Russia-Ukraine war: In Putin’s invasion of Kyiv, Cold War echoes reverberate
KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)
Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)
Summary
If we are talking more generally about a cold war, if we mean a titanic struggle that involves all aspects of national power waged between two incompatible systems but short of outright military conflict then yeah, I guess this is a cold war, says Fredrik Logevall, professor of history and international affairs at Harvard and Pulitzer-Prize winning author most recently of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.
A rivalry with Russia. A proxy battleground. Nuclear brinksmanship. For many generations of Americans, it is just like old times.
The invasion of Ukraine has rapidly returned echoes of a Cold War mentality to the United States, with a familiar foe in Russia.
Bars have poured out their Russian vodka. McDonald’s, a symbol of the end of the Soviet Union when it first opened in Moscow, has shuttered its Russian locations. Once again, a U.S. president sees a pitched ideological battle. We will save democracy, President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address.
For an America where Russia never quite went out of style as an evergreen villain in film and television, revived tensions with the Kremlin have drawn from a well-worn geopolitical script. A familiar, chilly East-West wind is blowing again.
It is very much a Cold War echo, says James Hershberg, professor of history and international affairs at Georgetown University and former director of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Hershberg sees much that’s different about today’s inflamed tensions with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s aggression, he says, doesn’t seem to be driven by ideology the way communism was for the Soviet Union. A transformed media landscape, too, has helped turn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a global protagonist.
But in a crisis that pits two nuclear superpowers on opposing sides, history is repeating in other ways. A Russian strategic overreach, Hershberg says, is again sparking a potentially perilous moment in the international order.
We are in a second Cuban Missile Crisis in many ways in terms of the danger of escalation, says Hershberg, whose books include Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam. Putin is acting so irrationally he makes Nikita Khrushchev appear like a rational actor in comparison.
The largest land conflict in Europe since World War II, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which is into its third week now has rallied Western alliances like few events before it. In repudiating Putin’s invasion, the U.S. and its European allies have enacted crippling economic sanctions on Russia — which Biden on Tuesday extended to Russian crude oil — while still drawing the line on military engagement with Russia.
If we are talking about a capitalized Cold War, I don’t think I could call this Cold War II, says Fredrik Logevall, professor of history and international affairs at Harvard and Pulitzer-Prize winning author most recently of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.
“But,” Logevall says, “if we are talking more generally about a cold war, if we mean a titanic struggle that involves all aspects of national power waged between two incompatible systems but short of outright military conflict then yeah, I guess this is a cold war.”
The Cold War is innately connected to the crisis in Ukraine partly because it so much informs Putin’s world view. A former KGB agent, he once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. The invasion of Ukraine is intended to deter Western influence and NATO infringement from Russia’s sphere of influence, and potentially to restore a Texas-sized part of the former Soviet Union.
Barely two weeks in, the Cold War has often been invoked. The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said the threat to global security now is more complex and probably higher than during the Cold War, partly because there aren’t the same back channels of communication. A Russian Foreign Ministry official, Alexander Darchiyev, according to an Interfax report, recently suggested that perhaps it would be worth recalling the well-forgotten principle that worked during the Cold War peaceful coexistence.
Even before the war began in Ukraine, Americans had a historically dim view of Russia. According to Gallup poll conducted in February, 85% of Americans viewed Russia unfavourably, easily the country’s worst rating in more than three decades a slide accelerated by Russia’s meddling in U.S. elections, its annexation of Crimea and the nerve agent attack on Putin’s leading opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who’s currently imprisoned.
And while former President Donald Trump has maintained his esteem for Putin, anti-Russian opinion has uncommon bipartisan support. Gallup found that 88% of both Republicans and Democrats have an unfavourable view of Russia. Nothing unites like a common enemy.
Nina Khrushcheva, a Moscow-born professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, maintains that the Cold War never really went away that the West’s view of Russia remained stuck in the broad portrayals of villains Boris and Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. To her, Putin’s invasion was devastating because it confirmed the worst about her native country. Now, she begins her classes by apologizing.
Putin is the global villain he deserves to be, and Russia is finished for decades to come, says Khrushcheva, whose great-grandfather was premier of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was president of the United States. “My country just killed itself,” she says, and the U.S. got their enemy back.
They got their enemy that has always been, always deserves to be and is always at the forefront of the American mind, says Khrushcheva. Russia has no excuse. But for America, it is a field day. America is back and it is on a white horse saving a white country in the middle of Europe against the horrible Russian Bear.
Logevall, who co-authored the book America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, doesn’t expect a Cold War rerun. The world isn’t as bipolar as it was decades ago. China, which signed a pact with Russia shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, looms much larger. And the interconnectedness of the global economy — where the waves of corporations have severed ties with Russia — makes isolated coexistence harder to tolerate.
The conflict in Ukraine seems sure to be at least a coda to the Cold War, if not a new beginning.
Putin feels great resentment about how the Cold War ended. The West declaring victory. Russia losing power and influence. I think he resents a certain Western triumphalism, Logevall says. In a way, I think history is what drives him.
Also Read: Sanctions against Russia are targeting the elite’ – but did that work in
Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout
3 Mins Read
Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter
KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow
5 Minutes Read
Daily Newsletter
