Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 25 – The first cold war between Moscow and the West ended without a major war, but the second one won’t, Igor Eidman says, because the Kremlin is not prepared to accept any peaceful means of its resolution. Its denizens don’t allow for the possibility that others will be converted to its views as a result of peaceful competition.
During the fist cold war, both the West and the Soviets believed that over time their opponents would either converge or come to accept the superiority of the other system and convert, the Russian commentator says. But now the Kremlin doesn’t share that view because its demands are not ideological but imperial (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=637F7F4D4C079).
According to Eidman, “the Russian elite doesn’t allow for the possibility of some transformation of capitalist ‘goats’ into communist ‘sheep.’ Instead, Putin and his entourage have declared the West to be the eternal enemy of Russia, declaring that it seeks to deprive Russia of sovereignty, natural resources and heterosexual orientation.”
Given that definition of the situation, the commentator says, the current confrontation “can end only in the fatal defeat of one of the parties.”
The tasks the Kremlin has set itself do not allow for any peaceful way of implementation, he continues; “and the containment of its aggressive aspirations is impossible by peaceful means.” The positions of the two sides are far more radically antagonistic than during the first old war and thus that “a peaceful solution [to the second cold war] is simply impossible.”
Eidman concludes by observing that “if the second cold war between Russia and the West doesn’t end soon with the fatal defeat of the Russian army in Ukraine, which I sincerely hope for, it has every chance over time of turning into a hot nuclear war” that could destroy both, a view that makes Western support for Ukraine not dangerous but the only path to safety.
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