Global Security and Intelligence Studies
ues of diversity , relativity , rejection of materialism and authority , and permissiveness (“ anything goes ”). Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History in his 1992 book with the argument that liberalism has eventually defeated the only remaining competing ideology of communism , leaving the world with only one ideal as to how society should be organized ( as a liberal democracy with a free-market economy ). Only after 9 / 11 and with the beginning of the War on Terror , there was realization that the West was in another “ war of ideas ” or a new ideological struggle with radical Islam . President George W . Bush declared in 2006 : “ The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict . It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21 st century , and the calling of our generation ” ( Bush 2006 ). This has led U . S . strategists to conclude that a victory in the War on Terror would require the West to win the war of ideas as well as the physical war on the battlefield ( Echevarria 2008 , 23 – 24 ). Now that the War on Terror seems to be winding down , Russia has reemerged as a new threat to the West and to the world order that was formed after 1945 . Russia has again turned to ideology and political warfare to achieve its political objectives .
The Origins of the New Cold War
Despite initial hopes that the nature of the relationship between Russia and
the West could be transformed and the Cold War could be ended for good after the collapse of the Soviet Union , there was never enough trust between both sides to make it happen . On the Russian side , there was early on the firm belief that the Soviet Union and communist bloc did not simply collapse because of internal reasons but rather collapsed because of covert Western influence and manipulation ( Legvold 2016 , 83 – 84 ). Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were perceived by the former Soviet elites to have been traitors to their nation for bowing to Western demands . Furthermore , the West was seen as taking advantage of a massively weakened Russia when it moved to expand NATO and attack its ally Serbia in 1999 .
Russian elites disagreed with the tendency of Westernization under Yeltsin and they became increasingly concerned about the ideological threat posed by the West to Russian sovereignty and Russian national security . According to a popular Russian conspiracy theory , CIA Director Allan Dulles had devised a diabolic plan in the 1940s to completely demoralize Soviet society . A document attributed to Dulles states : “ After sowing chaos there [ in Russia ], we shall imperceptibly replace their values by stealth with false ones and shall force them to believe in these false values ” ( Shiner 2018 ). In this view , Russia has been under an informational attack from the West since the 1950s , which ultimately caused the Soviet collapse and which aims to destroy Russian national identity and marginalize Russia as country by breaking it into pieces . Russian theorists like to point at the existence of a “ noosphere ” or “ mental sphere ” that shapes the thinking and behavior of a people . According to the Russian theorist Vladimir Karyakin , “[ t ] he mental sphere , a people ’ s
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