P Kharel

Coined in the 1950s and buried in the 1990s, Cold War is close to getting minted again. As long as the United States, with the full backing of the European Union, ruled the roost in setting the global agenda and exercising domineering influence for three decades, the Cold War was supposed to have ended. With the economic and technological rise and rise of China along with Russia asserting its presence in the international arena since the turn of the century, the term gets invoked with frequency these days.
I do not subscribe to communism, especially the now-defunct Soviet variation and that of China under Mao Zedong, simply because of its inherent restrictive nature. Nor am I any fan of the ideological onslaught that the hegemon among core capitalist countries play. But facts are facts.
The first communist state emerged as the now-defunct Soviet Union toward the end of World War I. Moscow’s aggressive approach, particularly coinciding with the end of World War II, created communist states in Eastern Europe and encouraged communist groups in other countries. Come 1991 and the “Iron Curtain” collapsed and so did the Eastern European satellite communist regimes like nine pins. But the philosophy of communism continues to attract people seeking better economic distribution and ending disparities in various forms.
China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam remain one-party communist states. Theirs is a centralised mechanism of decision-making practice, and reckon how Karl Marx and Lenin abhorred parliamentary system and its bourgeois democracy. The US groans under the sight of communist Cuba off the Florida state since more than 60 years. Fidel Castro was Washington’s a relentless but vain target of military coup and assassination. Not only he but his brand of communism has survived against an opponent like the superpower America. Most communist parties elsewhere have adopted their socialist versions of polity committed to multiparty electoral culture.

Domino theory
American political elite went paranoid when any of their rivals asked for restraint in unleashing onslaught against what was termed leftists. “The fall of China to communists” was an incalculable loss to them. The US President Lyndon Johnson and his team feared the domino theory whose application would “infect” nearby and eventually far off nations. The domino theory, floated in the 1960s by the White House favourites of the John F Kennedy and Johnson administrations, viewed that if Vietnam fell, Cambodia, Laos and South East Asia would all be “lost” to communists.
Noted American journalist and author David Halberstam, in his “The Best and the Brightest”, commented: “Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them... had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism ... Johnson had told (Vice-President Hubert) Humphrey that he wanted a report which would brand China as the aggressor throughout Asia...The report, as Humphrey projected it in front of his staff, in one long and disastrous meeting, would say he had visited all the countries of Southeast Asia and there was only one source of aggression in Asia and it was Peking, and it was the same in Vietnam, Thailand, India, Malaysia and the Philippines.”
Hundreds of thousands of people suspected of being communists in Indonesia, the Philippines and Latin America were killed in state actions. Their families were ostracised as potential terrorists. Indonesia’s Suharto regime massacred up to one million “communists” in the 1960s.
Laos’s former colonial rulers, the French, made much ado about the landlocked country’s neutral independence but the intention was to save it from collapse into communism. In 1953, the French reconlonised the landlocked country that had independence gained after the Japanese quit in 1945. Communist Laos, today, stands as South-East Asia’s fastest growing economy.
Major powers harbour no qualms about giving short shrift to lofty principles they at other times preach if non-compliance suits them. When the Soviet Union sent troops into Czechoslovakia to quell the 1968 Prague Spring witnessing political liberalisation, not all NAM members protested. One of NAM’s founding members, Nepal opposed the superpower military intervention in landlocked Czechoslovakia.
Ever since the Soviets installed a puppet communist regime in poverty-stricken but strategically placed Afghanistan in 1979, that landlocked country has never experienced normalcy, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed. Millions of Afghans were reduced to being refugees in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. The very West that condemned the decade-long Soviet presence in Afghanistan has been stationing troops there since two decades.
In the third decade of the 21st century, communism could stage a comeback even without communist China proactively encouraging but discreetly watching and defending the right to be free from outside interference in the domestic affairs of an independent state. Most of the years since communist rule arrived in China in 1949 went without the best of ties with neighbouring Russia. Today, Sino-Russian alliance is an effective force to reckon with for mutual strength and cooperation.
Big powers are not infrequently found flouting the letter and spirit of the United Nations’ Charter. No country has the right to interfere overtly or covertly in the domestic affairs of other nations. Of note is how the military and the bureaucracy, with the knowledge of the president, misled the American public regarding the carpet bombing and victory claims in the Vietnam of the 1960s. Much of the news media became party to disinformation conspiracy.
Selective approach
Decay, decline and disintegration of the Soviet system was a telling tale of massive miscalculation, which Beijing was quick to note and ensure its prevention in China. Any notion that Western Christian democratic-elitist values are essentially the ultimate all-time prescription for governance everywhere. Use of human rights issue as a political weapon will do much damage in the long run. One-sided containment of China means sowing the seeds of clashes with dangerous potential for larger warfare, not discounting the worst the world has ever recorded.
To the hard core capitalist world, election, whatever the quality of its process, and dictatorship seem to be a better option to communism. It sees authoritarian regimes as a halfway house to a functioning democracy. Sensitivity should not be the monopoly or exclusive privilege of the rich and the big. The traditionally dominant nations are obsessed with the idea of containing and preventing the world from being “infected” with communist ideology.
A return of Cold War would denote an end to the three-decade long single superpower domination and the beginning of multiple superpower world. The ensuing years will record the highs and lows in international relations, major shifts in power equations and emergence of power blocks but not completely in line of what was witnessed during the Soviet-American superpower rivalry in the post-World War II decades until the early 1990s. For the West China’s rise is doubly painful - a communist regime very close to becoming the No. 1 economy.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)