly the domestic and overseas efforts of the Office of War Information. This recent defamation of en- emies is not difficult to understand when one looks at the history of racial, na- tionalistic, and ethnic propaganda that has dominated official US worldviews since the beginning of the republic. NYU and Princeton emeritus professor and Russia scholar Stephen Cohen (2016c) warns that this current demonization of Russia and Putin “is propelling the new Cold War toward hot war, poisoning American politics, and degrading US media” (italics in original).4 The jingoism against Russia has become a mainstream media feeding frenzy, backed by key proctors in the military establishment. Obama’s chief military advisor and choice for chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, told the US Senate Armed Services committee in July 2015 that “Russia presents the great- est threat to our national security” (Crawford 2015). Defense secretary Ashton Carter declared in April 2016 that of the five greatest threats to America, Russia tops the list. Apart from political-cultural motivations, it is even more determinatively the globalizing and militarized American economic system that structurally and ideologically has a compulsive need for enemies.