Prof. Richard Sakwa, the emeritus professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and a leading academic expert on Russia, gave an interview today to Anatol Lieven, the Eurasian Director at the Quincy Institute, about his February book on The Culture of the Second Cold War. Sakwa posed that this year is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Perestroika by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1945, but that the Cold War has never ended. First there was a “Cold Peace” which has now become a second Cold War, defined as a Great Power conflict; but, unlike the first Cold War, there is no diplomacy and an erosion of democracy in the West, driving the world toward a global nuclear war. The first was seen as an effort to destroy Communism, but this one is to destroy Russia, politically and culturally.
Trump, he says, is an “ice-breaker,” dismantling the structure of the war policy in the U.S. but not creating the necessary new structure. There is a “double defection”—as Russia rejected Communism and the empire of the Soviet Union, the U.S. under Trump is rejecting the unified Western empire under U.S. leadership which has existed since World War II, but beyond that is rejecting what Sakwa calls the post-World War II “Charter International System,” with the UN and the related international institutions. Gorbachev wanted to have Russia join the Charter International System, but the West’s “monism” (the unipolar world under U.S. leadership) rejected it in favor of bipolar division.
Asked why Europe has promoted more war rather than joining Trump’s effort to build cooperation with Russia, he said that following the long Cold War policy in Washington, Europe has become “more papist than the Pope,” in demonizing everything Russian, rejecting the once popular notion of a “common European home” from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The worst expression of this is the German concept of “Putin-versteher,” a pejorative of anyone who wants to understand Russia and Putin, which was considered necessary against the Soviets during the first Cold War. He is considering titling his next book The March of Folly Resumed, referring to Barbara Tuchman’s book on the failure of leadership driving nations to war From Troy to Vietnam.
He said that he was personally targeted by the censorship operations launched by the U.K. police-state’s “Integrity Initiative,” accused of being “too knowledgeable” on Russia. He is not optimistic that the EU will survive after it becomes clear that the Ukraine war has been lost.
Professor Sakwa was interviewed in 2023 by EIR's Mike Billington.
