Cold War 2.0; A More Difficult Cold War

inFOCUS: The issue is called “Our World,” but every time we turned around, we ended up seeing China.

Clifford D. May: I worry about China. China is the most important participant in what I would call the “Axis of Aggressors.”

China wants to displace the United States as the most important power on earth. It is the strongest Communist Party in history with the strongest military any Communist Party has ever had. And when I talk about the Axis of Aggressors, I’m thinking of China’s junior partners, Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Ali Khamenei in Tehran, and Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang. And also, Cuba and Venezuela.

This is an axis that means to diminish the United States and replace the “liberal, rules-based world order” that has been American-led since the end of World War II, with something else that would be a very illiberal world order with China making most of the rules. Probably allowing the Islamic Republic of Iran, at least for a few years, to be the hegemon in the Middle East.

And Beijing doesn’t care what happens to Israel, whether it survives or not, and allowing Vladimir Putin to become hegemonic in Eastern Europe and as far as he can. If he brings down NATO, for example, I think Xi Jinping would think, well, he’s earned his pay today.

iF: Is Putin okay with being the “junior hegemon?”

May: I think he understands that’s an unfortunate reality that he has to deal with because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has a rather small economy and a much smaller population. Putin sees himself as a tzar, a modern-day tzar, and his mission is to restore the Russian Empire. That very much requires him to attempt to reunite Ukraine with Russia. Why? Because the proper title for tzar is “Tzar of all the Russias.”

That means Russia proper. It means Belarus, which is essentially a vassal state at this point. It means Georgia, where he’s taken two provinces. It certainly means Ukraine because Ukraine was a very important part of the Russian Empire

Does he think, “If we succeed in this replacement of the United States and making America a second-rate power, Russia will have problems with China 10 or 20 or 30 years down the road?” I think he’s smart enough to know that when Xi Jinping looks straight north from Beijing, he sees what we call the Russian city of Vladivostok. What does “Vladivostok” mean? It means “Ruler of the East.” It’s part of the Russian Empire.

At a certain point, Xi may want to take that. China has a large population that can move; Russia does not. There are resources there. Xi may want them. But for now, it is a marriage of convenience, as it were. We united with the Soviet Union to fight the Nazis, not because we had the same ideology.

So yes, this is an Axis of Aggressors, but it’s also an axis of convenience. Putin knows that he cannot be the major player, and he accepts that, but he wants to achieve the goals he can achieve in the remainder of his life.

NATO

iF: This has a lot to do with the future of NATO. Can you give us a status check?

May: NATO is stronger now that members see Russian aggression as a reality. It wasn’t that long ago that I remember talking to very senior German diplomats, and they clearly thought that Russia presented no threat to NATO members or to anybody else.

I’d say, “Look, you’re getting dependent on Russian oil and gas from the Nord Stream pipeline.” “No, no,” they said, “Cliff, you don’t understand. Russia is dependent on the Euro, on our money. It’s really just fine. It’s all okay.” And most of these NATO members were not spending nearly enough on defense and what they were spending was wasted.

That is better now, but it’s not uniform. We have Finland and Sweden, which have given up generations of neutrality to join NATO, and that strengthens NATO. There’s no question about it. NATO is much stronger. You now have the Baltic Sea with NATO members around it, which is important because the Russian Baltic fleet is there in a non-contiguous province of Russia taken from the Germans after World War II.

But I do think that Germany and France and Italy and Spain are not strong enough NATO members; they are not doing enough for the collective defense.

Poland is doing a great deal. Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia know how threatened they are. They believe that if Putin should succeed in Ukraine, he will go on from there. Probably Moldova, not a NATO member, it would be easy pickings, then perhaps Lithuania.

If he could get even a piece of Lithuania, he could have a land bridge to Kaliningrad, which used to be Konigsberg. Are we really going to fight Russia over a land bridge through southern Lithuania to Kaliningrad? I don’t think so. Is Germany? I don’t know.

But Putin will understand that if he can do that and if NATO doesn’t fight, then NATO collapses. And again, he believes as Xi Jinping does, if he can collapse NATO, he’s earned his salary for that week.

iF: Latvia and Lithuania are pulling their proportionate weight; making their 2 percent of GDP. But 2 percent of Lithuania is not 2 percent of Germany, and Germany’s not there yet.

