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Since The New Cold War was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and updated third edition, Lucas includes a new preface on the Crimean crisis, including analysis of the dismemberment of Ukraine, and a look at the devastating effects it may have from bloodshed to economic losses. Lucas reveals the asymmetrical relationship between Russia and the West, a result of the fact that Russia is prepared to use armed force whenever necessary, while the West is not. Hard-hitting and powerful, The New Cold War is a sobering look at Russia's current aggression and what it means for the world.
Since The New Cold War was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and updated third edition, Lucas includes a new preface on the Crimean crisis, including analysis of the dismemberment of Ukraine, and a look at the devastating effects it may have from bloodshed to economic losses. Lucas reveals the asymmetrical relationship between Russia and the West, a result of the fact that Russia is prepared to use armed force whenever necessary, while the West is not. Hard-hitting and powerful, The New Cold War is a sobering look at Russia's current aggression and what it means for the world.
Since The New Cold War was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and updated third edition, Lucas includes a new preface on the Crimean crisis, including analysis of the dismemberment of Ukraine, and a look at the devastating effects it may have from bloodshed to economic losses. Lucas reveals the asymmetrical relationship between Russia and the West, a result of the fact that Russia is prepared to use armed force whenever necessary, while the West is not. Hard-hitting and powerful, The New Cold War is a sobering look at Russia's current aggression and what it means for the world.
Why the West Must Believe in Itself First a medieval fortress and then the citadel of Soviet totalitarianism, the Kremlin's rose-red walls have rarely made lovers of liberty and justice feel at home. It is as if Britain's government were based in the Tower of London, or France's in the Bastille. Certainly the ideas now bubbling under its onion domes would have been all too familiar to its past occupants: put bleakly, Russia is reverting to behaviour last seen during the Soviet era. So the first step towards winning the New Cold War is to accept what is happening. History is not delivering the inexorable victory that it seemed to promise in the 1980s. The collapse of communism has spread freedom and justice only to a minority of the ex-captive nations. In the rest, authoritarian bureaucratic capitalism, bolstered by natural resources, effective secret police and stifled media, has taken root. The dominant value is not freedom but economic stability, protected not by the rule of law, but by strong government. Consensus replaces the electoral mandate. The powers that be are accountable to history, not to the citizenry. Opposition is disloyalty at best, and outright treason if it is supported from abroad. The individual is a means to an end, not a bearer of inalienable rights; justice is a tool, not an ideal. The mass media are an instrument of state, not a constraint on its power. Civil society is an instrument for social consolidation, not diversity. Property rights and contracts are con- ditional; foreign policy is solely about the promotion of national interest. Intervention to protect human rights is hypocrisy. The raison d'etat rules. `Sovereign democracy' is just the latest label for this; anyone who has studied Russian history will see that many of these ideas go back centuries. Revisionist, nationalistic and jingoistic, Russia has hauled its old ideas out of the dustbin of history, burnished them and for now made them work. Having accepted the magnitude of the problem, the next step is to give up the naive idea that the West can influence Russia's domestic politics. That was possible in the Yeltsin era, when the people running Russia or at least some of them truly wanted to join the West and were willing to take advice on how to achieve this goal. That era may have been illusory. It may have been wasted. It may not return for decades. At any rate, it is now futile to seek friends among the feuding clans of the Kremlin. Their hatred for each other may lead to change, but not necessarily change in the West's interests. Instead, we are back in an era of great-power politics. If we want to defend our interests, we will have to think clearly and pay dearly. The difficulties facing us are not mere bumps in the road. We are facing people who want to harm us, frustrate us and weaken us. Their main weapon is our greatest weakness: money. Just as we worried about the firepower of the Soviet war machine, now we should fear the tens of billions of dollars in its coffers, and the weakness of mind and morals on which they are applied. The 1990s are over: it is high time now to treat Russia as the authoritarian regime that it is: like China or Kazakhstan, rather than a member of the European family experiencing an unfortu- nate but temporary aberration. A developed Western consensus on how to deal with Russia took shape only slowly in the last Cold War, and a new one will not be arrived at overnight now. But the elements are clear. First, 270 HOW TO WIN THE NEW COLD WAR: Europe and America must realise that the Kremlin's aim is to split them. America must not accept divisive deals from Russia on security (trading help in Iran for the abandonment of Georgia, for example). Similarly, the EU must drop its lingering disdain for America. Certainly the Bush administration's foreign policy has been open to criticism. But the common transatlantic interests are far deeper and more important than the temporary disagreements over Iraq, the Middle East or climate change. Europeans may sometimes privately agree with Russian complaints about Amer- ican arrogance or incompetence, but they should be careful about echoing them publicly. Faced with the Kremlin, Europe needs America more than America needs Europe. United, they are easily capable of standing up to a resurgent Russia. Divided, each is vulnerable, Europe most of all. The Atlantic alliance may never regain the unity and importance of the last Cold War, but it is still the basis for victory in this one. Secondly, it would be neither possible nor desirable to block trade with Russia or investment there outright. The lesson of sanctions is that they create wonderful opportunities for corrup- tion, stoke the paranoia and isolation of the targeted regime and do little or nothing to dislodge it. But Russia cannot expect to take advantage of the liberal and open economic system of Europe and America if it does not play by the same rules at home. The EU is already rightly alarmed by the investments made and planned by state-run `wealth funds' from Russia and China. That alarm needs urgently to turn into firmly enforced rules. Countries that do not respect outsiders' property rights cannot expect to buy whatever assets they like in countries that do: those who defraud shareholders in Yukos should not then be able to use that loot to buy up more companies abroad. It is time to stop the Kremlin having the best of both worlds. Most of the time it claims its companies are normal economic actors maximising profits like everyone else until WHY THE WEST MUST BELIEVE IN ITSELF 271 suddenly it claims national interest and, for example, cuts off oil deliveries to Lithuania and Latvia, or electricity to Georgia, because of pressing political reasons. That is entirely rational in current conditions from a Russian point of view, but intolerable from a European one. In future, the Kremlin cannot have it both ways. If it depoliticised and demonopolised its own energy industry chiefly by allowing third-party access to its gas pipeline monopoly it could defuse the controversy over energy security. Until that happens, the outside world must regard every investment Russia makes abroad as a politically loaded expression of foreign policy, and not a neutral business transaction. In other words, energy security is national security, and cheap energy from ill-wishers is a bad bargain. The EU must focus sharply on gas, which is now the continent's greatest vulnerability. Securing supplies and breaking Russia's grow- ing monopolymay be painful andcostly. The Kremlinhas already said that if America or the EU start blocking its investments on national- security grounds, it will retaliate against Westerncompanies inRussia. That may be bluff: Russia needs Western technology and would be foolish to scare such companies away. If it is not bluff: too bad. The price is worth paying. It is better to shave pennies off these companies' dividends than to let the Kremlin into the heart of our economic and political system. Putting security of supply above cost means both bargainingcollectivelywithRussia, andmakingEurope's ownenergy infrastructure more robust and therefore less vulnerable to outside pressure. That means, for example, enforcing competitionlaws sothat South Stream is not built, while providing taxpayers' money and political backing tomake sure that other pipelines are. Similarly, LNG terminals are expensive and no cure-all, but still worth the money because of the diversification that they allow. Europe needs better strategic gas storage and to link its national `energy islands' with interconnecting pipelines and electricity lines. The result will be a gas 272 HOW TO WIN THE NEW COLD WAR: