We’re now in “a second Cold War.” Here’s what that means.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is fueling fears over the possibility of another global war, even though that’s exactly what President Joe Biden has vowed to avoid.
Earlier this month, Biden said he wouldn’t deploy U.S. troops to Ukraine under any circumstances because that would amount to “a world war,” but that doesn’t appear to have quieted concerns amid chilling images of tanks rolling into Ukraine and residents fleeing with whatever they can carry on their backs.
Amid these unthinkable circumstances, Katie turned to Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, who weighed in on this increasingly dire situation — and whether it could pave the way for nuclear war.
On that front, he had a mix of good and bad news: “We are not on the precipice of World War III, but the United States and Russia are now engaged in very serious, regime-altering, hand-to-hand combat on the economic front, which makes what we are talking about much more plausible.”
His comments come as Biden announces another round of sanctions against Russia to counter its aggression towards its neighbor. Though Biden has avoided targeting Putin himself, the president’s latest round of retaliatory measures affects significant swaths of Russian assets, including additional financial restrictions on elites with ties to the Kremlin.
“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences,” Biden said during a White House address. “Today, I am authorizing additional strong sanctions and new limitations on what can be exported to Russia. This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time.”
So what does it all mean? Katie finds out in their full conversation, which we’ve excerpted below and you can watch in full right here:
Katie: Could you give us a brief history of Russia’s relationship with Ukraine?
Ian Bremmer: Ukraine was a part of the former Soviet Union, and Ukraine as a country really has two different components to it. The closer you get to Crimea and Southeast Ukraine, which is where the most recent political fighting has been, the more you get Russian-speaking Ukrainians, actual ethnic Russians, and Ukrainians who are Orthodox and have a religion that is very similar to that of the Russians. The farther you get to the north and to the west, you’re now talking about Catholic Ukrainians, very few Russian ethnics, and very few Russian speakers.
Crimea, which is the part of Ukraine that the Russians annexed in 2014, was an autonomous republic that was given to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev back in 1955 as a gift. There was a Russian base there in Sevastopol, and it was overwhelmingly ethnic Russians. They’re sad that the Soviet Union fell apart. It had a Russian parliament, with a tricolor Russian flag flying on top.
That was when Ukraine was independent, but most of Ukraine is not like that. Most of Ukraine is independent and a democracy. And after the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014 — which Russia denied; they never said they had troops there until just a couple of days ago — that led the Ukrainians to get much angrier with Russia, led them to want to tilt towards the West and want to engage more with the United States, with the Polish government, with NATO as a whole.
Ukraine wanted to become a member of NATO, but tell us what happened with that.
NATO has expanded quite substantially over the course of the past 30 years. The Russians claim they were promised that wouldn’t happen after the initial east European integration. Former general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev said that he never made a firm promise, but nonetheless, once the Baltic states were brought in, the Russians really got much angrier about it.
When President George W. Bush extended an invitation to begin the process of joining NATO to the Ukrainians and the Georgians back in 2008, that was the final straw for Putin. Remember, there used to be a NATO-Russia joint council. There was a desire on the part of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin to actually be a part of NATO.
Over time, it became clear that the Americans weren’t all that interested in truly integrating Russia. There was talk about making them a free-market economy, but the reality was that we were prepared to give them economic advice, but we weren’t going to give them a lot of money to help. So by the time Ukraine was given this offer by Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and of course former president Bush, the Russians basically said, No mas.
It seems that all these geopolitical observers thought Putin would only go into these kind of Russia-friendly areas, and then everyone was surprised when this was a much broader, wider, more ambitious invasion. Can you talk to us about that?
Well, the Americans weren’t caught by surprise — not the American government. The Biden administration has been releasing their intelligence consistently over the last month, in part to embarrass Putin. I mean, you’ve got 190,000 Russian troops arranged along three quarters of Ukraine’s border — they’re not there for a parade. And when the Americans got wind of Russia’s plans to engage in false flag attacks and to take Russian-oriented former Ukrainian leaders in exile and insert them to become a new Ukrainian government, the Americans made those plans public. All of this was aligned with the belief that Putin intended to engage in a full-fledged invasion.
It’s interesting because when I talked to senators over the last month who were in the Intelligence Committee and Armed Services Committee, who were getting briefed by Defense and by the CIA, they told me they were terrified by what they were hearing. Literally. The American government briefing them was convinced of a full invasion against a comparatively defenseless Ukraine.
What is happening with Chernobyl?
It looks like it’s been occupied by Russia. It wasn’t particularly defended. It’s situated right along one of the main roads that one would use to stage a war into Kyiv. So what it tells me is Kyiv is fairly heavily defended, Chernobyl was not, and the Russians intend to take Kyiv. They intend to overthrow the Ukrainian government, but they want to soften those defenses first, both through cyber capabilities and through airstrikes. And they’re going to use Chernobyl as one of their way stations while they prepare.