May: Germany is not contributing adequately to the collective defense of the West. The US should be working on that, making sure Germany understands what it has to do and is spending the money. But money has to be spent properly; you don’t increase pensions. And when we talk about Lithuania and Finland and these countries, it’s not just spending, they’re also putting on the ground very good forces that can fight against the Russians.

Now, will they resist forever? Will they be able to? No, but a war that most people don’t know much about, but I find fascinating, is the Winter War of 1939. The Soviet Union wanted to take over Finland, and Finland is a small country. But the Finns had soldiers who were really brave, who dressed in white, who buried themselves in the snow and simply took out hundreds, maybe thousands, of Russian troops.

Finland lost about 10 percent of its territory in the Winter War but kept its independence; it wasn’t complete independence. For years during the Cold War, we all talked about something called “Finlandization,” a country that is independent but couldn’t dare to offend or antagonize the Soviets.

That’s also why it’s important that Finland is now in NATO and Finland now understands that.

iF: There is a view that the Europeans should be in charge of responding to Ukraine and Russia. The chief US priority should be the Pacific because there is no country that can respond there except us. Would the US pulling away and turning most of its attention to the Pacific encourage Germany to step up and be what it should be?

May: I think not for a couple of reasons. One, it sends the message, “We have to pivot toward China and we’re going to have to let the Europeans save themselves – or not. It’s not our concern.” It is a very dangerous message, a little like we sent toward China and Russia that led to Korean War.

The Soviet Union and China thought, “They’re not going to defend South Korea, we might as well take it.” Same thing with Kuwait. The message was given to Saddam Hussein, “We don’t really have an interest in Kuwait,” so he attacked.

That says we’re no longer the leader of the Free World. We’re going to concentrate on Asia. That’s all.

Four Democracies

There are four democracies in the world that are specifically threatened. Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea.

South Korea is not imminently endangered because there are 28,000 American troops there. They’ve been there since 1953 when we made the decision not to end the war with the defeat of our enemy or victory for ourselves, but with essentially a stalemate. So that war is in an armistice, but it still goes on. And the result is that Kim Jong-un, who’s the third in a line of dynastic dictators, has nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated missiles to deliver them.

But then there’s Ukraine. Putin wants to subjugate the Ukrainians. There is Israel, the Islamic Republic does not want to subjugate the Israelis. It wants to exterminate the Israelis. So, with Taiwan – of the four threatened democracies at war – where are we? Taiwan is a vibrant, free, prosperous society, super important to the American economy and to the global economy. The Taiwanese ask, “Are we going to be more like South Korea and be able to stave off this threat or are we going to be like Ukraine and Israel that have not asked for our troops, only our weapons and support?”

The problem is the message you send. And that is a very important lesson we should have learned over the last four years, after Biden decided to capitulate to the Taliban and to betray our allies in Afghanistan. That had a huge impact globally. Putin looked at that and invaded Ukraine; the Islamic Republic Iran looked at that, and two years later, Hamas invades Israel on October 7th; and one day later, Hezbollah begins to bomb the north of Israel, and it hasn’t stopped yet.

When America is seen as in retreat, when America is seen as not able or willing to defeat its enemies, it sends messages to our allies that we’re not reliable and to our enemies that we are feckless. That’s dangerous.

America’s Strategic Position

iF: HR McMaster said, “Persistent declarations of withdrawal across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations emboldened our enemies.” Yes, the culmination is Biden in each example you gave, but there are roots.

What do we do to encourage our allies to think that we still have, not just the ability, which we may or may not, but the will?

May: There’s nothing more important to America’s strategic position than deterrence – a combination of capabilities and will. You must have both and you must be perceived as having both. We should be demonstrating our capabilities and our will in all cases. The Houthis would be a good case where we’ve been figuratively, you might say, shooting the arrows rather than the archers.

The Houthis are supplied, funded, instructed by Tehran. They have been violating the most basic international law, which only the US can enforce, which is freedom of the seas. There’s now a huge environmental disaster looming with a Greek oil tanker that’s been not only hit, but the Houthis have come aboard and lit fires. You’d think the environmental community, as we like to say, would be up in arms over this. Somehow, this doesn’t bother them as much as some soccer mom driving an SUV that has an internal combustion engine rather than an EV.

