The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West

Abstract

1. There are more and more of articles and books devoted to the same theme: things are getting worse and worse in Russia and only those ignorant Russians, who “are not like us” and certainly not Europeans (J. Dimbleby, “Seduced by a Smile”, The Sunday Times, 24 February 2008, News Review, p. 1), do not see that the Kremlin is not only menacing the West but also bad for Russia too. Last autumn, one of the most prolific neocon authors Robert Kagan called on us to forget the Islamic threat since the coming battle would be fought between autocratic nations like Russia and China and the rest (The Times, 2 September 2007). Now, Edward Lucas claims that a new Cold War between Russia and the West has actually already started and only naïves still refuse to see the obvious. I do not think that we are already there though if more and more people start forgetting the threat of Islamist (not Islamic) terrorism, other common challenges such as global warming, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, inter-ethnic violence and abject poverty in too many parts of the world, downplaying the need for cooperation of all responsible governments in facing these and many other common challenges, concentrating, instead, on great power rivalry over scarce natural resources and meanderings of pipelines (all important issues, no doubt), then the world may indeed sleepwalk into a new Cold War or a new era of great-power confrontation.