The Dogs of War that will bring back the Era of the Cold War

Igor Afanasiev, a native of Kyiv in Ukraine, was hired in 2011 as Business Development Manager of a large, multinational investment company in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which I was then serving as its Chief Financial Officer. Igor and I worked as colleagues during the ensuing eight years when we became good friends too. Besides the professional work we both did for the Saudi Arabian company which often brought us to cooperate closely with each other, Igor and I also shared other common interests. The most interesting one was we each trying to outdo the other in being arm-chair, office coffee-break, Monday-morning-quarter-backs in what we liked to believe was our very own 2-man think-tank of expert observers and analysts of world current affairs. Many were the hours-long discussions we both had over the years– e.g. on the fall-out of the Cairo Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, the creation of the ISIS, the destruction of Libya and Lebanon, the people’s coup in Sudan that threw out the dictator Omar Al-Basheer, the insurgency in Donbass that followed the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the great dominant American hegemony in the world being rivalled by the growing Chinese one…. and many more such world events….

Igor and I got however rudely and abruptly parted from Riyadh in 2020 when the Corona Wuhan virus attacked the world as a pandemic and disrupted our lives… He packed up and returned to his native city of Kiev and so did I when resigned from my job in Riyadh after a 7-year job-stint there. Throughout 2020-21 we did however keep in intermittent touch though over social media platforms, Whatsapp and Facebook.

In December 2021, when I sent him a Whatsapp message asking “what was going on in Ukraine with Russia massing troops on the eastern borders”, Igor replied tersely, “Just the usual seasonal drama....”.

On February 22, 2022, when the first bombs fell outside the city of Kyiv, and I sent Igor a Whatsapp message asking if he and his family were safe, he replied, “The country’s air force has been taken out… and it looks like there will be troops landing soon once the airport is cleared. I hear Antonov airport will fall into Russian hands. But I am safe though I can’t fly out since all flights out of Kyiv were cancelled since yesterday”. Igor and his wife decided to remain in Kyiv city braving the risk of Russian bombing, choosing not to flee to Poland by road or to anywhere else.

Thank God, my friend until today, remains safe and unharmed.

On March 5, a Whatsapp message I sent Igor read as follows:

“The USA washes its hands off Ukraine… This is not the first instance of American betrayal … The West has only succeeded in turning Eastern Europe into another possible Middle Eastern “hot-spot””….

And Igor replied: “Nothing new…. We remember attempts to ignite a war in the Middle East before the Covid crisis … remember the (assassination) of General Suleiman, (the Commander-in-Chief of Iran Armed Forces)….? Nothing happened then… But this time they got “lucky”… with Ukraine and Russian now at war. Coincidence? Did some party stand behind these attempts?”

Behind my friend, Igor’s question is the implied poser: “Who benefits from this senseless war?”

Who really is behind all this war madness and who benefits from it?

There is no doubt Russia is the main cause and beneficiary of this war that rages on even today after 12 days of combat hostilities. Russia, if she succeeds, in overrunning Ukraine, which seems very likely in a matter of days, will claim that it has effectively “de-militarized and de-Nazified” Ukraine and thereby has extinguished a growing threat to Russia’s own national security posed by Ukraine’s dalliance with NATO in Eastern Europe.

Ukraine too is another main cause and beneficiary of this war. If only Ukraine had declared itself to be a neutral and non-nuclear state for the remainder of this decade, the war could most certainly have been prevented and thousands of innocent lives saved. But instead, the belligerent and short-sighted President Zelensky precipitated matters by insisting that not only did Ukraine have a sovereign choice to join NATO if it so wished it also similarly had the right to exercise its choice to defend itself with nuclear weapons, if it had to, by even reneging on its non-proliferation obligations under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Zelensky was obviously thinking covetously of the possible benefits accruing immediately to Ukraine out of such a bellicose position: a fast-tracked emergency admission into the European Union and ipso facto protection under the NATO security umbrella.

Both Russia and Ukraine however are terrible losers in this war, as it turns out to drag on and on, longer than either of them, or the rest of the world, expected.

Ukraine is a loser because the NATO that it was wooing and the USA that it was flirting with have both dumped it unceremoniously in its hour of distress. In its war against Russia, as Zelensky himself moaned and wailed in front of world-wide TV cameras, Europe simply abandoned Ukraine to defend for itself in the war. And the result? More than a million Ukrainians have fled their country to seek safe haven as pathetic refugees in neighboring countries. Ukraine’s military infrastructure and national assets have been destroyed.

Russia is a loser because it has now invited not only swift economic sanctions from Western nations, but also received outright condemnation for its act of naked aggression by 141 countries of the 193-membered United Nations General Assembly. Putin’s Russia which had always been Ukraine’s incubus has now become all of Europe’s Mephistophelean bête-noire and the world’s evil Dr. Moriarty.

To the ordinary observer far removed from the East European crisis, say, someone in India, it may seem that America, the undoubted king-pin in the NATO, has had its image of a military and moral superpower in the world severely damaged. But that is the view of complete naivete and sheer ignorance of how American plays geo-politics.

