The conflict is back. But this time, only one side is fighting.
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The Germans’ theory, increasingly shared by most serious Western analysts, was that Putin wants to “go back to the good old days,” as the official put it. In his first few years in power, Putin had concentrated on restoring the Russian state inside its borders, but in recent years the onetime KGB operative who has now become Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin has decided to revisit the world outside those borders, seeking wherever possible to reassert Russia’s position as the undisputed heavyweight of its neighborhood. He has once again turned NATO into Russia’s nemesis, portraying its extension into Eastern European countries, like Poland and the Baltic States, that were a part of the Soviet bloc as the ultimate affront.
Moreover, Putin has shown he intends to act on his views, not merely proclaim them. Already, he has used guns and tanks in Georgia and Ukraine (where fierce fighting continues today in the country’s embattled east), and he has employed some combination of political destabilization, bribery, propaganda, cyberattacks and economic pressure in every one of the countries that were part of the Soviet Union or under its control in the Warsaw Pact. He has interfered opportunistically in the NATO countries, as well—including the U.S. presidential election. In the Middle East, Russia has intervened in Syria on the side of its longtime client Bashar al-Assad and provided covert aid to the Taliban in Afghanistan, in what seem like obvious echoes of 1980s-style proxy wars.
As the Germans told the skeptical American president on that March day in the White House, Putin is “back to fighting the Cold War,” even if we in the West are not.
Not quite nine months later, the New Cold War that Merkel warned Trump about appears to be hotter than ever. Year-end magazine cover stories feature Putin’s scowling face and lengthy expositions trying to figure out what the tough guy in the Kremlin wants – not to mention his puzzling relationship with the American president. “Putin is preparing for World War III—Is Trump?” warned a December Newsweek dispatch from a veteran correspondent in Moscow.
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But Trump himself still does not seem to be fighting it. In the days leading up to the strategy’s unveiling, he talked with Putin by telephone not once but twice—including in a White House-initiated phone call whose purpose seemed to be an ostentatious thank-you to the Russian president for publicly praising the performance of the Trump-led U.S. economy in 2017. In a campaign-style speech rolling out his national security team’s work, Trump never called Russia a “strategic competitor,” although aides, according to Bloomberg, had promised that he would. Instead, the president touted U.S.-Russian cooperation that foiled a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg over the weekend, refused to mention the Russian election meddling and noted that it was still very much his desire to build a “great partnership” with Moscow—a partnership not mentioned anywhere in the nearly 70-page document. The recent lovefest provoked James Clapper, the sober-minded former director of national intelligence, to say this week that Putin’s blatant manipulation of Trump’s ego shows that he “knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”
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- Discussion
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Since we're debating the term's birth, I called it Cold War 2.0 pushing 4 years ago in …. @politico https://t.co/dRd6Tc6UCo
— John Schindler (@20committee) December 22, 2017
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