Cold war 2.0: how Russia and the west reheated a historic struggle
Warnings of a return
to cold war politics have been a staple of European debate for three years, but
in recent weeks many western diplomats, politicians and analysts have come to
believe the spring has indeed been released. Russia is being reassessed across
western capitals. The talk is no longer of transition to a liberal democracy,
but regression.
The post-cold war era
is over, and a new era has begun. Cold war 2.0,
different in character, but potentially as menacing and founded not just on
competing interests but competing values. The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc
Ayrault, said: “The reality is that behind the appearance of consensus … a form
of world disorder took hold. We are now paying the price for that error of
assessment that gave westerners a feeling of comfort for two decades”....
...the former head of
MI6, warned: “We are moving into an era that is as dangerous, if not more
dangerous, as the cold war because we do not have that focus on a strategic
relationship between Moscow and Washington.” But unlike the cold war, there are
now “no clear rules of the road” between the two countries.The German foreign
minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an advocate of dialogue, made the same
point: “It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the cold war. The current
times are different and more dangerous.”
The reasons for all
this anxiety are not hard to find. The accumulation of recent Russian
provocations is daunting. The hybrid frozen war in Ukraine and the bombardment
of Aleppo in Syria, revealing a determination to keep Bashar al-Assad in power,
top the list.
Add to that Putin’s
sudden scrapping of a 20-year-old US-Russian agreement to reprocess excess
plutonium to prevent its use in nuclear weapons. He also deployed short-range,
nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave in
eastern Europe, unnerving Nato members Poland and Lithuania. He moved advanced
S-300 and S-400 ground-to-air missiles, and radar into Syria in a sign
that he now regards the country as his preserve, and can see off any plan for a
Turkish or American no-fly zone. In a display of military reach he dispatched
the Admiral
Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and its taskforce, to the waters off Syria so
its SU-30s and MiG-29 aircrafts can drop yet more bombs on Syria.
He even raised the
spectre of the Cuban missile crisis by saying he was considering reopening
military bases in Cuba and Vietnam, a move calculated to unnerve US public
opinion. At the same time, Putin is trying to challenge western diplomatic
alliances – notably with Turkey,
Egypt, China and Libya. All the while he
experiments with new techniques – the unprecedented use of cyber warfare,
including the hacking
of Democratic politicians’ emails, and wider use of information wars to
destabilise the Baltics or fund parties of the right in eastern Europe. The
only common factor, apart from the aggression, is his unpredictability, adding
to Putin’s self-image as a master of political intrigue.
.... Many acknowledge the
west must take its share of the blame for the collapse of relations. The
mistakes are real, notably the scale of Nato expansion to the east and in the
Baltics. Russia also feels deeply that it was duped into accepting a UN
resolution criticising Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, only to find it was used as cover for regime
change. Hillary Clinton, then at the State Department, did little to mange the
Russians. Russia has not voted for humanitarian action at the UN since.... read more:
