New Era of Cold-war

Relations between Russia and the West are at a new low. But how should we describe the current situation?

There's a lot of loose talk about a new "Cold War" - a comparison of present-day tensions to the bitter ideological and military rivalry that existed between the Soviet Union and the West from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s.

But such comparisons may be misleading.

"The Cold War," says Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, "was a competition resulting from a bipolar system, where two superpowers, both with economic and military advantages, were competing to shape international politics.

"Their universalist ideologies made this competition inevitable, as did the distribution of power at the time."

In contrast, he says, today's competition is not the result of a balance of power, or universalist ideology per se, but "conscious decisions made by leaders, the strategies they pursued and a series of definable disagreements in international politics". And these were not "destined or inevitable".

'Soft power'

So, while Mr Kofman believes the stakes could prove significant for the United States, the scale and existential nature of the conflict is nothing like the Cold War, nor is Russia in any position to fundamentally alter either the balance of power or the structure of the current international systems. "In short," says Mr Kofman, "the causes and character of the conflict are different."

During the real Cold War there was an armed peace in Europe, while the real battles were fought out across the globe from Angola to Cuba and the Middle East. Today's battle lines are generally much closer to Russia's own borders - Georgia and Ukraine.

There is a very different balance of forces between Russia and the West. Russia also has very limited "soft power", lacking an attractive internationalist ideology to "sell" around the world.