To Russia, with wariness: Is the Cold War heating up again?

The Associated Press

Vladimir Putin is reasserting Russia's role in the world.

Featured Topic | Posted 42 weeks 3 days ago

To Russia, with wariness: Is the Cold War heating up again?

Don't worry -- it's probably not time to resume the old "duck and cover" drills from the 1950s. But nearly two decades after the Cold War came to an end, relations between Russia and the U.S. are on a "downward trajectory." Leading Russian officials think the U.S. took too much advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s; now they're ready to again take their place on the world stage.

And with President Vladimir Putin set to retain power, it seems the country is giving up any pretense of democracy.

Is the Cold War heating up? What does that mean for the future of the United States and its allies?

Ben likes: A sign of the falsified times

Mark MacKinnon/The New Cold War

Yes, there will be opposition, but only of the token sort. Putin heir Dmitriy Medvedev's remaining "opponents" are a pair of multi-time losers and a virtual unknown. Kasyanov was the only figure Russia's fractured liberal opposition could potentially have rallied around.

Though the odds were long, the pro-democracy forces' aim was always to replicate Ukraine's Orange Revolution, with masses crowding Red Square on election day to peacefully protest a vote that everyone knows in advance will be deeply flawed. For that to have any chance of working, they needed a Viktor Yushchenko, a popular
candidate to rally around. One by one the other potential Yushchenkos dropped out or were forced out of the race by the Kremlin: Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Boris Nemtsov. Now Kasyanov's gone too.

Joel likes: A fact of life

Economist

What is certainly true is that the Kremlin is no longer a global adversary: its relations with the Muslim world and China, are tetchy and ambiguous. But the lack of a global dimension doesn’t make the tussle for power less troubling in the main theatre of the old cold war—the countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Clearly the icy and terrifying confrontation of the 1950s and 1960s is not in view. But that era shaded into détente—what some have called the “soft cold war”. Finding similarities between that era of uneasy coexistence and our own is perhaps easier. But whatever the new era is called, the big question is what to do about it.