The US should go strong right there by defeating the Houthis, and/or I would say, understanding and acting upon the knowledge that the Houthis are proxy of Iran. And if you made it painful for Iran to continue to support them, I think you would show your allies that they have no better friend than you, and to your enemies, that it can be no worse enemy than you. That’s not what we’re doing. It’s not what we have been doing.

Bagram

Biden gave up Bagram Air Base, which was a hugely important asset for the US from a national security point of view. Central and East Asia are teaming with terrorist groups. And because Afghanistan shares a border with the People’s Republic of China, that base was important from an intelligence and national security point of view.

We abandoned it with billions of dollars of equipment left there for the Taliban to take over, and they paraded it out on the third anniversary of their reoccupation of Kabul. And in Kabul, people, especially women, had gotten very accustomed to the freedoms that America had helped them achieve – going to school, serving in government.

They were abandoned and that just had huge repercussions.

iF: Iran. Post October 7th and given that there’s a war in the region, do you think that the US government has come to understand the conventional problem of Iran?

May: Insufficiently.

If you asked the Obama administration, it would say that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was an achievement, but that was a dreadful, dreadful deal that only maybe delayed, but didn’t stop, the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It gave them a patient path into the nuclear weapons club. Trump was against that and had serious sanctions and was strangling the economy and that was a very good policy of his. And then Biden has tried to get back and has probably helped the Islamic Republic of Iran get $150 billion that they’re using for terrorism and to attack Israel and to develop nuclear weapons, and it’s a totally failed policy.

Ali Khamenei has been the Supreme Leader since in 1989. He is very smart and very strategic, and he figured out, “I’m going to wage a war in Israel, and this is an existential war, a genocidal war. I want to wipe it off the map. How do I do this? I should use pawns. I should use Arabs to get this job done.”

Now he has Hezbollah in Lebanon. There are no territorial disputes really between Israel and Lebanon; that’s not what this is about. Khamenei has supplied Hamas in all these ways. They have this tunnel infrastructure. You’ve got the Houthis. Khamenei is sending weapons through Jordan into the West Bank and has both Hamas and other groups like Islamic Jihad that it supports there.

This is what is called the “Ring of Fire Strategy.” Neither the US nor Israel have been sufficiently engaged in a strategic way.

The Israelis have been distracted with one enemy at a time and not said, “This is a war being waged against us. They’re trying to checkmate us by surrounding us on all sides, having us fight a multi-front war while they move ahead to develop nuclear weapons and missiles deliver them, which will provide an umbrella for these groups. What’s our strategy for defeating the Islamic Republic of Iran? Militarily? Helping to bring down the regime? What?”

The Israelis knew that tunnels were being built. For some reason, they didn’t know how elaborate they were, that there were more than 50 coming from Egypt under the Philadelphi corridor into near Rafah, bringing in huge amounts of weaponry. The Chinese were likely involved in the engineering for these tunnels.

So no, I don’t think America has an adequate response to the hegemonic ambitions and the genocidal ambitions of Tehran, and I think Israel is only barely beginning.

The Caliphate

You have is within the Islamic world, on the Sunni and Shia side, what we would call revanchists, who say, “We have to reestablish an Islamic caliphate and empire, and its goal is to conquer the world. And nothing irritates us more than Israel because in this little, tiny sliver of land, you have the Jews exercising self-determination. They’re not ruled by Muslims. We can’t accept that.”

That’s why when people say, “land for peace,” that doesn’t answer the question – that is not the cause of the war. When people say a “two-state solution,” a two-state solution doesn’t work if you’re Hamas or you’re Hezbollah or you’re the Houthis or you’re the Islamic Republic of Iran or you’re al-Qaeda.

The problem is not that there’s not a Palestinian state, the problem for them is that there is a Jewish majority state. That’s the problem they want to solve, and they want to solve it with the extermination of Israel and have to kill as many Israelis, Jewish, Arab, Bedouin, Christian, whatever, as they possibly can. Until we recognize that that’s the problem, you can’t solve it.

iF: You wrote about Iran’s decision not to retaliate after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, at least not immediately. Some reasons are quite practical. On the other hand, is not retaliating a shameful thing?

May: My guess is that that both arguments were made to Ayatollah Khamenei, one that said, “Let’s be patient. Let’s not do this now because it could bring problems with Israel that we don’t want at this point. We don’t want them to set back our nuclear weapons program.”

