Cold War II is a conflict between US-led European and Asian alliances and a de facto Sino-Russian bloc, and at the same time it is also a bloodless civil war over identity, economics, and foreign policy in the bosom of the Euro-American West.
For three decades after the Cold War, the US sought to create a unipolar world order in which its overwhelming military might served to underpin a rule-based world market based on free trade and the exchange of technology. The dream of the global market was weakened by the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and lasted for a whole decade, and died completely with the interruptions suffered by the supply during and after the covid pandemic, which convinced the majority of governments that multinational corporations had gone too far in dispersing essential supply chains. America's dream of global hegemony collapsed: first with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover of that country; and then with the war in Ukraine, which has shown that, outside of Europe, hardly any country (not even major democracies such as India and Brazil) was willing to join the US and the European Union in their sanctions against Russia to uphold Western liberal norms. At the same time, under Xi Jinping, China has pledged to become a world military power equivalent to the US, for which it is willing to even pay the price of economic disengagement from the US market.
What will emerge from the decomposition of the post-Cold War era cannot yet be known. However, several trends are already apparent. In the geopolitical sphere, unipolarity is giving way to Sino-American bipolarity, given the impossibility of a European unification that would give rise to a third superpower. Bipolarity does not mean that all countries will be on the Chinese side or the US side. On the contrary, the global struggle between China and the US allows the resurgence of something similar to the non-aligned bloc of the first cold war, with regional powers such as Turkey, India and Brazil keeping their distance from Beijing and also from Moscow and they play games against each other (in the first cold war, the third world was originally a reference to non-aligned status, not poverty or lack of development).
In the realm of geoeconomics, similar fissures fracture the world economy. The US Secretary of State, Janet Yellen, has called for offshoring to be replaced by friendshoring, that is, the limitation by US multinationals of outsourcing critical supply chains to countries friends. This will logically lead to the balkanization of world trade and the replacement of a single global market by more or less self-sufficient trading blocs whose members will often be military allies, or at least not military adversaries. On the geoeconomic front, the second cold war will allow regional powers to build smaller military-economic blocs to increase their independence from both the US and China.
The collapse of the post-Cold War unipolar and neoliberal world order, and its replacement by Sino-American bipolarity and the fragmentation of the world economy between rival military alliances, has its parallel in the domestic politics of both sides of the Atlantic in the collapse of party patterns and post-Cold War political readjustments.
In the three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the previous Cold War model of Western national politics, with center-left parties supported by labor organizations and center-right parties representing business, gave way to the new politics of the neoliberal era. In the 2020s, both in the US and in Europe, the social base of the center-left is made up of professionals with university studies, executives and workers in public and non-profit organizations, allied with immigrants and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, the new right, increasingly nationalist and populist, relies on the native white working class (including former members of center-left and pro-union parties in declining industrial areas) and small business owners. . Beginning in the 1990s, the multinational business and financial sectors, which account for most of the wealth in a deindustrialized Europe and the US, began to shift from political neutrality to growing support for the new, affluent center-left. , at least on issues of culture and immigration, and also to consider the center-left as an ally against nationalist populism. At the same time, the center-left, whose highly educated and exclusive professional cadre is not threatened by globalization, has increasingly embraced libertarian positions in favor of large-scale immigration and free trade.
Such a political readjustment has been accompanied by a transformation of the political geography, both in North America and in Europe. For much of the 20th century, the well-to-do elites lived on the outskirts of cities, while the poor and working class were urbanites. As a result of gentrification, the wealthy and professionals have colonized urban cores, driving up housing prices and driving less well-off citizens and immigrants to the peripheries, where most of the world today lives and works. the working class of Western democracies. The urban cores of Western countries are also home to a low-paid service class of recent immigrants who, unlike the natives and more assimilated immigrants, are willing to live in big cities and work for the social elite, at least until they earn enough to move to the suburbs and beyond.
In most Western countries, union membership has experienced some decline as old industrial hubs have been hit by Asian imports or destroyed by offshoring policies of multinational corporations. That decline is most extreme in the US, where union membership among private sector workers has plummeted from a third of the workforce in the 1950s to no more than 6% today. The majority of unionized workers in the contemporary US are teachers and other civil servants in the public sector. However, college-educated professionals in the public sector, in terms of material interests and post-material values, share more with other college-educated professionals in the business, financial, and nonprofit sectors than they do with the multiracial American working class.
Another trend common to the US and Europe is fertility falling below the level necessary to prevent national populations from shrinking, in the absence of increasing levels of immigration. Although mass immigration can sustain the populations of Western democracies, it creates multiple crises in both the short and long term.
