In Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cold War echoes reverberate
New York: A rivalry with Russia. A proxy battleground. Nuclear brinksmanship. For many generations of Americans, it's 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's 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 aggressions, he says, don't seem 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 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 two-plus weeks of war in Ukraine 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're 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.