But yes, they want to retaliate for the killing, which was Israel’s retaliation his role in killing well over a thousand Israelis. Israel chose to do it in Tehran rather than in Doha, Qatar because the US has a very close relationship with Qatar. I don’t think it should, but it does. So, they wouldn’t want to hit him there, and they thought they had the opportunity and the means to do it in Tehran.

And the regime in Iran is very sophisticated. They don’t like this idea and at some point, they’ll want to get revenge. They did various things in response or retaliation to the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

Americans, quite a few of them, are threatened with assassination currently and have to have special security, but the US government doesn’t say to Iran, “There will be consequences for threatening Americans. You can’t do that to Americans.”

Years ago, they tried to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in Georgetown. They’ve had a number of failed efforts like that, and they say, “Is it shameful if we failed? Yes.” But then they say, “We’ll try, try again until we succeed, and we’ll see what we can do.”

iF: Let’s focus there. The US and our World War II allies decided after the war that the best way to promote peace and have peace was through international organizations. We made the UN, and people thought it was going to be a good thing. Now, it is 2024. Can we get rid of them?

May: It’s not easy. I used to think the UN was dysfunctional. I wish that’s all it was. It is now an enemy of democratic nations. not least because Beijing has taken over a lot of it.

But, yes, if you wanted to be serious you would begin to defund it. The US pays about 27 percent of the UN total budget. You could starve the budget of some of that money, make it more of a debating society and really make clear that its ambitions to be a world government are going nowhere.

And then I think you would also consider seriously, if you can, maybe building onto NATO. Or maybe what the late Senator John McCain called a League of Democracies. Democratic countries, or those clearly aligned with democratic countries could be involved in an international organization and work together.

But the first step is to begin to defund the UN. We have a lot of things to spend money on in the US. That tends to not be a good investment for us.

Gaza

iF: Finally, Gaza. Is there a “day after”?

May: First, there’s no day after unless Hamas is incapacitated, militarily and as a governing institution.

iF: The US is still doing the two-state solution thing.

May: I don’t think there can be a two-state solution. What you might do is mollify various pragmatic Arab regimes, saying, “We are going to establish a pathway to a two-state solution.” It may be a long pathway because you will need to have Palestinian leaders who agree, “We can settle for peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state. It will not be our job to wipe the state, Israel, off the face of the earth.” We don’t have that right now.

Without Hamas, you might find a way to work with the Saudis, the Emiratis, with other technocrats to begin to establish law and order and begin some reconstruction of Gaza, which has been hit hard by tunnels, armories, and military installations Hamas installed under their own people.

Israel will need the Philadelphi Corridor.

But yes, you can talk about a Palestinian state in the future – not under Hamas’s leadership or rulership, not under Islamic Jihad, and certainly not under the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas.

Without Hamas pressure, maybe a lot of them will say, “You know what? I don’t want to go through this again. Let’s rebuild our lives. This kind of war is not like when the Israelis are doing precision strikes against a bedroom in a building where a Hamas leader is staying, and we don’t want to go through this again.” Maybe that’s possible.

iF: If you ever listened to the JPC webinars, you know I always like to go out on a positive note.

May: American leadership is indispensable. And when I say indispensable, I mean there’s nothing else. We fought World War II so that terrible authoritarian regimes would not take over most of the globe. If authoritarian regimes take over in the 21st century, it turns out that World War II was a battle won in a war that we eventually lost; the Cold War is also a war that it will turn out we lost – if the Chinese Communist Party comes to dominate most of the world.

We have to be as good as the Greatest Generation. We have to be as good as the Cold Warriors.

We can’t say, “We’re tired. Let’s just give up.” That would be particularly wrong for our children and grandchildren. They should inherit a world that is no worse than the one that we inherited from our fathers.

iF: I am not as good as my father was – he was the Greatest Generation, the Depression, WWII, raising us. I am not as good as my father. I know that.

May: I don’t think we’ve recognized the enormity of the challenge – we are in Cold War 2.0, and this is a more difficult Cold War than the first one. But I do meet a lot of younger people who I think are up to this challenge. They understand and care and are up for this and if they become our leaders, then I’m much more optimistic about the future.

iF: Cliff May, on behalf of the Jewish Policy Center and the readers of inFOCUS Quarterly, thank you for a great look at the world.