In the short term, the backlash against high levels of immigrants, who compete with natives for jobs, benefits, residential areas and status, has led to the rise of national populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Center-left metropolitan elites in central cities and their allies in the business and financial worlds condemn such populist movements as a revival of Nazism or fascism. Now, while they have xenophobic elements, populist movements are clearly today's reactions to neoliberal globalization and immigration policies that benefit urban elites and harm or threaten many working-class citizens. The decline of mass-membership political parties has deprived many frustrated citizens of a voice, with many finding imperfect representatives in demagogues whose ranks include famous billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump.
In the long term, mass immigration is not a sustainable solution to declining birth rates if immigrants and their descendants adopt the same fertility behavior as the majority of residents of the countries to which they move. If so, immigration will only prevent population decline until the new sources of foreign immigrants are exhausted.
All these trends occur to a greater or lesser extent both in the US and in Europe. The cultural convergence of the US and Europe (at least, the West) is a relatively new phenomenon and it is accelerating. On the one hand, the US has become Europeanized in the sense that it has declining levels of religious affiliation and declining fertility rates like Europe. On the other hand, elitist phenomena originating in American universities, such as woke leftism, have taken Europe by storm (in the UK to a greater extent than in continental Europe). In 2020, large numbers of Europeans took to the streets to protest the death at the hands of US police of George Floyd; while in 2022 large numbers of Americans have passionately identified with the fate of Ukraine, a country on the European periphery.
Over time, American cultural influence seems to have been growing in Europe. After World War II, the US had a huge influence on popular culture and working-class fashions in Western Europe, thanks to Hollywood movies, rock and roll, and jeans. However, until the end of the 20th century, intellectual influence flowed from Europe to North America; and French academic thought, above all, was highly influential in American universities from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Today, however, American culture seems to be hegemonic both among the elites and among the European masses. Business culture in Europe is a clone of the one taught in American business schools. Obsessions on the American left, such as race and gender issues, as well as climate change, have pushed out the old European leftist traditions.
The short-term result of the Ukraine war is likely to be an increase in Europe's economic and cultural dependence on the US. Before Putin's Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany was the country that benefited the most of European integration. Protected by a US-led NATO alliance that allowed low defensive spending, Germany used cheap Russian gas to make profitable goods for sale on world markets and enjoyed a historically unusual permanent trade surplus in the US. Manufacturing sector. Directly or through the EU, Germany exported capital to the southern periphery of Europe, from Greece to Italy, and used its influence to impose strict austerity policies on those countries.
Germany's strategy is unraveling as a result of the war in Ukraine and the West's economic war against Russia. The loss of low-cost Russian natural gas is devastating for German industry, which will suffer even more if the US pressures European allies to join its economic war against China. If the Ukraine war drags on, a new version, perhaps on a smaller scale, of the Marshall Plan with which the US would bail out its European allies might be needed. US oil and gas can partly replace Russian oil and gas in Europe; and, above all, under a Republican president who ends the hostility of a Green-influenced Biden administration to drilling on US soil.
All of this is relevant to US politics, because both its domestic and European politics have become internationalized to a degree that was unthinkable in the past. There is no doubt that during the first cold war all Western European countries, along with the US, rejected Marxism-Leninism and tried to minimize the power and influence of the Soviet bloc. Shared anti-communism aside, however, American Republicans, German Christian Democrats, British Tories, and French Gaullists were, on the right wing, quite different in their values and traditions; they differed from each other as much as the center-left European parties differed from the American Democratic Party.
Now, it happens that today the center-left and center-right on both sides of the Atlantic have more in common with similar parties and movements in other Western democracies than with the rival party in their own country. This gives rise to a curious dual character of Western politics, which is both local and transatlantic. American conservatives look to European figures such as Orbán of Hungary for models, while many center-left Europeans seem to identify as much with American Democrats as with parties in their own countries.
It is no exaggeration to speak of a civil war (bloody, so far, and fought through elections and civil methods) in the transatlantic West across national borders. Such transnational politics is, of course, nothing new. In the 19th century, European aristocrats often allied with each other against bourgeois liberals and proletarian socialists, who in turn saw themselves as members of transnational and transimperial movements. In classical Greece, wars between city states such as Athens and Sparta were often civil wars within the city states themselves, with the authoritarians forming a pro-Spartan party and the democrats forming a pro-Athenian faction.
The bloodless civil war in the West pits a pro-European center-left party in countries that also includes the US and Canada against an anti-European center-right party with transatlantic affiliations. With the term Europe I refer to the idea, rather than the reality, of the European Union.
Previous generations of progressive Americans paid little attention to the precedents of the European Union. The European common market was, after all, a simple economic agreement, and the Euro-American conflicts over the banana trade and the value of currencies only attracted the attention of those whose interests were affected. After World War II, the American center-left pinned hopes on the United Nations for a transcendence of international conflict, just as an earlier generation of American liberal internationalists had idealized the League of Nations after World War I.
