By Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra
The world politics is currently undergoing a phase of a new Cold War characterized by simmering tensions, breach of international norms, proxy wars and arms race among major powers around the globe. Lack of trust and boiling tensions in relations are evident between the US on the one hand and major powers such as China and North Korea in the Indo-Pacific, Iran in the Middle-East and Russia in Eurasia on the other which keep feeding the contending powers’ desire for an armament race
Challenges to American Hegemony
The end of the Cold War not only put an end to the world-wide struggle for influence between the global powers, it witnessed a steady rise in the influence of regional powers as they began to carve out independent roles for themselves in the absence of the Cold War constraints – ideological preferences and alliance commitments. Several radical religious groups also emerged as powerful non-state actors in world politics. The US began to face stiff resistance from assertive regional powers once the overarching threat perceptions from either of the superpowers and their allies evaporated. The regional powers did not hesitate to put their weight behind radical religious groups with the objective of fostering their geopolitical interests and undercutting American interest in the regions under their influence.
More Localized Proxy Wars
Even though the major powers confronted primarily the challenges of civil wars and the cases of inter-state conflicts following the Cold War era reduced, this did not, however, represent a paradigm shift in world politics considering the fact that the contending powers chose a strategy of intervening in such conflicts through clients and sought to realize their war objectives in the era of a new Cold War. The powers such as US, Russia, China and Iran have been witnessed getting involved in proxy war strategies much like the Cold War era to sustain their power ambitions. The strategies included strengthening of ruling regimes, countering regimes by encouraging democratic protesters and/or seeking secret alliances with militant groups. The conflicts between erstwhile the contenders of the Cold War era –the US and the Soviet Union were spread across the globe and many of them were fought by allies through proxy wars which reduced the intensity of the conflict whereas any possible war-like situation between the US and China or the US and Russia or the US and Iran would be more localized and is likely to be confined to specific regions. Recent tit-for-tat offensives between the US and Iran in Iraq pointed to the localized nature of the conflagrations. Further, in sharp contrast to the Cold War era, a greater number of contending powers as well as lack of a clear ideological thrust in their competition makes the new Cold War more complex.
Absence of Soft-balancing efforts
Evidently, no group of states is available to engage in soft-balancing in a bid to cast impact through alternative norms, discourse and solidarity and constrain militaristic impulses of great powers as the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) used to do during the Cold War. Henry Kissinger, a former US politician and diplomat predicts in the context of US-China conflict: “If the conflict is permitted to run unconstrained, the outcome could be even worse than it was in Europe.” He ascribes two reasons to this eventuality. First, the US does not have a framework to deal with Beijing as a “military power” whereas a plan to reduce nuclear capacity of the US and the Soviet Union was given top priority. Second, more lethal and advanced weapon systems could add a dangerous dimension to the conflict.
Information Technology and Cyber warfare The advancement of information technologies has made the powers not only more capable to influence civil war situations within rival countries; it has facilitated inter-state warfare through the Cyber domain. The contending powers in the new Cold War notwithstanding their attempts at undercutting rival powers’ influence by military means are also cautious players so far as they avoid engaging in direct wars. The destructive nuclear and military capabilities that each of the powers possesses vis-à-vis the other would prevent the contemporary major powers to go for all-out wars much like the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario that prevented the erstwhile superpowers from direct confrontations. In this context, the major powers are poised to choose the cyber domain as the primary channel to realize their war objectives and other ways of confrontation such as proxy wars would recede to a secondary place. The reasons for this shift are understandable. First, information technology can offer contending powers the abilities to weaken the adversarial power far more effectively by targeting at critical infrastructure such as banking, energy and defence sectors than the proxy wars do. Second, the cyber domain can provide the contending powers the avenues to operate from unknown sources, to do the damage and yet avoid military reprisals. Third, the superior technological capabilities of the US would prompt it to sustain its hegemonic ambitions primarily through the cyber domain not only by shaping the global norms but to incapacitate the adversarial powers militarily as well.
The author is a Lecturer in Political Science, Swami Vivekananda Memorial Autonomous College, Jagatsinghpur, Odisha, India.