THIS is part one of a series on the new Cold War between China and the US. I hope it does not reach more than three articles. I will not do the series consecutively. I have never done that in 34 years of newspaper commentaries.

I am currently penning a series on the political history of the Mulatto/Creole class in Guyana and I haven’t done it consecutively. I have maybe two or three more articles to come in that particular series.

I believe readers get tired and bored after reaching part three of a series. It is best to intersperse the series with analyses on other topics. In each article in this Cold War series, I will devote an analysis separately of the Russians, Americans, then, Chinese.

At the conclusion, I will contend that the Chinese will win the new Cold War. Today, I will look at why I think the USSR was never a superpower in the sense of global hegemony and was no match for the USA. It was a myth and remains a myth that the USSR was a rival of the US for global influence.

After the end of the Second World War, Europe lay in ruins, and the USSR was terribly bruised by the Nazi invasion. The US emerged triumphantly because it had the atom bomb and it used it.
After the war, there was only one superpower the USA – but academia and journalism referred to the international system as a bi-polar template because the world had two large countries – USA and USSR- and each controlled vast territories on the globe. This portrait of international society deceived you when you looked at it.

The USSR was no match for the USA after the 1950s and was destined to lose the Cold War. Here is why.

1- The USSR’s claim to global reach rested on two pillars. It controlled half of Europe and had the atom bomb. But the USSR had nothing more. Money was not there to sustain its eastern European allies – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, Mongolia, Rumania and Yugoslavia. In addition, the USSR did not have cutting edge technology in the 1970s like the US. In the 1980s the USSR’s did not have proper photocopy machines.

Despite a flow of anti-American revolutions in the 1970- Somalia, Ethiopia, Iran, Grenada, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua – the USSR did not have the capability to finance these countries (Iran was never close to the USSR) thus these revolutions were always on shaky economic ground.

I was the foreign policy advisor to the government of revolutionary Grenada and I knew first-hand how rejectionist was the attitude of the USSR to giving finance and resources to Grenada.
The USSR was simply not interested in bankrolling Grenada. Cuba gave more to Grenada than the USSR. On the opposite side of the fence, the Americans were pouring in money to their satellites all over the Third World. In the period 1970 to 1980, Guyana, per capita, was the largest recipient of American aid except for Israel.

2- During the old Cold War, the USSR was never interested in international hegemony. This was never the intention of the USSR in sharp contrast to the British, then the Americans. The previous generation of the world, including this columnist, was fed on a diet of international relations literature that was American-centric and Eurocentric. We were brought up on a diet of Soviet appetite to spread communism all over the world.

The Soviets had no interest in communism in Indonesia and remained with its hands to its side when the communist party was being butchered by the army.

For a good description of how the Soviets let down Indonesia, see the 1980 Mel Gibson movie, “The Year of Living Dangerously.” While the USSR was not interested in pushing communist victories in the Third World and Greece, the Americans were insanely involved in overthrowing leftist regimes.

A few examples are Iraq, Guatemala, Greece, Guyana, Chile, and Nicaragua. No book can describe the CIA’s overthrow of the leftist Chile government in 1973 than the 1980 Jack Lemmon movie, “Missing.”

The Russians’ obsession has always been, and presently is, its borders with Europe. Russia fears invasion from Europe and this explains its tight rein over Eastern Europe from 1945 until the USSR fell in 1980

3- The Russians are a maudlin, introverted nationality that just wants to be left alone and have no interest in interacting with the rest of the world. They don’t want to know about the world. It is this insularity that makes them racist against non-white people that they have hardly interacted with for centuries. Next- part 2- the Americans