Many teachers of Russian and European politics have grown accustomed to students’ puzzlement at an apparent paradox: if the Ukrainian war is entirely Moscow’s fault, why do most of the world’s countries stand aside and refuse to join in sanctioning Russia? The western political establishment, including the think-tank and media elite, are vehement in their demonization of Russia and alarmism at its intent to recreate the Soviet empire. Bombarded by this narrative, ordinary voters cannot understand why our friends—from Mexico, Argentina, and South Africa, to India, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—do not join in punishing Russia. If they did, some logically ask, if those sanctioning included more than a small minority of the world’s nations, then war would come to a swift halt. In fact, there is a strange lacuna between the strident Washington-Brussels perspective on the Ukraine war and the larger contours of global politics wherein western political-economic dominance is clearly ebbing. Among the contributions of Richard Sakwa’s The Culture of the Second Cold War is an incisive analysis of this lacuna.

The book begins with a spirited statement of its thesis: that we are deep into a second Cold War, one that is mainly America’s fault for ignoring the security interests of Russia after the USSR’s collapse and seeking to expand the military-economic hegemony of the “Political West” (24). The benign western hegemony of the postwar era, which largely respected the UN Charter system’s core principle of state sovereignty, was supplanted by a fusion of neoconservative and liberal-interventionist goals in Washington, DC that launched the “Political West” on a mission of democracy promotion, intervention, and regime change after 1991. This challenged the UN Charter system, ironically rendering the Political West a revisionist force while the “Political East”—led by Russia, joined by China and other BRICS countries—represent the status quo (29).

In simple form, this argument is broadly familiar to mainstream analysts of US-Russia relations and transatlantic security, and also broadly dismissed. They would do well to read Sakwa’s synthesis of a burgeoning literature on this incipient geopolitical shift, from philosophical to political-economic perspectives, reflecting Chinese, Indian, and other Global South viewpoints as well as Russian. From exposing the “rules-based order that permanently generates double standards” (21) to protesting the west’s policies on trade, debt, and climate change that leave developing countries “alienated and resentful” (47), the erosion of the west’s practical and moral influence is seen precisely in its inability to mobilize global support against Russia. Washington’s military assertion in both Moscow and Beijing’s spheres of influence has been pushing the two closer for over a decade, so it is no wonder that China supports Russia on Ukraine. “Unless they stand together,” Sakwa argues, “they are liable to be hanged separately” (45).

Yet the Biden Administration spent two years trying to persuade Beijing that backing Moscow was not in China’s interests, and the Trump Administration has tried economic coercion to achieve the same with both China and India. Neither succeeded because neither understood the depth of resentment at American hypocrisy, nor do they understand how the global tide is shifting against the Political West. And this, argues Sakwa, is due to the pervasive culture of the second Cold War. Demonization of the enemy has reached depths never seen in the first Cold War. The logic is “Manichean” as the west “insists it is upholding a consistent set of values” while its adversaries denounce “the deleterious and immoral consequences of America’s struggle to maintain its global supremacy” (15). The incisive debates over our enemies’ motivations that informed policy in the first Cold War has been replaced by a dogmatic uniformity that ridicules dissent and cancels voices that would dare consider viewing confrontation through the adversary’s eyes. The “evil empire” of the first Cold War has been replaced by today’s “evil civilization, with an inherent propensity to violate rules and to degrade all that it touches. There can be no negotiation with such an evil force” (37). Sakwa is pessimistic:

While sometimes as strident as those he criticizes, Sakwa has nevertheless written a valuable book that asks us to see the larger forces at play—both geopolitically, and also in our domestic discourse—and shed the simplistic and self-serving narratives that are leading us toward disaster.