How frightening is that with the history of Chernobyl?
It’s just symbolically frightening. What is terrifying is the fact that for the last 30 years, nobody thought that the Cuban Missile Crisis was possible again, and we can’t say that anymore. What’s terrifying is that a nuclear-armed country with capabilities in terms of both their nukes and their cyber capacity, which is every bit as significant as those in the United States, has basically decided they’re going to declare war on the European order. That’s terrifying. The likelihood that we will get into a confrontation with Russia that has the potential to escalate into our worst nightmares is now real again. I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s real.
Let’s say that does happen, or even if there’s a misfired missile that lands on NATO territory and suddenly NATO is brought into this huge global conflict. Play this out for us, if you will.
The good news is that when Putin made that threat, it was on the back of the Americans and NATO already making very clear that there were no circumstances under which NATO troops would be placed into Ukraine to defend the Ukrainians. So this was a very cheap, alarmist threat by Putin — don’t you dare, or I’m going to use my nukes is basically what he said, and he’s acting like a child. So I would not give too much airtime to that, but I want to be clear: The economic sanctions, which the Americans and Europeans are now imposing on Russia as of today are the toughest sanctions that have ever been put on a major power in the post-Soviet era.
They are sanctions that will be commensurate with the sanctions we put on Iran. I say that because you’ll remember when we put those sanctions on Iran, we were saying we want to bring this country to its knees and force them to negotiate — and if they don’t, we want regime change. So even if we’re not saying now that we’re imposing these economic sanctions in Russia because we want to remove Putin from power, that that’s how Putin perceives it.
What could the sanctions do? Are they just going further escalate the situation?
When you put those kind of sanctions against a country that has essentially called your bluff and is attacking an independent nation, that’s escalatory. But not putting those sanctions in place would also risk telling the Russians, the Chinese, and others that there is no appetite to prevent you from going a lot farther militarily. Once the Russians decided they were going to attack anyway, it really wasn’t possible for the U.S. not to put those sanctions in place, but again, there is no likelihood that those sanctions are going to lead to a negotiated settlement between NATO and the Russians in the foreseeable future.
That’s why this is so dangerous. We are now in a second Cold War — which is, in some ways, less dangerous than the first Cold War because Russia’s economy is smaller than Texas. They don’t matter in South America or in East Asia or Southeast Asia or most of Africa in the way that the Soviet Union was a global power. But in some ways it’s more dangerous than the Cold War, when you had a number of agreements that created some guardrails on the relationship. You don’t right now. In the Cold War, you didn’t have disinformation and cyber attacks as a weapon. I’m not trying to in any way alarm the audience, but I do believe that we need to be aware of just how different the world is going to look going forward because of the unilateral decision by President Putin to basically commit crimes against humanity in Ukraine.
When we hear cyber warfare, what does that actually mean?
You may remember that the one significant face-to-face meeting that Putin and Biden have had, back in June, was mostly about cyber attacks. The meeting was right on the back of the attacks by the Russians on the Colonial Pipeline, which was a malware attack that shut the pipeline down, and the Americans were really angry. Biden basically told Putin, “Look, this is a red line. If you keep attacking critical American infrastructure — and we understand that it might not be you, we understand it might be these criminal gangs that are in Russia — but you know who they are. You can stop them. If you don’t stop them, that’s a red line. And the interesting thing is over the coming months, they did stop them, and that reduced the tensions in the relationship.
It is very clear to me that on the back of these sanctions we’re now imposing, those sorts of attacks are coming back. Disinformation is coming back in a big way, with the midterm elections and the 2024 elections coming up in the United States. And while the Republican leadership in the party right now is largely aligned with what the United States is doing, vis a vis Russia, you can already see just how brittle that is. You can already see former president Trump just going after Biden tooth and nail — and a number of the more Trump-oriented supporters, including in the House and Senate. This is something the Russians will do their damnedest to take advantage of over the coming months.
People are worried about nuclear weapons. Can you tell us briefly about that?
The United States and Russia both have about 5,000 nuclear warheads. That is far more than you need to destroy the planet. The Russian government is showing that they have far fewer constraints on their president than the United States has on our president. So if Putin felt that he was starting to lose power, if Putin felt that his core national security interests were being undermined, his willingness to push his chips all in and threaten massive escalation have proven by the last 24 hours to be much greater than that of anybody else with that kind of power on the planet.
That creates a much more dangerous environment for all of us. We are not on the precipice of World War III, but the United States and Russia are now engaged in very serious, regime-altering, hand-to-hand combat on the economic front, which makes what we are talking about much more plausible.
