President Biden and his national security team have argued since he took office that all easy, flattering comparisons between this era and the Cold War are misleading, a gross oversimplification of a complex geopolitical moment.
The differences, in fact, are stark: The United States has never had the kind of technological and financial cooperation with its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, that complicates an increasingly bitter and dangerous downward spiral in relations with China .
And Mr. Biden’s advisers often argue that Russia is not the Soviet Union. Yes, it has nuclear weapons, they say, but its conventional military capacity has now been destroyed in Ukraine.
And during the Soviet era, the United States felt compelled to fight a global ideological battle. In the new era, it is resisting China’s efforts to use its economic and technological power to expand its influence.
However, the echoes of the Cold War are growing louder. Mr. Biden himself added to the noise this week. In Vilnius, Lithuania, on Wednesday night, addressing a crowd waving American, Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags, he repeatedly encouraged the struggle of the Baltic countries to free themselves from a collapsed Soviet Union, saying to Vladimir V. Putin that the United States and its allies will defend Ukraine, and with it other vulnerable parts of Europe, “as long as necessary.”
Mr. Biden has never said clearly that the United States must once again “bear the burden of a long, twilight struggle” — President Kennedy’s famous description of the Cold War in his 1961 inaugural address, when it entered its most dangerous phase. But Mr. Biden’s message is essentially the same.
“Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken,” he said. “We will stand for freedom and liberty today, tomorrow, and as long as necessary.”
While Mr. Biden’s rhetoric sometimes links this moment to the past — as he compares Lithuania’s struggle for independence to Ukraine — those who work with him say his analysis of current dynamics is the underlying forces is quite different.
“Fundamentally there is still the challenge of aggression,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said in an interview Thursday in Helsinki, Mr. Biden’s last stop. “A need to stand up in defense of sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom and democracy. But those elements can be there without going back to ‘Back to the Future’ in the Cold War.”
What was not said at the summit, even publicly, was another big difference between now and three decades ago: the uncertain level of bipartisan support for continuing to push back against Russian aggression.
From the Truman administration through the George HW Bush years in office, both major American political parties were committed to avoiding America’s geopolitical adversaries, even as they argued over tactics and whether to engage in local conflict. That is not clear now. On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius, foreign ministers and aides from allies near and far are questioning whether Congress will begin slowing aid to Ukraine when current allocations run out at the end of the summer.
And they asked what the chances are that opposition to American involvement in the war from the two leading Republican presidential candidates – former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida – can take on a wider part of the population.
“The Americans are worried that Europe will flag,” a senior European official, who requested anonymity, said during the Vilnius summit. “We are worried about the American flag. And everyone is worried that the Ukrainians will run out of ammunition and air defenses.
Mr. Biden was asked about those concerns at a news conference with President Sauli Niinisto of Finland on Thursday and replied that “there is tremendous support from the American people” to support Ukraine and NATO. But then he stated the obvious: “Nobody can guarantee the future, but it’s the best bet anyone can make.”
If there is an overarching theme to Mr. Biden’s trip this week, it is that the West must prepare for a long, expensive confrontation that will require levels of cooperation and integration of intelligence and military forces unlike any other. of any attempt before.
“At this critical moment in history, this inflection point, the world is watching to see, will we do the hard work that matters to build a better future?” he said at the news conference. “Will we be together, will we stand by each other? Shall we stay the course?”
Buried in the NATO communiqué are the building blocks for the next twilight struggle. There are plans for bigger defense budgets, although nearly a decade after NATO set a minimum military spending standard of 2 percent of each member’s GDP, most wealthy Western European countries have yet to meet the goal. (Smaller former Soviet republics have done better.) There are plans for a truly integrated NATO military strategy, including specific ways to integrate cyber defenses, and to strengthen the production of conventional artillery rounds, which almost no one ever thought of. needed again in Europe.
But the reality is that those changes are just the beginning — and hardly enough if the West is entering years, or decades, of hostilities with Russia, officials say. Jens Stoltenberg, who agreed last week to extend his tenure as NATO secretary general, acknowledged the fact in an article for Foreign Affairs.
“Even if the war were to end tomorrow,” he wrote of the conflict in Ukraine, “there is no sign that Putin’s broader ambitions have changed. He sees freedom and democracy as a threat and he wants a world where the big states dictate what their neighbors do.This puts him in constant confrontation with NATO values and international law.
Like Mr. Biden, he made the case that allowing Mr. Putin to gain any territory from his military venture would “send a message to other authoritarian regimes that they can achieve their goals through of force. China, in particular, is watching to see the price Russia pays, or the reward it receives, for its aggression.
Mr. Stoltenberg’s observation is unmistakable. But as some American and European officials acknowledged during the Vilnius summit, such commitments make it difficult to begin any real ceasefire or armistice negotiations. And the promises of Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO – after the war – created a strong incentive for Moscow to hang on to whatever Ukrainian territory it could and to keep the conflict alive.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters in Vilnius, “We want to regain our lands, restore security to our territory. That is success.” He added: “A frozen battle is not a victory.”
Mr. Biden used his visit to Helsinki to celebrate a clear departure from the Cold War: the move by Finland and Sweden, weeks after the invasion, to apply to join the alliance after decades of formal neutrality — even though in recent years they have trained and cooperated with NATO.
American officials view Finland as a model new member: Although the country is small, with a population of 5.5 million, it has grown some of the most skilled air and naval intelligence capabilities in all of northern Europe. And its 800-mile land border with Russia complicates the choices Mr. Putin must make about how to deploy his stretched military resources.
Once Sweden joins, which could be months away now that Turkey has lifted its long-standing objection, the Baltic Sea will truly become Lake NATO. Its entire coastline will be occupied by NATO countries except for small Russian lanes around St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad.
Lurking in the background of the summit meeting is another factor that differentiates this era from the Cold War: the role of China.
The communiqué issued in Vilnius included a broad discussion of the risks of supply chain dependency on suppliers such as China, an issue that NATO has not given much thought to in the past.
In the Cold War, there was one major enemy; now there are two, and the contours of their “unlimited” relationship are still a mystery. American officials believe Beijing is providing Russia with technology, but not the weapons it seeks. As China’s president, Xi Jinping, talks about his close relationship with Mr. Putin, American intelligence officials believe the Chinese leader is worried about what he sees as Russia struggles with battlefield.
And Mr. may doubt. Xi to foment another conflict with the United States when he has much in hand that more directly affects China’s future. Among those are the effects of the cutoff of high-end computer chips — which Chinese officials regularly complain about — and the possibility of new restrictions from Washington on Western investments in critical technologies, including the artificial intelligence.
There was no debate about such issues in the days of the Cold War, of course, because the United States and the Soviets hardly traded with each other, nor did they produce any of the products that depended on the other.
“The Cold War is not just a particularly useful analogy in key respects,” Mr. Sullivan said, looking at “the degree of economic interconnectedness, the nature of technological competition, the need to cooperate on global challenges that have spilled over borders” to China.
“These are fundamentally different drivers of relations and geopolitics today than anything in the Cold War.”
