A New Cold War With Russia? No, Its Worse Than That
MOSCOW — The expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from the United States, countries across Europe and beyond has raised, yet again, the question of whether the world is veering back where it was during the Cold War. The alarming answer from some in Russia is: No, but the situation is in some ways even more unpredictable.
For all the tension, proxy conflicts and risk of nuclear war that punctuated relations between Moscow and the West for decades, each side knew, particularly toward the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, roughly what to expect. Each had a modicum of trust that the other would act in a reasonably predictable way.
The volatile state of Russia’s relations with the outside world today, exacerbated by a nerve agent attack on a former spy living in Britain, however, makes the diplomatic climate of the Cold War look reassuring, said Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations, and recalls a period of paralyzing mistrust that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
“If you look for similarities with what is happening, it is not the Cold War that can explain events but Russia’s first revolutionary regime,” which regularly assassinated opponents abroad, said Mr. Kurilla, a historian at the European University at St. Petersburg.
He said that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had no interest in spreading a new ideology and fomenting world revolution, unlike the early Bolsheviks, but that Russia under Mr. Putin had “become a revolutionary regime in terms of international relations.”
From the Kremlin’s perspective, it is the United States that first upended previous norms, when President George W. Bush scrapped the Antiballistic Missile accord, an important Cold War-era treaty, in 2002.
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History has seen lots of people come to power and foolishly overplay their hands. Hitler foolishly invaded the Soviet Union. GWB and Cheney foolishly invaded Iraq. Putin may have held unchallenged power for so long that it has gone to his head; he may believe he's invincible or something, can get away with anything (like Drumpf & Co.). Maybe these big diplomatic expulsions will offer him a chance to reevaluate his place in the world before continuing to overplay.