America is indeed the real gainer in this war. The benefits it gains and will gain are enormous and far-reaching. Here is a small illustrative list of such benefits:

1. NATO since its ignominious retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 was in great danger of collapsing into irrelevance as a futile, purposeless Trans-Atlantic military alliance. During the Trump Presidency, the European allies of American within NATO were being harangued, belittled and berated as ineffectual partners if not outright parasites feeding off America’s military bulk and heft. There was growing European resentment against America. A mutinous mood was setting in inside NATO. That mood has now been instantly dissipated with the outbreak of the Ukraine-Russia war. NATOs waning trans-Atlantic solidarity has now been miraculously renewed.
2. For some years now in the 21st century, the rise of China has been challenging the pre-eminent position of America as the most dominant power in the world. Americans have seen the “Exceptionalism” of Pax Americana, the veritable fabric of the so-called “rules-based world-order” of the post-WW2 era, beginning to fray at the seams, as it were. That “rules-based” World Order is now going to be resurrected by America and its European allies with a combined foreign-policy phalanx that will henceforth be relentlessly and ruthlessly targeting Russia.
3. The Cold War Era between 1950 and 1989 when the Soviet Union disintegrated, was the golden period of American Exceptionalism. It was the period when the wheels of what President Eisenhower called the great American “military-industrial complex” powered the engine of the growth of all of America’s leviathan trans-continental economy and geo-economic influence. After the Cold War came the Globalization Era — viz. the Clinton, Bush and Obama years — when America briefly harvested the bumper fruits of a debt-driven prosperous world that became suddenly “flat” with free markets offering marvelous opportunities for capitalist sharks of the Western world. But then it was globalization too that greatly helped China’s very own “military-industrial complex” to rise up too and begin challenging the American “world order”. America and the newly European Union formed in 2000 suddenly discovered that they were both beginning to experience the geopolitical ground shuddering under their feet, glacially breaking-up and shifting tectonically towards a slide and decline in real power, influence and impact in world affairs. Disastrous wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and in the African continent, together with face-losing encounters in North Korea, Hongkong and finally in Afghanistan, and the great financial melt-down of the Western financial system in 2008 , all came to signal clearly that America and the West were no longer going to be able to make the rules in a “Rules-based World Order” of their creation.
4. George Soros, back in a prescient Op-Ed in the Atlantic dt. December 2003 wrote what today seems to ring very true: “International Relations are relations of power, not law, power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the Post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests and values. The world would benefit from adopting those values because the American model has demonstrated its superiority…. (successive American) Administrations failed to use the full potential of American power. This must be corrected; the United States must find a way to assert its supremacy in the world”.
5. Today in the current ongoing events of the Ukraine-Russia War, the USA sees at last a great opportunity to bring back the Cold War Era once again into the world. A repeat of the Cold War will once again enable America to reap the supreme benefits it once enjoyed as an unchallenged super-power. It will enable America “impose its views, interests and values” on Europe first through a revival and redux of its old “superior model” — i.e. that which once was wholly spearheaded by its all-powerful, steamrolling “military-industrial complex” — and then, gradually and eventually later, upon the rest of the world too though the ushering in of a so-called new order of international law and rules that legitimizes its power.
6. Behind the scenes of the Ukraine-Russia War, in just the last week, already we are seeing the giant “military-industrial complex” of America, which for quite a long time since the end of the Cold War has been slumbering in a half-comatose condition, stirring a bit after being woken up…. reminding one of the demonic character, the terrible Kumbhakarna, in the India epic, The Ramayana!
7. The US “military-industry complex” has another name… one that more vividly and accurately describes the real nature of the beast. It is taken from the title of a very popular novel written way back in the 1970s by Frederick Forsyth: “THE DOGS OF WAR”. The title that Forsyth chose for his novel however was itself borrowed from Shakespeare’s famous play, Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene 1, Line 270): “Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war”! The novel ‘Dogs of War’ is all about a small group of European mercenary soldiers hired by a British industrialist to depose the government of a fictional African country of Zangaro. The story details a geologist’s mineral discovery, and the preparations for the attack: soldier recruitment, training, reconnaissance, and the logistics of the coup d’état (buying weapons, transport, payment). Like most of Forsyth’s work, the novel is more about the protagonists’ occupational tradecraft than their characters.
8. The “Dogs of War” is perhaps the perfect allegory for today’s Russia-Ukrainian War. The “tradecraft” is verily the resurrection of Cold War 2; the “European mercenary soldiers” are NATO; the “British industrialist” is the most apt cover-name for the American Anglo-Saxon “military-industrial complex” that will now surely begin collaborating and getting down to perpetrate all manner of sordid old Cold War-era tactics, machinations, sabotage, insurgency and provocations against its enemy — i.e. the “preparations for the attack” in terms of “soldier recruitment, training, reconnaissance, and the logistics of the coup d’état (buying weapons, transport, payment); the country of Zangaro, of course, is Russia …. And what the “mineral discovery” really is is indeed the easiest of anybody’s guess: its Russia’s massive geological reserves and resources of natural gas !

This morning, I sent my good friend Igor, the poor chap, cowering probably inside a bomb-shelter somewhere in the besieged city of Kyiv, a Whatsapp message attaching a set of charts and info-graphs which to me at least seem to signal the rumblings of the great wheels of the USA’s “military-industrial complex” announcing itself to whole world that, yes, lo and behold! it has begun to move and is going to herald the advent of the new Cold War era of the 21st century! As Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s play announced it, “Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war”!

Who are these new Dogs of War? To help my friend Igor keep himself rather busy during the day cooped up in his bomb-shelter by taking his mind off the war outside and try instead to figure out for himself “who is behind and who benefits?” from this conflagration on his doorsteps in Kviv, I sent him this List below that names the Top-8 Dogs of War — the largest arms-producing companies in the world. Six out of the 8 Dogs quite unsurprisingly are all Anglo-Saxon!

The fact that the Dogs of War have been awakened by the Russo-Ukraine War of 2022 is evident from the way the Stock-Prices of these arms producing companies have in the last few weeks suddenly revived in some cases and sharply spiked in other cases.

Take care of yourself, Igor, my good friend, amidst all the havoc around you, the Dogs of War have started barking, growling and gnarling… Keep your faith strong inside your heart… There is hope yet for those who have the will and the strength of spirit do so in this sad, sad world.

Sudarshan Madabushi