Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 6 – Moscow has two goals
in promoting the notion that the current conflict between the West and Russia
is “a new cold war.” Most obviously, it wants to generate opposition within
Western countries to any willingness to stand up to Russian aggression abroad
and repression at home.
But far more important is the
Kremlin’s second goal: By insisting that what is happening is a new cold war, Putin’s
regime is making a claim to be the equal of the West, something that may play
well with Putin’s base at home but is not justified by Russia’s current
position however often Kremlin propagandists and their acolytes repeat the
claim.
To the extent then that Western
commentators fall into the trap of using the Kremlin’s “cold war-redux” notion,
they unwittingly elevate the status of Russia today to one that it does not
deserve. Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is a far weaker but also far more
dangerous opponent.
Putin’s Russia has only part of one
of the three things scholars have long identified as the basis of a superpower.
It does not have a powerful economy, it does not have a system that attracts
others to it, and, except for its nuclear arsenal. it does not have a military
capable of taking on a modern Western military like that of the United States
and NATO.
Moreover, and far more important,
Moscow does not have the network of states who are prepared to support it in
opposition to the West. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had both
satellites and client states that would do its bidding. Now, the Kremlin can’t even
get its “partners” on the former Soviet space to follow its lead on things like
expelling diplomats.
Putin and his minions routinely
describe Russia as “a besieged fortress.”
And as a result of his policies of aggression and repression, that is an
increasingly accurate description. But being “a besieged fortress” and an
outlaw state that ignores international law and its own constitution does not
make it an equal or a counterpart to the West.
Consequently, it is long past time
to recognize that we are not in a new cold war with a powerful ideological,
economic and military power. We are in a conflict, one that still does not have
a good name, with a declining but revisionist and revanchist country that often
gets its way not as a result of its strength but through bluff and bluster and
the weakness of the West.
And that in turn means that the
situation today is far more like the 1930s when the international community
such as it was had to deal with Hitler’s Germany than it is like the Cold War
after 1945, however much Putin, his Russian base, and his friends in the West
continue to try to suggest otherwise.
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