A new report by CASE maintains that the conclusion of the Ukraine war’s hot phase will usher in the urgent need to revise and overhaul the West’s strategy targeting Putin’s Russia and other global security threats.
Some experts and commentators compare the present-day Russia with the 1930s Germany. Indeed, both are associated with imperialistic ressentiment; thwarting the revisionist policies of both suggests a comparably powerful force. However, the current landscape is much more evocative of the Cold War climate rather than that of World War II. The paper posits that Russia’s status as a nuclear-weapon state along with a host of other age-specific circumstances must eliminate the contingency of the crisis devolving into an even larger-scale armed conflict. Hence the need for a New Containment strategy that would draw upon the Cold War practices rather than any other episodes from history. A belated broader realization of this long-overdue need to update and upgrade the previousera strategy may have severe and crippling ramifications.
The paper argues that the New Containment should factor in several crucial aspects. While pursuing a formal demarcation may be one option, of much more importance is the conceptualized and materialized boundary of strategic interests and what constitutes the “red lines.” This will substantially hinder a potential nuclear escalation. The renewed strategy should also seek to step up the West’s defense capabilities and technological prowess so as to ensure its superiority over the authoritarian Russia and China. Besides, the New Containment should foil Russia’s attempts to ensconce itself as a global guarantor of any autocracy’s sustainability outside of the post-Soviet space, and hamper Russia and China’s unchallenged leadership over the Global South. In other words, the proposed strategy echoes the paradigm of the long-time peaceful confrontation within Europe while prompting a more determined technological deterrence to limit the Kremlin’s overseas clout and shape up an equivalent of the 1960–70s Non-Aligned Movement in lieu of the current BRICS model. This New Containment should, therefore, aim to hamstring the Putin regime’s economic and technological capabilities by creating incentives to bleed it dry of its financial and human capital along with a range of similar steps.
