The New Cold War

Behind the spectacle of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s insults against the West lurks something more sinister than meets the eye. Chávez seeks to lead the Non-Aligned Movement in a new cold war of race, class, and nationalism, to be fought everywhere on earth, chiefly against the United States. And before he’s done, he may hurt his people and ours more than he can imagine.

In the 1950s, from the ashes of Europe’s colonial empires, there arose a wave of new “nations,” soon to be called the “third world.” Usually defined by borders of Europe’s own creation, these states were represented by whatever gang managed to get itself credentialed at the United Nations, regardless of whether their governments were in any ethnic sense national or in any political sense representative.

Having read the article, I too am stunned by what Thunder90 has quoted from it, but I write that off to a "Free-trade will save Cuba" approach that I consider forgiveable -- as I am the world's biggest free trader -- but nonetheless wrong-headed. Castro has done far too much harm over the course of his life to be forgiven: the Cuban Missile Crisis (almost Global Thermonuclear War); his military mercenarism in Angola and Ethiopia precipitating the deaths of millions; his sustaining the violent guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Colombia; his backing of the Sandinistas . . . I could go on, but I'm guessing we all have our own lists of "Fidel's sins" against mankind.

There otherwise is something here in that the author does a good job of pointing out the disparity between "rhetoric and reality" within the (so-called) Non Aligned Movement. That is easily-enough said. But there is also something missing in the presentation too; the dangers of Multi-Polarism for collective security.

What is really missing here is a statement recognizing that the original intention of the United Nations was to provide an over-arching body of nations capable of enforcing collective security, something that was intended as an antidote to the "Spheres of Influence" foreign policies of Germany, Japan, and Italy which preceded and precipitated the second world war. Yes; the Cold War prevented this model of collective security from coming to fruition, but if you run the clock forward to the end of the Cold War you will see that there was a very brief period, running from about 1990-1994, when it looked as though collective security might work after all, the first Persian Gulf War being a good example and, in spite of the mistakes made, so was Somalia in its intention. But Bill Clinton decided to let the former Yugoslavia slide into chaos, telling the Europeans that it was "their problem" and all the progress of bringing the world together to act in unison was lost. It was only natural that we would see the "Multi-Polarist" viewpoint emerge after this, as France and Germany sought international support for taking the lead in a major crisis -- even though they never took the lead at all and Bosnia never calmed down until we got involved -- believing that they deserved enhanced recognition for their power.

One of the things that is most striking about the Non-Aligned Movement that is not mentioned in that article is why it is that the United States is its biggest enemy. I submit that the answer is that the U.S. is the one nation on this planet who believes that there ought to be a universal standard of international law that keeps the peace -- can the rhetoric about the Tokyo Protocol and the Rome Treaty here, we're talking about War and Peace -- and the nations of the Non Aligned Movement do not find friends in the U.S. as they seek "accommodation" abroad to the excesses of their rule at home. We just won't do it. France and Germany were more than willing to negotiate through Syria to get Iraqi oil at below-market value in flagrant violation of a series of U.N. resolutions; China and Russia have close diplomatic ties with some of the most brutal regimes on the planet and have shown nothing short of a determined will to prevent the U.N. from acting against regimes like Iran and North Korea because their regional interests are not recognized as exclusionary by the U.S.; and on and on . . .

The real new "Cold War" that is being waged is not over the Non Aligned Nations, it is over Multi-Polarism. The Non Aligned Nations are merely pawns distracting and rhetorically attacking the U.S. while the real drive for spheres of influence is carried out by our most powerful competitors on the U.N. Security Council. Our only chance of victory is to continue to insist on the one common standard for international behavior that is reflected in our waging of the War on Terror (we must see it as a war and not an era of expanded international police cooperation), our support for global free trade (rejection of this is the ultimate goal of spheres of influence), and our insistence that "Human Rights" is predicated upon the rights of the individual, not "collective" or "class" or insert group rights. That is the real new Cold War.

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