Now that US Congress overwhelmingly passed the Russia sanctions bill, which Donald Trump is constrained to sign into law, and Russia retaliated by expelling US diplomats and seizing US diplomatic properties, Vladimir Putin’s gamble appears to have failed. The man he helped place in the White House wants to have a special relationship with Russia, but can’t do so for political reasons, having shown his hand early. The golden rule of Trump – whoever makes a deal with him inevitably comes to regret it – has been yet again confirmed.
But the Kremlin may still come out a winner. Sure, the sanctions won’t be lifted and new, permanent ones have been imposed, but Russia will now fall back on another strategy: create even more havoc in Trump’s already dysfunctional Washington. I’m expecting an imminent release of the Trump “pee tape,” on which the future Leader of the Free World is cavorting with Russian prostitutes. It doesn’t matter whether it will be authentic or manufactured. The new Cold War between the two nuclear superpowers will then be in full swing.
But it will be a very different Cold War – and this time the United States stands little chance of winning it.
After World War II, America built its domestic and foreign policy around the existential imperative of countering the spread of communism and containing an expansionist Soviet Union. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the old Soviet Empire rejected communism and President George H.W. Bush declared the advent of a New World Order.
Over the past quarter of a century the United States has tried to find a new national idea. The system that was originally built to fight – and win – the Cold War disintegrated and with it went America’s social and political cohesion. Now that a resurgent Russia is bringing a new Cold War to America’s shores, this country finds itself unable to respond.
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, communism was already pretty much dead. To be sure, official propaganda outlets still rehashed communist principles and trumpeted Soviet achievements, but very few people still believed in it in private.
Not so in the United States, where the communist ideology was still being taken seriously. That was, in part, because communism had been fairly influential in America until the 1950s, and because it was proving attractive to many postcolonial countries as well as to some Southern European nations.
Americans don’t realize to what extent their post-World War II society was shaped by the response to the Marxist critique of capitalism. Indeed, in the early post-World War II decades America was determined to give the lie to Marx’s assertion that under capitalism workers became progressively impoverished, with “the capitalist constantly trying to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the workday to its physical maximum.” In fact, this seemed a major error, because American workers had joined the great American middle class, buying homes, driving private cars and working a 40-hour week, with mandatory higher pay for any overtime.
The government played a key role in making America an largely egalitarian, middle class country. It provided a pension scheme and tuition assistance to middle-class families, and a safety net for the poor. It regulated businesses, protected workers and supported unionization. The Eisenhower Administration built a network of interstate highways, on which people travelled free of charge and which helped create suburbs and contributed to the spread of car ownership. To fund all those government subsidies everyone paid taxes, and the tax system was highly progressive, imposing marginal tax rates as high as 91% on the highest earners.
At the 1959 American exhibition in Moscow, when Soviet visitors were shown “the kitchen in a typical American house,” they were convinced it was all a lie – because Marxism had taught them that American workers were poor and exploited. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was sufficiently incensed by what he saw as American trickery that he clashed with Vice President Richard Nixon against the backdrop of that kitchen.
The Marxist assertion that capitalism despoiled the environment in search of profits was countered by a growing body of environmental regulations. The response to Marx’s characterization of religion as opium for the masses was strict enforcement of the constitutional separation of church and state. Claims by the communists that capitalism is inherently racist were answered by civil rights legislation, desegregation and affirmative action. And Lenin’s prediction that capitalism would result in constant warfare was debunked as well: Western Europe was at peace and conventional NATO forces were far inferior to the combined might of the Warsaw Pact. They were designed to contain the Soviet threat, not fight wars around the globe.
But the system built to fight communist Russia sputtered once Russia had stopped being communist. The propaganda value of America as a land of opportunity dropped sharply. The orderly, egalitarian, enlightened America was no longer needed, and in this new America many of the dire Marxist-Leninist predictions have suddenly started to come true.
The middle class disintegrated as masses of blue-collar workers were pushed down the income ladder and became lumpenized. Industrial corporations were allowed to bust their trade unions and send jobs abroad. The labor market offered low-paying, no-prestige service jobs without security, benefits or career paths. Many people now have to work several part-time jobs, adding up to much more than 40 hours per week.
While wages are stagnant or declining, corporate profits are at record levels in terms of percentage of GDP, and American corporations are squirreling away trillions of dollars in cash.
Meanwhile, a new class of the super-rich has developed, and it uses its money to sic disaffected lumpenized workers on the liberal intelligentsia with the help of rightwing media outlets. It has bought up the government, making sure it keeps cutting taxes on the rich and shredding the safety net for the poor.
It may not be exactly the way Marx predicted, but he would have no problem recognizing his dystopian vision of capitalism’s future.
Religion, a private matter in the 1960s and 1970s, has wormed its way into the political mainstream. The anti-abortion movement and the talk about the war on Christmas go hand in hand with the denial of scientific facts, cuts in science research and, most recently, backlash against public education.
Racism is flourishing after eight years of an African American president. Black lives no longer matter, while the KKK and the neo-nazis, once a minor fringe of American politics, are getting encouragement from the White House.
America’s military has been transmogrified into a nation all its own, which wages undeclared wars all over the world without any stated goals and with no end in sight. The Pentagon maintains troops in over one hundred countries and has a budget that nearly matches what the rest of the world spends on defense. The endless war is a vision not even so much out of Marx as out of George Orwell.
Finally, to stand up to the Soviet Union, Washington created the dollar-based international economic system and worked to strengthen its allies. This system provide security for Americans while also making them richer. But the post-Cold War America has suddenly grown scared of competing in an open system of its own creation, unwilling to lead and deliberately shredding its historic alliances.
Russia also found itself at loose ends when it lost the Cold War. It flirted with democracy but found it unsatisfactory. Under Vladimir Putin it has returned to an old-style expansionism and nationalism.
It would be highly ironic if this new Russia – having rearmed itself like Germany in the 1930s – not with tanks or fighter planes this time, but with cyber weaponry suited for modern asymmetrical warfare – won Round Two of the Cold War by taking advantage of the fissures in American society that developed because America won Round One.
