No, this is not a new Cold War we're in. It's much more complicated than that, more chess than checkers.
We survived, just, the bilateral nuclear standoff of the bi-polar world of the Cold War. We are currently surviving, painfully, the outcomes of George W. Bush's catastrophic attempt at uni-polarity – the scheme to run the world as a New American Century, the U.S. Constitution paramount, the United Nations Charter be damned. It was all to begin, recall, with democracy in Iraq, after the victory there.
But those eras of bi-polarity and attempted uni-polarity are behind us; we live now in a multi-polar world. Power has spread, is spreading and will spread further. Like it or not, there must be room for new players, such as a revived Russia, and Iran, and China, with accommodation of their legitimate security interests.
Multipolarity, what used to be called a Concert of Powers, like the one that gave Europe and much more a century of peace and progress before the first World War, need not at all be a zero-sum game. I like the analogy of a great multi-ringed tent, with each pole, rising, making more room for the whole human circus, for the energy, the genius, the commerce and the culture – but not the warring and never, for it would be fatal, the no-holds-barred, nuclear warring – of the human family.
The Cold War has not ended for those who work in the missile silos, of course. MAD, mutually assured destruction, is alive and well. That's why Russia won't ignore a U.S. missile-defence system on its doorstep.
The Cold War rages on in some minds, too – especially those that were shaped by it, steeped in it, some pickled by it, on both sides – but they're getting old now and will pass on.
There's as well the fact that security establishments, the Military Industrial Complexes of America and Russia, need a big, bad enemy to rationalize their massive budgets. For the Pentagon, it's Russia; for the Kremlin, the United States. It's good that they're far apart and don't really have anything they need to fight about.
The threats to the vast, complex Russian Federation are much closer to home. One in six Russians is Muslim. There is no ocean between Russia and Islamic fundamentalism. Moscow needs good relations with Tehran. Meantime, vulnerable, challenged in the Caucasus and the Far East, Russia needs a war with the West like it needs the Black Plague.
So, no, the Syrian civil war doesn't tell me we're back to the Cold War.
It tells me other things:
It tells me foreign policy choices are humbling, damnably complex and full of moral dilemmas. I have not envied those in charge – or those who need to brief them. I'm glad Barack Obama plays basketball and pivots well. The United States might otherwise be engulfed in yet another tragic intervention.
The Syrian civil war tells me too that, for all its faults, the United Nations has vital roles to play – as a forum (in which outcomes should not be blamed on the setting); as a convenor; as the agency that tends for refugees; as the agency that, through the World Food Program, feeds them; and as the agency, through the OPCW, that gets rid of chemical weapons.
The war in Syria also tells me that in this multi-polar world, multilateral diplomatic capacity, standing and influence are vital assets in the promotion and protection of national interests.
We can do better in, and for, the world than we've been doing.
Christopher Westdal was Canada's ambassador to Russia from 2003 to 2006, to the United Nations in Geneva from 1999 to 2003, and to Ukraine, South Africa, Bangladesh and Burma in the 1980s and 1990s. This is adapted from a speech he gave to the Canadian International Council last week.