By the end of the first cold war, in 1989, most Americans had lost faith in the United Nations. Following the attempt to turn the European common market into a federal state, with its own Parliament and courts, many center-left Americans began to see the European Union as a model of liberal, democratic, post-national government, as well as a precedent for a future world federalism. At the same time, some elements of the radical left lost their own model of a post-national federation, the Soviet Union.
This explains the apparent paradox that many on the left and also the liberal center in the US and Europe were fervently committed to European integration (a paradox, insofar as the main beneficiaries of European integration have been the capitalists). and corporate executives and bankers, not the working classes of Europe). And that explains the personal pain and outrage felt by many progressive and left-wing Americans when the UK left the European Union after the Brexit referendum. How dare the wicked British voters oppose the march of progress of humanity, symbolized by ever deeper integration of the European Union today and of the whole world tomorrow!
For its part, the American right has always been suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of transnational institutions. The conservative opposition kept the US out of the League of Nations, despite the fact that the League was promoted by the Wilson government. After World War II, American isolationists and unilateralists failed to keep their country out of the second attempt at a US-designed global institution, the United Nations. Yet from the 1940s to the present, extremist elements on the American right have continued to denounce the transfer of American national sovereignty to a conspiratorial United Nations and its global army of peacekeepers. Just as many on the American left no longer pin their hopes for global federalism on the United Nations or the Soviet Union, so too many on the American right see the European Union as a model of bureaucratic, nation-destroying tyranny that must be rejected in favor of popular sovereignty and the independence of nation states from any kind of transnational authority.
During the early years of the first cold war, in the 1940s and 1950s, American liberal internationalists (residents, then as now, in the big cities on the Atlantic coast) focused on defending Europe from conquest or subversion. soviet Instead, many American conservatives wanted to prevent the US from being drawn into a third world war in Europe and were hostile to free trade and permanent alliances like NATO. Those “Asia first” conservatives wanted the US to return to its pre-World War II strategy of avoiding “compromising alliances” in Europe and elsewhere, while focusing on protecting Asia and the Pacific from a China whose power had been conquered in 1949 by the communists led by Mao.
During the era of neoliberal globalism, from the 1990s to the 2010s, mainstream American Democrats and Republicans shared a broad consensus. America's bipartisan elite believed that the US was so wealthy compared to the other great powers that it could easily afford to dominate all regions of the world indefinitely, without needing to prioritize Europe, Asia or the Middle East. Today, however, China's growing military and industrial power and the relative decline of the US economy in global trade and production share are forcing Americans to set regional priorities. The result is a pattern more like the 1950s than decades after, with a Europhile center-left and an “Asia-first” and “America-first” center-right. first".
The Cold War I ideological war over ownership of the means of production has been replaced by Cold War II culture wars over racial and gender identity. During the previous cold war, many liberals and leftists, including those who rejected the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, saw Soviet communism as a noble, if failed, experiment in promoting human equality. In the current cold war, many populists and conservatives, including most who reject authoritarian rule, see the social conservatism of Putin's neo-orthodox Russia and the religious traditionalism of Orbán in Hungary as preferable to woke ideology and gender radicalism. from USA and Europe.
Each side in this new transatlantic civil war accuses its rivals of being willing or unwitting pawns of a hostile great power outside the Western democratic bloc. In the US, Democratic leaders and media figures spent, in McCarthyism-like style, the four years of Donald Trump's presidency trying to prove that he was a Russian influencer and even that he had defeated Hillary Clinton thanks to Russian rigging of the 2016 election. Those claims were as absurd as, in the 1950s, the far-right John Birch Society's claim that President Dwight Eisenhower was a crypto-communist and a soviet agent. For their part, many on the American right try to portray Democrats as willing or unwilling fifth columnists working to advance China's interests; including President Joe Biden, slandered by the demagogic Trump with the nickname China Joe.
Thus, the cracks in the post-neoliberal world order run through the US and many European democracies. Despite the Trump riots on January 6, 2021 in Washington DC, claims that this transatlantic political civil war will escalate into actual political violence in the US or other democracies are dubious. However, there is no doubt that the consensus on foreign and economic policy within the American political majority has broken down. The result is a national political order characterized by deep partisan disagreement, not just over culture war issues like abortion that have long divided American parties, but also over new and growing divisions. on trade, immigration and foreign policy. Given Europe's growing dependence on the US in the military, economic and cultural spheres, the debates in that country will continue to have echoes and consequences on the European shore of the Atlantic.
Michael Lind is the author of 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite' (2020), as well as a researcher at New America and a columnist for 'Tablet'. The author of numerous books of political commentary, economic analysis, and history, he has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Texas universities, and has been editor or staff member of 'The New Yorker,' 'Harper's Magazine,' 'The New Republic' and 'The National Interest'.
