For a contemporary "New Thinking 2.0" - or Questions for Mikhail Gorbachev

For a contemporary “New Thinking 2.0” – or: Questions for Mikhail Gorbachev and for all of us (1/3)

by Leo Ensel

[This article posted on 1/12/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=127043.]

The most important political legacy that Mikhail Gorbachev left us is the New Thinking, which he helped to develop and was the first to implement in political practice. It brought to the fore the interest of humanity that arches over all other contradictions: survival as a species. Today we need an update, a “New Thinking 2.0”. By Leo Ensel.

“At the center of the New Thinking was the thesis of the primacy of universal interests and values in an increasingly integrated, interdependent world. The New Thinking does not disavow national, class, corporate, and other special interests. But it does put the interest of the preservation of the human race in the forefront, in order to save it from the threat of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. We refused to view worldwide developments as a struggle between two opposing social systems. We revised our security concept and made the demilitarization of world politics our mission. This resulted in the principle of an appropriate defense capability at a lower level of armaments. In general, the New Thinking in both foreign and domestic policy meant trying to think and act according to common sense.”

Mikhail Gorbachev himself once again outlined the basic principles of his New Thinking in his 'political testament', the long essay 'Understanding Perestroika – Defending New Thinking', published two years before his death. Today, at a time of the dramatically escalating war in Ukraine and the renewed mutual threat of using nuclear weapons in extreme cases, these principles are more urgent than ever. But they need to be updated. A contemporary “New Thinking 2.0” would have to think further in the spirit of its main protagonist and take current global trends and threats to humanity as its starting point.

In the fall of 2021, the author of this text still wanted to write an interview book with Mikhail Gorbachev about the conditions for a necessary “New Thinking 2.0”. This failed because the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was in poor health, had to spend the last two years of his life in the presidential administration hospital and was unable to receive almost any visitors due to the corona situation at the time.

But the questions about an update of the New Thinking remain virulent. The following text indicates the direction in which the journey should go here: in the form of the – updated – guide for the talks I still wanted to have with Gorbachev. Now it is up to all of us to develop the answers ourselves.

The global relapse into old thinking

The militarization of world politics and the new cold and hot war

Mikhail Sergeyevich, more than three decades after the “Charter of Paris”, which was not least the result of your new thinking and action, we find ourselves - under changed geopolitical conditions - not only in a new cold, but in a bloody 'hot' war between the collective West and Russia on the territory of Ukraine. In recent years and decades, fundamental pillars of the global architecture of arms limitation and disarmament have been demolished, always at the instigation of the United States. The most significant of these were certainly the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty at the end of 2001, which was unprovoked, and the withdrawal from the INF Treaty, which you negotiated, in the summer of 2019. It is now fair to say that almost your entire disarmament legacy has been deliberately wrecked. How did we get here, after all the efforts of the West and the Soviet Union to declare an end to the Cold War and usher in a new era of cooperation by signing the Charter of Paris in November 1990?

Nuclear rearmament is taking place, with smaller warheads on ever more accurate delivery systems. In addition, nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles are being developed that can no longer be eliminated during the approach. At the same time, the line between nuclear bombs and conventional weapons is becoming increasingly blurred, drastically increasing the likelihood of nuclear warheads actually being used. And completely new weapons are being developed whose effects can no longer be foreseen: drones, autonomous combat robots, artificial intelligence, the militarization of space – yes, on the horizon appears the increasingly realistic , if not probable, option that, in view of extremely shortened advance warning times, the decision on the existence or non-existence of the entire planet will sooner or later be delegated to computers, to artificial intelligence, in short: to devices! – Can the opening of Pandora's box be prevented in time?

The current militarization of world politics is taking place in different regions and at different levels. In terms of the new military tensions between NATO, which has expanded to the east, and a resurgent Russia, one could perhaps speak of a “new bipolarity in an increasingly multipolar world”. In your language, one would have to say that there is currently a dramatic relapse into old thinking at all levels – diplomacy plays virtually no role in the war in Ukraine – and yet there is hardly any resistance to it! Do you have any explanation as to why this highly dangerous development, with all its incalculable risks, is being accepted almost resignedly in both the West and Russia?

Don't we all still have a bitter lesson to learn from the developments of the past three and a half decades: namely, that even the most promising development can be reversed if it does not suit certain powerful and influential circles? Should we not expect more of these fatal setbacks in the future? And what conclusions can we draw for our actions?

It's not very pleasant, but let's take the trouble to think through current trends to their logical conclusion, especially in the context of the Ukraine war, which is currently coming to a dramatic head: what will happen if this trend continues unabated into the future?

The failure of civil societies

In the 1980s, there were strong grassroots peace movements in Western Europe and the United States. Most people were aware of the danger of a possible, even likely nuclear war at the time, and many were willing to take to the streets to protest it. How do you explain the fact that this awareness has completely disappeared today, even though experts are warning that the current situation in the war in Ukraine is more dangerous than during the Cuban missile crisis? Has your successful policy of nuclear disarmament perhaps paradoxically led many people to relax their fight against the atomic bomb because they thought the issue had been happily resolved?

The civil society engagement of young people in the Western world is currently almost exclusively limited to the fight against global warming and climate change. The fact that a nuclear war – even a 'limited' one – would be the quickest way to destroy not only the climate but, in the worst case, all life on this planet (to use a fashionable term, 'most sustainably'), and that not least global armament is already possibly inflicting irreparable damage on the sensitive, highly fragile ecological balance, is something that activists such as Fridays for Future and others strangely seem to fail to see! The fight against climate change obviously stands in the way of the fight against nuclear and conventional armament, against the militarization of world politics. In short, the environmental movement is blind to armaments policy! – How can awareness be raised in this generation that the fight against global warming, for the salvation of the environment and the fight against worldwide armament and the threat of war objectively belong together, or more precisely, are two sides of the same coin?

Reproduced with permission from Globalbridge.

Episode II of this three-part series will be released next weekend.

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